If I was to have a baby, I’d want the child to grow up to be a musician or a writer or anything in the arts. Sports would be cool, too. But some of you may want your child to grow up to be a CEO. If so, then make sure the baby is born in the spring.

In a study from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, babies born in the summer are less likely to be CEOs.

“Our findings indicate that summer babies underperform in the ranks of CEOs as a result of the ‘birth-date effect,’ a phenomenon resulting from the way children are grouped by age in school,” said Sauder Finance Professor Maurice Levi, co-author of the study to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters.

Using hockey as an example, Malcolm Gladwell addressed this same phenomenon in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, summarizing that the reason players are successful is due to the month in which they were born.

For the U.S., school admissions are open between September and January. The study’s researchers discovered that of the 375 CEOs sampled from S&P 500 companies, the ones born between June and July were the youngest in their class. Those born in March and April were the oldest.

“Older children within the same grade tend to do better than the youngest, who are less intellectually developed,” Levi said. “Early success is often rewarded with leadership roles and enriched learning opportunities, leading to future advantages that are magnified throughout life.

“Our study adds to the growing evidence that the way our education system groups students by age impacts their lifelong success,” Levi continued. “We could be excluding some of the business world’s best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.”

(Story quotes from the University of British Columbia. Image via Flickr: opensourceway / Creative Commons)