Firstborn daughters may change male bosses’ hiring decisions: Chartered accountant explains why women could benefit at work

If your boss has a daughter, it’s time to celebrate, and not just because he can throw a party for this personal milestone. Taking to Instagram, CA Sarthak Ahuja highlighted how having a daughter as a firstborn can make male bosses more female-employee-friendly at work. A study published by the Aarhus School of Business claimed that when male managers have a girl as their firstborn, women’s pay and employment in their firms increase significantly.

The study uses a large amount of anonymous data from Statistics Denmark, which includes information about the Danish labour market from 1993 up to 2017. The researchers combined information about employers and employees with detailed data on household setups to follow the work, family, and business situations of thousands of Danish managers over many years.

The main study looks at male managers in small businesses that are run by one person, often the owner. In these businesses, the manager is responsible for making decisions about hiring and setting salaries on their own. Researchers looked at how things changed inside each company before and after the manager had their first child. Because the baby's gender happens by chance; this method allowed the researchers to see the effect of having a son or a daughter and figure out the real cause-and-effect relationship.

The Findings

After the birth of the manager’s first-born daughter, women’s earnings increased by 4.4 per cent, while employment rose by 2.9 per cent. Managers are more likely to hire women, particularly for lucrative education and high-paying jobs. The income ratio of women to men went up by 4.1 percent.

The proportion of female hires over other hires also went up by 4.5 per cent. Moreover, such managers were more likely to select the female candidate over the male ones if they were presented with two equally qualified candidates for a high-paying position.

The study also notes that there is no proof that companies where fathers are the primary carers do worse. Average labour costs, sales, and productivity are still the same. Women who are hired after a daughter is born often take the place of men who have the same skills and are paid the same amount.

Last but not least, the probability of the highest-paid employee among these companies being a female worker also went up by 8 percent.

The researchers speculated that the birth of a daughter makes a man more likely to confront and change ingrained biases against women.

The research paper titled 'Daddy's Girl, Daughters, Managerial Decisions, and Gender Inequality' has been published in the Review of Economic Studies by Maddalena Ronchi of Northwestern University and Nina Smith, Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Business Economics at Aarhus University.