Old Wives Tales Gender Quiz: 12 Questions, One Honest Score

Four questions with a study behind them

Carrying high or low, and morning sickness. In 1999 a team at Johns Hopkins asked 104 pregnant women who did not know their baby's sex what they expected and why, then checked after the birth. The baby's sex was not systematically related to the shape of the mother's abdomen or to how much sickness she had (Perry, DiPietro and Costigan, Birth, 1999).

There is one wrinkle worth knowing. A separate Swedish research letter reported more girls than boys among babies of mothers who had hyperemesis gravidarum, the severe, medical form of pregnancy sickness (Askling et al., Lancet, 1999). That is a pattern across a large group of women with a specific condition, not a test anyone can apply to their own pregnancy, and it says nothing about ordinary queasiness. The quiz keeps the tale as folklore tells it and flags the Perry result.

Heart rate of 140 or more. A team at Wright State University measured the heart rate in 477 single pregnancies scanned before 14 weeks. Girls averaged 151.7 beats a minute and boys 154.9, both above the folk threshold, and the difference was not significant (McKenna et al., 2006).

The Chinese gender calendar. This is our own site's tradition, and it has had the largest test of any tale: researchers applied the chart to 2,840,755 Swedish births and found it agreed with the baby's sex no better than chance (Villamor et al., 2010). If you have not tried it yet, the Chinese gender calendar calculator works out your lunar age and lunar month for you, and you can bring the answer back to question 11.

Eight questions nobody has tested

Cravings, skin, hair, sleeping side, cold feet, the ring test, a partner's weight gain and the Mayan rule: for each of these we searched PubMed, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database of medical research, in October 2026 and found no published study testing it as a predictor of the baby's sex. The nearest miss was a 2006 study from the same Johns Hopkins group that looked at heartburn and the newborn's hair, which is a different tale entirely.

“Untested” is not the same as “disproved”, and we are careful not to say otherwise. It means every confident statement you read about these tales, including the specific boy and girl meanings we used in the quiz, is word of mouth. Families tell them differently, too. Some say a left-side sleeper is having a boy and some say the reverse; some read a circling ring as a girl and others as a boy. We used the versions we see most often and say so plainly.

The Mayan rule is a special case. It is pure arithmetic: an even or odd age against an even or odd month. Across any large group of births it will be right roughly half the time, because it splits pregnancies into two groups with no reference to biology at all. Our comparison of the Mayan gender predictor vs the Chinese calendar goes through how the two rules differ.

The other versions you may hear

If your grandmother reads a tale the other way round, she is not wrong; she is using a different version. A few of the swaps we come across most:

• Cravings. Sweet for a girl and salty for a boy is the usual version, but sour is claimed by both sides, and some families add spicy food as a boy sign.
• Sleeping side. Left for a boy is common, and so is the exact opposite, and comfort usually decides the side long before folklore does.
• Skin. “A girl steals your beauty” is the best-known form, but some say a boy causes breakouts because of “male hormones”.
• Ring test. Circle for a girl is our default; plenty of families read a circle as a boy.

Because the meanings vary, you can flip any answer in the quiz to your family's version and the overall lesson stays the same. A rule that can be read either way and still feel right half the time is exactly what a coin toss looks like from the inside.

Why a lopsided score means less than it feels like

Suppose every tale were a fair coin toss. With twelve votes, how often would you get a result that feels decisive? We worked it out from the 4,096 possible ways twelve coins can land:

So roughly four quiz-takers in ten get a score of 8 to 4 or wider with no signal at all, and about one in twenty-five sees a landslide of 10 to 2. A strong lean is exactly what randomness produces a good share of the time. That is why the quiz shows you the evidence column next to the tally: the size of the score tells you nothing about the baby, only about how the coins fell.

Real answers are not quite coin tosses either, which makes things worse rather than better. Several questions overlap: someone who feels unwell may also sleep badly, have duller skin and crave salty crackers, so one underlying fact can quietly cast three or four votes in the same direction. The folk meanings are not independent of each other, which pushes scores further from a neat tie.

Playing it at a baby shower

The quiz works best as a group game, where the point is the conversation rather than the verdict. A few ways families use it:

• Guests answer for the parent. Everyone fills in the twelve questions from what they have noticed, then compares scores. The spread between guests is usually wider than people expect.
• Seal it before the scan. Copy the result link into the family chat with the date, and open it again after the anatomy scan or birth to see who was right.
• Pair it with the calendar. Run the Chinese gender chart for the parent and for each grandmother's own pregnancies, and see whether the chart would have got the family right.
• Read the evidence column out loud. It turns the game into a small, friendly lesson in how folklore survives: the hits get remembered, the misses do not.

For the full story behind each tale, including the studies, our longer guide to old wives tales gender predictions goes through them one by one.

When to put the quiz down and call someone

Two of the questions touch on symptoms, sickness and the heart rate, and it is worth being clear about where folklore stops. Sickness that is severe is a medical matter, not a clue. The NHS advises calling your midwife, GP or 111 if you are vomiting and cannot keep food or fluids down for 24 hours, have very dark urine or have not peed in more than 8 hours, feel very weak, dizzy or faint when standing, have tummy pain or a high temperature, vomit blood, or have lost weight.

In the same way, a heart rate is something your provider reads for your baby's health, not for boy or girl. If anything about a reading worries you, ask them what it means; do not run it through a folk rule. The quiz is for the fun questions, and those are the only ones it should ever answer.