Girls just want to have boys

‘If my next child’s a boy, I’ll stop. If not, then I’ll keep trying until I get one.’ These words weren’t spoken by an Asian or Indian woman, desperate to give her husband an heir, but by a white woman, upper-middle-class and married to an investment banker. She spoke from the cosy confines of her flat in Hampstead two months after giving birth to her first child, a girl. Of course, she loves her daughter and she is a wonderful mother. Still, there it is: the disappointment that she didn’t bear a boy.

This was not the first time I had met someone disappointed not to have a boy. A cousin of mine wept after his wife gave birth to their first, a girl; a former colleague wore blue the entire time she was pregnant, only to have a daughter; and my own father recently divulged that he was temporarily upset after I was born — me, his lovely daughter.