Having a child can abruptly shift the way you view the world. That may be especially true when it comes to men who are raising girls. According to new research, fathers who are in managerial roles behave differently toward women at work after having daughters.
The new study, which was recently published in The Review of Economic Studies, used Danish administrative data to match employer records with information about managers’ families. The research focused on workplaces with just one person in a managerial position in a given year; the manager would therefore be the most likely to be in charge of decisions like hiring and promotion.
The study, which explored the birth of a first daughter “as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes,” found that if male managers had a daughter, they were more likely to hire women.
That was especially true for women who met three criteria: higher levels of education, full-time employment, and a high salary at the company. Overall, the hiring rate of women by male managers increased by 2.9% following the birth of a first daughter.
The hiring change wasn’t the only noticeable difference in how male managers worked with women. The study found evidence that suggested promotions also shifted in favor of women.
The study explains that male managers were more likely to promote women after becoming fathers to a daughter, “provided the pool of incumbents includes female employees who are plausibly better suited for higher-responsibility roles.” Likewise, the research found that the first-daughter effect led to a relative earnings increase of about 4.4% for women who worked for these male bosses.
The birth of additional daughters was found to have some impact, though not as significant, meaning the birth of a first daughter had the biggest sway on male managers’ hiring and promoting decisions.
The study didn’t point to a specific, firm reason for why male managers’ behavior changed. However, it follows previous research that’s found male bosses may be more supportive of women in the workplace in a variety of ways if they have daughters. Likewise, social media users have dubbed girl dads the “best bosses”—perhaps with good reason.
Study author Nina Smith, professor emerita at the department of economics at Aarhus University in Denmark, tells Fast Company that she believes the study is, quite simply, “documentation of unconscious bias and unconscious gender stereotypes.” In other words, the bias that ordinarily keeps women from advancing at work is so prevalent that the study was able to track a rise in gender equity.
Maddalena Ronchi, an assistant professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who co-authored the research, agrees. Ronchi says the researchers were able to surmise that fathers were not likely consciously shifting the way they approached gender disparities to impact their own daughters’ experiences, given the shift happens quickly and doesn’t seem to be an act of helping one’s own child succeed.
“The change happens right after the birth. A newborn daughter can’t benefit from her father’s hiring decisions for another 20 years, so self-interest is an unlikely explanation,” Ronchi explains.
Instead, she suspects that the experience of having a daughter is an expansive one that lends itself to developing a clearer understanding of women in general, especially how they may experience the workplace.
“Our evidence fits better with a daughter making gender inequality suddenly more salient to her father,” Ronchi says. “He becomes more aware of it and identifies more closely with women.”
The research noted that it didn’t find “any significant effect” on the overall performance of workplaces that hired more women. “We also find no sign of a trade-off between equity and efficiency,” Ronchi says. “Managers hired women just as qualified as the men they would otherwise have hired, and firm performance didn’t suffer.”
Unsurprisingly, this suggests that male managers can hire and promote women more often without worrying that their firm will be negatively impacted.
Kirk Davis, senior vice president at Client HR and a girl dad, tells Fast Company that the study’s lesson is that, when it comes to gender, “exposure drives understanding.”
Davis adds: “The more leaders see the workplace through the eyes of the women in their lives—whether daughters, spouses, colleagues, or team members—the more likely they are to recognize that equity is not about favoritism.
“It’s about ensuring every talented person has a fair opportunity to contribute, grow, and lead.”
Regardless of the hopeful study, the gender gap still broadly exists today.
While pay gaps have narrowed slightly over the past 20 years, women still make roughly 85% of what men do, according to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center. And, according to the new report, hiring more women alone isn’t enough to close it. It notes: “Policies aimed at shifting managers’ perceptions of the social costs of gender inequality may therefore be necessary.”
However, when male managers have daughters, a swift change in perspective seems to happen pretty much on its own.