Male managers who become fathers to their first daughter tend to start hiring more women, raising women’s share of jobs and earnings at the businesses they run, according to research accepted for publication in The Review of Economic Studies. The shift appeared almost immediately after the birth and had no detectable effect on the firm’s overall performance.
The research revolves around the daughter effect, a sociological concept describing how fathering a daughter makes men more sensitive to issues of gender equality. The research, led by Maddalena Ronchi, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Nina Smith of Aarhus University, sought to understand if this shift in personal attitudes translates into concrete professional actions.
“Economists increasingly see gender attitudes as one reason why gender gaps persist in the labor market,” Ronchi told PsyPost. “Most of that research, however, has focused on how attitudes shape women’s own choices—whether and how much to work, for example, or whom to marry.”
“But managers’ attitudes could matter just as much, because managers decide whom to hire, retain, and promote,” she continued.
The authors note that managers hold a lot of power over hiring, firing, and promotions. Because of this, their personal biases or beliefs could be a driving force behind why women continue to face unequal pay and fewer opportunities in the corporate world. It is difficult to study how a manager’s personal views affect their employees because attitudes are hard to measure.
“The challenge is that it is very hard to isolate the effect of a manager’s attitudes,” Ronchi explained. “We rarely observe what managers actually think about women’s role at work.”
“And even if we did, managers with different attitudes are likely to differ in many other ways,” she noted. “A manager with more progressive views may be younger or more educated, for example. He may also choose, or be chosen by, a firm that already treats women differently. So simply comparing managers or firms cannot tell us whether managers’ attitudes themselves affect women’s careers.”
In addition, managers are not randomly assigned to companies, making it tough to separate a single person’s influence from the company’s existing culture. By looking at what happens to female employees when a male manager becomes a father to a daughter rather than a son, the researchers hoped to capture a natural experiment, a situation where chance, rather than researchers, sorts people into comparison groups.
“Ideally, we would change a manager’s attitudes at random, keep him in the same firm, and see whether his treatment of female employees changes,” Ronchi said. “Of course, we cannot run that experiment. Instead, we use the birth of a manager’s first daughter. Whether a newborn is a boy or a girl is essentially random, and previous research suggests that having a daughter can make fathers more attentive to gender inequality.”
This approach allowed them to see how an external shock to a manager’s worldview might shift their workplace behavior. To investigate this, the researchers used Danish administrative registry data spanning from 1992 to 2017. These records linked employer and employee information with longitudinal data on family composition. The authors focused on single-manager establishments, which are workplaces with only one person in a management role. These businesses averaged 12 to 13 workers, but made up more than 90 percent of Danish establishments and accounted for about a third of total employment.
This setup increased the likelihood that the manager being studied was directly responsible for personnel decisions like hiring and supervising employees on a daily basis. Because previous research indicates that the daughter effect is mostly observed in fathers, the study restricted its focus to male managers. The final sample included 6,701 periods of employment where a male manager experienced the birth of a child while working at the same company.
The researchers tracked two outcomes within the same company before and after the birth: the share of employees who were women, and a measure comparing women’s average earnings with men’s, scored so that 0.5 means women and men earned the same on average. At the companies studied, women made up 34 percent of employees on average, and the earnings measure averaged 0.39. They controlled for the total number of children a manager had, comparing fathers who had a daughter with those who had a son while also adjusting for workforce characteristics like average education and company size.
After the birth of a manager’s first daughter, the earnings measure rose by about 0.017, a 4.4 percent increase over its average of 0.39, and women’s share of employees rose by about 1 percentage point, a 2.9 percent increase. “To put those numbers in perspective, these effects amount to roughly 20 to 50% of the difference in women’s outcomes between firms run by male and female managers,” Ronchi pointed out.
This positive effect on female employment and earnings was concentrated among managers having their first daughter. Experiencing the birth of additional daughters produced a positive but smaller effect that was not statistically reliable. Furthermore, among managers having their first child, a son did not reduce women’s outcomes, suggesting the effect reflects daughters raising them rather than sons lowering them.
When breaking down how these changes happened, the data showed that managers shifted their hiring practices. Instead of completely restructuring the workforce to be more family-friendly by offering more part-time roles, managers simply substituted male hires with female hires who had similar qualifications. Following the birth of a first daughter, managers hired more women who were highly educated, worked full-time, and commanded higher salaries. The researchers also found that women already working at the firm who were good candidates for promotion were more likely to see earnings increases, while male employees did not experience a similar change.
“The main takeaway is that managers’ attitudes toward women can shape women’s opportunities at work—and that those attitudes may change quite quickly,” Ronchi observed.
These results fit with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that among managers, having a daughter weakened the link between a rivalrous form of narcissism and traditional gender role attitudes, though that study measured self-reported attitudes rather than hiring and pay. The findings also align with a study of Japanese fathers covered by PsyPost in 2026, which found that men whose firstborn child was a daughter were more likely to reject traditional gender roles and support gender-equality policies, again based on self-reported attitudes rather than workplace decisions.
The study also assessed whether these shifts in hiring and promotion affected the financial health of the companies. Looking at sales, total employment, and value added per employee, which is the value a business creates per worker, the researchers found no detectable effect on firm performance.
“Importantly, we find no evidence that these gains for women came at a cost to the firm,” Ronchi noted. “So the results suggest that at least some of the men these managers would previously have hired could instead be replaced by similarly qualified women without a detectable cost to the firm.”
This indicates that managers were able to hire observably similar women without sacrificing productivity. It also suggests that any previous bias favoring men did not provide an economic benefit to the firm.
Additionally, the researchers looked at the timing of these changes. The shift in hiring and in women’s earnings happened almost immediately after the daughter’s birth, and the effect persisted for years afterward. This rapid change suggests that managers did not need years of seeing their daughters grow up to learn about gender barriers in the labor market.
“That timing is important,” Ronchi said. “A newborn daughter is decades away from entering the labor market herself, so the manager cannot be improving opportunities for women in order to directly benefit his own child.”
“Instead, the evidence is consistent with having a daughter changing how managers think about women more broadly—and those changes showing up almost immediately in their decisions at work,” she added.
A separate comparison of managers whose oldest daughters were different ages found that the effect grew stronger as daughters reached adolescence and adulthood, suggesting that continued exposure may reinforce the initial shift. The effect was also larger among managers born in 1965 or later and for births after 2001.
The authors interpret the lack of a performance effect as a sign that the bias they detected mostly affected close calls between a man and a woman with similar education, hours, and pay. Theoretical work they cite suggests that even subtle bias of this kind can carry long-run costs, for example by discouraging women from investing in skills if they expect to lose such close calls.
“The gender bias we uncover seems to operate ‘at the margin’—affecting whether a man or an equally qualified woman gets the job, rather than leading managers to choose substantially less qualified workers,” Ronchi explained. “That helps explain why changing these decisions can improve women’s opportunities without producing a detectable change in the firm’s output. The absence of a productivity effect does not mean the bias is harmless. A manager choosing a man over an equally qualified woman may make little difference to that firm’s output, while repeated decisions like this can make a large difference to women’s careers.”
As with all research, there are a few caveats to consider. “One important misinterpretation is that fathers of daughters are somehow better managers, or that firms should care about whether a manager has sons or daughters,” Ronchi emphasized. “That is not the point of the study. The birth of a daughter gives us a research tool: an essentially random event that previous research links to men’s attitudes toward gender, allowing us to study whether workplace decisions change after that event.”
The study focuses entirely on single-manager businesses in Denmark. It is unknown if managers in larger corporations would have the same level of freedom to change hiring practices based on their personal attitudes. Formal human resources policies in larger firms might constrain an individual manager’s ability to act on their updated worldview.
Another limitation is that the researchers cannot directly read the managers’ minds or measure their exact beliefs. Because the research relies on administrative data, it only tracks the outcomes of the managers’ decisions rather than their internal psychological states. Future research could explore whether diversity training or other interventions might produce a similar shift in perspective for managers who do not have daughters.
The study, “Daddy’s Girl: Daughters, Managerial Decisions, and Gender Inequality,” was authored by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith.
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