It is no secret that in both urban and rural areas, jalebis or barfis are distributed to indicate the birth of a girl child, and pedas to celebrate a boy child. "When a boy is born, one or two boxes of crackers are burst and villagers know the gender of the child. This is only the start of gender discrimination that the girl faces all through her life," says Bicholim-based social activist Ramesh Gauns.

But it’s possible that many of the differences between young boys and girls come from the way we approach child rearing, and the messages kids get about how boys and girls should look and behave: the cultural stereotypes we impose on them that become self-fulfilling prophesies of sorts. “It’s almost entirely cultural,” Brown says. Natal sex, in other words, is less predictive of who your children will be than of how you will treat them.