Jean-Francois MIGNOT, When girls are preferred: sex preferences in child adoption in the West, late 19th-early 21st centuries, The History of the Family, 1–19., 2026

Why do Western parents, who show little or no preference for biological daughters, consistently prefer to adopt girls? Drawing on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative sources from the United States, Western Europe, and Australia, the article documents a striking and persistent pattern since the late nineteenth century: Western adoptive parents consistently prefer girls over boys. This daughter preference stands in sharp contrast to biological fertility behavior in the same societies, which reveals a preference for mixed-sex compositions rather than daughters. After evaluating alternative explanations, the article argues that daughter preference in adoption emerged alongside the sentimental transformation of adoption. As adoption shifted from an economically oriented institution to one centered on emotional fulfillment, adoptive parents increasingly sought children perceived as more likely to form secure attachments and less likely to become violent. In a context where attachment was uncertain, assumptions about girls’ emotional capacities rendered them especially safe and attractive. The article reconceptualizes sex preference as a context-dependent valuation shaped by expectations about returns and risks, rather than as a stable cultural preference for sons or daughters. It also suggests how the fertility transition may have reshaped parents’ sex preferences: as fertility decreased, parental investment in each child increased, and the value of children shifted from being partly economic to predominantly emotional, the relative attractiveness of girls increased more dramatically in adoptive than in biological parenthood, resulting in a preference for daughters among adoptive parents but not among biological parents.