The ancient Chinese conception chart or the Chinese calendar for gender as it is also known (amongst many other names) can be used for two different purposes. One being a baby gender predictor. Women who are already pregnant will look at the chart and cross match their age with the month that they got pregnant. This will reveal a neatly coloured pink or blue square predicting whether they are carrying a baby boy, or a baby girl.

The Chinese calendar for gender can also be used to tell a woman which month she must get pregnant to conceive a child of her preferred gender! You would find your age, look down the chart to find the blue or pink squares and in theory these squares will tell you which month you should try to get pregnant.

The ancient Chinese conception chart is believed to hang proudly in the Institute of Science in Beijing and local legend will tell you that it was buried in a royal tomb near to Beijing over 700 years ago. But is it accurate?

Many Chinese women will tell of a 90% success rate, maybe due to a one child policy which is currently in place in China (forcing Chinese couples to pre-plan the sex of their baby) But a poll that I have run on my website states a 50-50 balance in answers. According to my poll you may just as well flip a coin and hope for the best. And after a fair amount of research, I cannot find any official study results.

So would you put your trust in the Chinese birth gender chart?

There are of course medical procedures that you could undergo to try and select the gender of your next child. Some of these procedures are expensive and intrusive. Many do not totally guarantee your desired results. Only one method of gender selection can be certain to work 100% and that is Preimplantation genetic diagnosis. PGD (for short) is not readily available in all countries, some religions class the procedure as un-ethical, some places will only use PGD for detecting medical genetic disorders. The only good thing that PGD has in it’s favour is that the method is tried and tested, where as the ancient Chinese conception chart isn’t.

The Chinese birth gender chart comes under the ‘natural gender selection’ tag. Many methods of natural gender selection can be found today, some of them include procedures that you can carry out in your every day life. The natural gender selection methods do not guarantee you a certain gender 100%, but they do claim to tip the scales in your favour by a considerable amount.

So weigh up the odds… Which would you prefer to help you in your quest to gain a perfectly balanced family. Some old chart with lots of little pink and blue squares? Or some natural methods that you can learn to help yourself?