Fathering a daughter alters view of females at work
Having a daughter will change how male managers perceive women in the workplace, a study shows.
The Economist reports that a paper published in the Review of Economic Studies journal used administrative records to track every worker and company in Denmark between 1992 and 2017.
They found that when male managers had their first daughters, the gender pay gap at their firms narrowed.
The authors restricted their sample to small, single-manager firms so that they could identify who was responsible for business decisions, the Economist reports.
Such firms represent more than 90% of Danish companies.
When a male manager had a first-born daughter, women’s earnings ratio – a measure of their pay relative to men’s – rose by 4.1%.
The share of women employed at the company rose by 4.5%. The shift started immediately after the birth and lasted as long as the manager stayed at the firm.
Having a son made no real difference, nor did subsequent daughters.
The gains came mainly from new hires and promotions, not from pay rises for existing employees or women being spared the sack.
The data suggest the new hires have similar qualifications and experience as the men hired into firms without a new girl dad.
When faced with equally qualified men and women, the new father appears to pick women, especially for full-time and high-paid jobs.
The probability that the best paid person at the firm is a woman rises by two percentage points.
This enthusiasm for hiring women had no effect on firm performance, probably because the female hires were no more qualified than the male applicants.
Value added
Firm sales, overall employment and the value added per worker barely budged.
What can be learned from this? Eighty percent of the managers studied were men; there were too few female managers to test whether motherhood has the same impact.
That makes it unclear whether the daughter effect reveals something about the psychology of fatherhood, or about the consequence of having a close relationship with someone of a different gender, the report concludes.