According to a recent study, women who seek higher wages and fairer treatment should work for companies headed by male bosses who have daughters.
Maya Sen, a professor at the University of Rochester and Adam Glynn, professor at Harvard University conducted the study, which showed that Supreme Court judges with at least one daughter were more likely to vote in favor of women’s rights than judges who had no children at all or who had only sons.
Among judges who had one child, those who had daughters were 16% more likely to decide in favor of women’s rights. Although the researchers were somewhat surprised at the findings, since judges are expected to be impartial, Sen says by having a daughter, male judges learn what it’s like to be a woman.
“Male judges perhaps learn a lot from having daughters. They might learn about things like discrimination in the workplace or discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” says Sen. Judges are more sensitive to these issues as they see their daughters come against gender barriers they themselves have never faced.
These findings echo those of a 2011 study of Danish companies that found male CEOs were closing the gender pay gap after they became dads to daughters.
The researchers studied the salaries of over 700,000 Danish workers at over 6,000 firms and found that a short time after male CEOs had daughters, women’s wages rose relative to men’s. The birth of a son, however, had no effect on the wage gap.
The “daughter effect” was strongest at companies with 50 or fewer employees, which could be attributed to the fact that CEOs of small companies have more direct influence over the pay of workers than CEOs of larger firms. The effects were also stronger the more education female employees had.
The researchers concluded male CEOs were more likely to envision these educated female employees as though they were their own daughters, who would most likely have more formal education. “Our results suggest that the first daughter ‘flips a switch’ in the mind of a male CEO, causing him to attend more to equity in gender-related wage policies,” the authors wrote.
Dr. Relly Nadler, author of Leading with Emotional Intelligence says having a daughter makes male leaders more empathetic, which can affect their leadership style.
As the father of a 17-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old son, Nadler says he’s seen firsthand the changes a daughter can have on a man’s emotional intelligence. “With my daughter, almost all our conversations are around relationships–what’s going on with her friends and how she’s feeling. With my son, it’s usually about things–things he wants to buy, places he wants to go, things he wants to do,” says Nadler.
Having a daughter, Nadler says, has helped him to develop his empathetic muscle. “What we know about neuroscience is that emotions are contagious,” he says. When men pick up on these emotions from spending time with their daughters, they’re more likely to carry them into the workplace and therefore be more attuned to issues that affect women at work and be better equipped to deal with them in a way that is more sensitive to women’s needs.
Management psychologist Gail Golden says dads with daughters are simply more aware of the obstacles faced by women in the workplace.
While having a child is a transformative experience for both male and female parents, she says fathers tend to become more protective of daughters. “He wants all the opportunities to be there for her. As she begins to experience some of the barriers that girls and women still do experience, it can be an awareness-creating experience for the father who has never really thought about this before,” she says. “It’s not just abstract statistics about salaries of women versus men, it’s about his daughter not being paid fairly for the work she’s doing.”
Even President Obama, has been influenced by his daughters to close the wage gap in the White House. He was quoted in the Washington Times stating: “I want to make sure my daughters are getting the same chances as men. I don’t want them paid less for doing the same job as some guy is doing.”