Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 April 9

= April 9 =

What is the largest amount of children that parents had of one sex/gender in a row?
What is the largest amount of children that parents had of one sex/gender in a row? For instance, this Michigan family has 14 sons and no daughters:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5833553/14-boys-no-regrets-Michigan-family-happy-way-are.html

Has this family set the world record for the largest number of sons in a row? What about for daughters? Who are some likely candidates for having the most daughters in a row? Futurist110 (talk) 02:31, 9 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Butter and cement are measured by amount. Children are measured by number. Akld guy (talk) 23:23, 15 April 2019 (UTC)


 * 14 daughters for a woman in Texas:


 * https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/supermum-29-14-daughters-says-8956386


 * That was two and a half years ago, so the count may have gone up since then. Rojomoke (talk) 10:17, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Very interesting! Futurist110 (talk) 23:57, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * 14 in a row sounds dramatic, but even if we assume a 50-50 distribution, that's only 1/2^14 or 1/16384 chance they would be all male, and the same chance for all female. Presumably there are more than that many sets of 14 siblings in the world, so it would be odd if we didn't have all male and all female sets of 14.  The limiting factor may be family size.  If we included all the children of a particular father, regardless of the mother, that would give a larger population to sample.  And the odds aren't necessarily always 50/50, which would make it even more likely to have sets of 14 or more with the same gender. SinisterLefty (talk) 15:19, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the law of truly large numbers makes any extremely unlikely event with a probability greater than zero extremely likely to occur at least once out of a sufficiently large sample size. Futurist110 (talk) 23:57, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Conception is slightly skewed towards males, but male fetuses also show higher miscarriage rates so that actual births are skewed towards females. --Khajidha (talk) 15:26, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Are you sure about actual births being skewed towards females? Our article on sex ratio suggests otherwise. Futurist110 (talk) 23:57, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I may have been thinking of infant mortality rates by mistake. But the article also states that selective abortions have skewed the current numbers. --Khajidha (talk) 04:43, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
 * There is another factor here, that some couples make a point of having children until they have at least one of each gender. Thus the odds are actually even higher than you would expect, because couples that might have had 14 kids stopped at 13 or earlier, and only if they were in the mixed portions of the distribution. This might be better modeled as some type of peculiar random walk in which the likelihood that a path ends increases once it changes direction. Someguy1221 (talk) 00:15, 16 April 2019 (UTC)