Male managers who become fathers to their first daughter tend to hire more women, boosting the share of female staff and their earnings within the firms they run, a study reported in The Review of Economic Studies has found. The research, led by Maddalena Ronchi of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Nina Smith of Aarhus University, analysed Danish registry data spanning 1992 to 2017 and focused on single-manager businesses that accounted for the vast majority of Danish firms.
The researchers describe the phenomenon as the “daughter effect,” a sociological notion that fathering a daughter can make men more sensitive to gender equality. As Ronchi explained, economists increasingly see gender attitudes as one reason why gaps persist in the labour market, though much of the prior work has focused on how attitudes shape women’s own choices rather than how managers’ attitudes affect hiring and promotion decisions.
“Economists increasingly see gender attitudes as one reason why gender gaps persist in the labour market,” Ronchi said. “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.”
The study argues that managers wield considerable influence over who is hired, retained and promoted, and that personal biases could help explain why women continue to face unequal pay and fewer opportunities. Measuring attitudes directly is notoriously difficult, which is why the researchers sought a natural experiment rather than trying to observe beliefs directly.
“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.”
To approximate a random shift in worldview, the team used the birth of a manager’s first daughter as an external shock. Whether a newborn is a boy or a girl is largely random, and prior research links fathering a daughter to heightened attention to gender inequality. This approach allowed the researchers to examine whether a manager’s decisions at work changed after the birth.
The Danish data set linked employer and employee records with family information, enabling a before-and-after comparison within the same company. The analysis concentrated on single-manager establishments— workplaces with only one person in a management role—typically employing around a dozen staff. These firms made up more than 90% of Danish establishments and accounted for about a third of total employment.
In total, the study covered 6,701 periods where a male manager experienced the birth of a child while still at the same company. The researchers tracked two outcomes within each company: the share of employees who were women, and a measure of gender equity in earnings, calculated so that 0.5 would indicate parity between women’s and men’s wages. At the firms studied, women comprised 34% of employees on average, and the earnings measure averaged 0.39.
After the birth of a manager’s first daughter, the earnings measure rose by about 0.017, a 4.4% increase over its average of 0.39, and women’s share of employees rose by about 1 percentage point, a 2.9% 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 shift was concentrated among managers whose first child was a daughter. The effect was smaller for additional daughters and not statistically reliable, and among those having a first child, a son did not reduce women’s outcomes, suggesting the effect reflects the impact of daughters rather than a cost associated with sons.
In terms of how one observed the changes, the researchers found that hiring practices shifted rather than a sweeping workforce overhaul. Managers hired more women who were highly educated, worked full-time, and commanded higher salaries, rather than replacing all male hires. They also found that women already employed at the firms who were strong candidates for promotion tended to see earnings gains, while male staff did not experience a similar boost.
“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. “Importantly, we find no evidence that these gains for women came at a cost to the firm.”
The researchers note the timing of the shift is telling: the change in hiring and in the earnings gap occurred almost immediately after the daughter’s birth and persisted for years. Ronchi said that this rapid change implies fathers do not need to observe their daughters entering the workforce to drive the effect; instead, having a daughter appears to alter men’s views about women more broadly.
A supplementary finding indicated the effect strengthened as daughters aged into adolescence and adulthood, and was more pronounced among managers born in 1965 or later and for births after 2001. The authors interpret the absence of a productivity dip as evidence that the observed bias operates at the margin—affecting who is chosen when qualifications are similar—rather than steering firms toward clearly inferior hires.
They caution that the results should not be interpreted as suggesting fathers of daughters are inherently better managers or that firms should evaluate managers by their family composition. The birth of a daughter is used as a quasi-random tool to examine attitudes and their consequences for hiring decisions.
The study focuses exclusively on Denmark’s single-manager firms, and researchers acknowledge that the same flexibility may not exist in larger corporations with formal HR policies. They also emphasise that the data cannot reveal managers’ internal beliefs, only the observable outcomes of their decisions. Future work could explore whether diversity training or other interventions yield similar shifts in perspective among managers who do not have daughters.
The work, titled “Daddy’s Girl: Daughters, Managerial Decisions, and Gender Inequality,” is authored by Maddalena Ronchi and Nina Smith.
