Trivers-Willard effect in U.S. billionaires revisited

Revisiting a Sample of U.S. Billionaires: How Sample Selection and Timing of Maternal Condition Influence Findings on the Trivers-Willard Effect:

Based on evolutionary theory, Trivers & Willard (TW) predicted the existence of mechanisms that lead parents with high levels of resources to bias offspring sex composition to favor sons and parents with low levels of resources to favor daughters. This hypothesis has been tested in samples of wealthy individuals but with mixed results. Here, I argue that both sample selection due to a high number of missing cases and a lacking specification of the timing of wealth accumulation contribute to this equivocal pattern. This study improves on both issues: First, analyses are based on a data set of U.S. billionaires with near-complete information on the sex of offspring. Second, subgroups of billionaires are distinguished according to the timing when they acquired their wealth. Informed by recent insights on the timing of a potential TW effect in animal studies, I state two hypotheses. First, billionaires have a higher share of male offspring than the general population. Second, this effect is larger for heirs and heiresses who are wealthy at the time of conception of all of their children than for self-made billionaires who acquired their wealth during their adult lives, that is, after some or all of their children have already been conceived. Results do not support the first hypothesis for all subgroups of billionaires. But for males, results are weakly consistent with the second hypothesis: Heirs but not self-made billionaires have a higher share of male offspring than the U.S. population. Heiresses, on the other hand, have a much lower share of male offspring than the U.S. average. This hints to a possible interplay of at least two mechanisms affecting sex composition. Implications for future research that would allow disentangling the distinct mechanisms are discussed. [. . .]

A striking result of the current study, one implied by neither of the two initially stated variants of the TW hypothesis, is that heiresses have a considerably lower percentage of male offspring than heirs, self-made billionaires, and the general population. That is, for women, the observed effect is actually diametrical to the prediction made on the basis of the TW hypothesis. The difference in the proportion of male offspring between heiresses and heirs is, in fact, the highest difference observed in this study. Despite the large size of the effect and due to the low group size of 26 heiresses, however, it is only statistically significant when not controlling for multiple comparisons. Once this correction is applied, the difference remains only slightly above statistical significance in the logistic regression model. Future research should test whether this finding can be replicated with larger samples of elite women. [. . .]

These objections notwithstanding: What could drive this distinct finding for men and for women? A clue to an answer may be provided by the literature on the effect of various stressors on reducing the percentage of male offspring [13], [41]–[44], including occupational stress [38]. If stress and status both affect sex composition, at least two mechanisms may interact and confound each other in producing sex ratios in population subgroups. Could it be that heiresses, partners and spouses of self-made men, and those of male heirs have, on average, different work and career patterns and are thus exposed to various degrees of occupational stress? Specifically, heiresses may be more likely than the spouses of male billionaires to hold stressful leadership positions in companies they inherited from their parents.