Kamala Harris finally lives her dream and winds up becoming the President of the United States. She decides that the US will be better off if there were more women, so she signs an executive order:

Henceforth, all child bearing couples will be required to keep having children until they have a girl. To prevent overpopulation, once they do have a girl, they must stop having children.

Here is the riddle: After 20 years of this policy, what will be the ratio of boys to girls under the age of 18 in America?

Categories: fun

5 Comments

Therefore · February 21, 2021 at 11:24 am

My guess was that it would favor girls. If you have a random birth and it is a girl, you stop. So there should be more girls in the end.

The simulation showed nearly 59/50. Each run was 1,000,000 couples and over three dozen runs we end up with 1,000,000 girls and nearly the same boys.

+/- 0.08%

Is that correct? It is so at odds with what I expected.

Don in Oregon · February 21, 2021 at 1:25 pm

China is the obvious example.

“The males to females ratio is at the highest point of 116.54 for the age group 10-14.”

https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/country/china-sex-ratio.php

Kid · February 21, 2021 at 2:08 pm

If you stop as soon as you have a female, but don’t stop when you have males, then males will far outnumber females.

You can have as many boys as occur but only one female.

Fang Tang Arangasang · February 21, 2021 at 3:12 pm

My initial thought was this would grossly favor boys, since only those having boys get to ‘go again’ BUT…

If the odds of conceiving a boy or girl is 50/50, essentially a coin toss, (I’m not aware if that’s true or not) the end result would be 50/50, with a halving of the number of coin flippers at each toss.

While such a policy would not alter the boy/girl ratio it would indeed limit population growth. Starting with 100 million reproducing couples, after 20 coin flips, only 95 couples would be eligible to ‘go again’.

WallPhone · February 22, 2021 at 10:19 pm

Not mentioned is how many parents don’t want an only child, so abort every girl concieved until they have birthed at least one boy.

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