3 ms·
In any given family of siblings that has both boys and girls, by definition the females will have more brothers than the males, yes. But it doesn't follow that
by tempestn 10y ago
In any given family of siblings that has both boys and girls, by definition the females will have more brothers than the males, yes. But it doesn't follow that "odds are that a given female has more brothers than a given male". The reason is that not all families have both. Families with multiple boys and no girls will bring the average up for boys. Families with multiple girls and no boys will bring it down for girls. The end result is that any given person has the same expected number of brothers as any other.
That also makes sense if you think about it intuitively. As the best (IMO) answer to the SO post put it:
"I'll write p for the gender ratio, i.e. the proportion of all people who are men. In real life p is close to 0.5, but this doesn't make any difference. In any random set of n persons, the expected (average) number of men is n⋅p.
1. Take an arbitrary child x, and let n be the number of children in x's family.
2. Let S(x) be the set of x's siblings. Note that there are no gender-related restrictions on S(x): It's just the set of children other than x.
3. Obviously, the expected number of x's brothers is the expected number of men in S(x).
4. So what is the expected number of men in this set? Since x has n−1 siblings, it's just (n−1)⋅p, or approximately (n−1)÷2, regardless of x's gender. That's all there is to it."
- dhimes 10y agoNice. Thanks.