Gender Maths And The Underlying Genetics

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I grew up in a very interestingly conservative society where women are expected to bear the huge burden of childbearing. This goes beyond just the biological ability to carry a child to term in the womb for 9 months which is the exclusive preserve of women, it also extends to the social expectation to produce children of a certain gender. In the Nigerian society, male children are used to define the social status of a man, and the ability of a woman to give birth to boys for her husband is seen as an important hallmark of a successful wife. This means that a woman who is not able to have male children is made to feel very underaccomplished with a lot of pressure from in-laws, making it seem like she is at fault for not being able to provide children of a certain gender. If only they knew about the genetics behind how the gender of children is determined. It seems like this is another opportunity for genetics to show up as a knight in shining armor and resolve this age-old conflict, so let's do a deep dive into the genetics of gender.

Put two and two together:

Our genes carry the instructions that specify who we are, which is why they are often referred to as the blueprint of life. These genes are carried on vehicles called chromosomes which are present in our cells. All cells in the human body have 23 pairs of chromosomes, meaning that there are two chromosomes 1, two chromosomes 2, two chromosomes 3, etc, until we get to two chromosomes 23. Now the reason we carry a pair of each chromosome number is because we get 1 set of chromosomes 1 - 23 from our mother and the other set from our father. In humans, the pairs of chromosomes 1 - 22 are similar, but the last set of chromosome 23 which are called sex chromosomes are different in men and women. In women, both pairs of chromosome 23 are similar and as they are an X chromosome the pair is called XX. Men however have different pairs of chromosome number 23, one is an X and the other is a Y therefore the pair is called XY.? Each of these chromosomes does a specific job and the job of chromosome 23 is to determine the sex of the baby. The Y chromosome carried by men is called the male defining factor because it has a specific gene that triggers the zygote to start forming testes which make a baby in the womb come out as male rather than female.?

How the Sex of a Baby is Determined:

When a woman gets pregnant, it means that she has received sperm cells from a male and these sperm cells have merged with her egg cell to form a new cell called a Zygote which then divides multiple times to form a huge mass of highly specialized cells that make the full human being. The sperm cell carries one of the set of sex chromosomes from the man, that is, it can either be a sperm cell carrying an X chromosome which for the purpose of simplification we will call an X-sperm cell, or it can be a Y-sperm cell. The woman’s egg cell also carries only one of the sex chromosome pairs, but since women only have Xs, all egg cells are X-egg cells. Now back to the zygote; if the X-sperm cell is the one that fuses with the X-egg cell, the zygote will be XX which will form a female baby. If, however, a Y-sperm cell merges with the X-egg cell, it forms an XY zygote which then produces a male baby.?

Conclusion:

It must be obvious by now but I will still spell it out for the avoidance of confusion, the gender of a child is defined by what kind of sex chromosomes are brought to the conception process by the sperm cell that does the fertilization and since the female partner has a constant set of X chromosomes, it is correct to say that the gender of the child is determined by what chromosomes are provided by the male partner.?Of course, this, like most events of biological significance, happens in the background and we are rarely given the opportunity to make significant contributions to the process as it develops, but this knowledge should help explain the process of gender definition at birth and provide women in conservative societies like mine some relief from this great superimposition to have omnipotent predictive powers over the gender of their baby which is absolutely outside of their control or that of their genes.