A new study suggests that having a daughter may influence how male managers make hiring decisions. Researchers found that after a manager’s first daughter was born, women’s relative earnings at the firm rose by 4.4% and their employment increased by 2.9%.
The findings come from economists Maddalena Ronchi of Northwestern University and Nina Smith of Aarhus University, whose study, Daddy’s Girl: Daughters, Managerial Decisions, and Gender Inequality, was published in the Review of Economic Studies in August 2026.
The research does not show that becoming a father to a daughter automatically makes a manager more supportive of women. Instead, it provides evidence that personal experience may measurably alter workplace decisions.
That distinction matters. The researchers were not asking managers whether they believed in gender equality. They examined what managers actually did when choosing whom to employ.
What did the study find about having a daughter?
The researchers compared workplaces led by male managers whose first child was a daughter with those led by managers whose first child was a son.
Following the birth of a first daughter, women’s relative earnings increased by 4.4%, while their share of employment increased by 2.9%. The changes appeared quickly after the birth and persisted over time.
The researchers found that the change was primarily linked to hiring decisions.
Managers who had a first daughter became more likely to replace male hires with female hires who had comparable:
- Education
- Working hours
- Earnings
- Overall job characteristics
In other words, the results do not suggest that managers simply began hiring less-qualified women to meet a diversity target. The researchers found evidence that women were being selected in place of men with similar observable characteristics.
How did researchers study the daughter effect?
The study uses detailed Danish administrative records to connect information about workers, firms, and managers with household and family data.
The researchers examined changes within firms rather than simply comparing different companies. This allowed them to observe what happened to a workplace after its male manager had a daughter and compare that change with workplaces where the manager’s first child was a son.
The analysis focused particularly on male managers in small, single-manager establishments, where the manager has substantial control over hiring and pay decisions. Aarhus University says the underlying data covered the Danish labour market from 1993 through 2017.
The gender of a newborn is treated by the researchers as a plausibly exogenous event. That makes it useful for examining whether an unexpected personal experience is followed by changes in managerial behaviour.
The approach is important because a simple correlation between having daughters and hiring women would not establish that one caused the other. The researchers instead use changes around the birth event and comparisons within firms to strengthen the causal interpretation.
What changed in managers’ hiring decisions?
The most notable finding was not a broad increase in women’s pay for existing employees. It was a change in who managers chose to hire.
After the birth of a first daughter, managers became more likely to recruit women, including women with higher levels of education, full-time positions and relatively high earnings.
That pattern gives the study a more specific implication for workplace inequality.
If equally qualified male and female candidates are available but managers consistently favor men, the resulting gender gap can persist even without an explicit policy against hiring women. A small change in the manager’s decision-making process can therefore alter the composition of the workforce over time.
The research suggests that the gender of a manager’s child may have been associated with such a change in the Danish firms examined.
Did hiring more women hurt company performance?
The researchers found no significant deterioration in firm performance following the shift toward female hiring.
Measures including labor costs, sales and productivity did not show a significant negative effect. The finding is consistent with the researchers’ conclusion that managers were largely substituting women for men with comparable characteristics rather than lowering the overall quality of new hires.
This is significant because one question surrounding efforts to reduce workplace inequality is whether changing hiring patterns comes at an economic cost.
In this particular setting, the study did not find evidence of such a trade-off. But that result should not be generalised to every company or labour market. It describes the firms and managers included in the Danish data.
Why might having a daughter affect a manager’s behaviour?
The study cannot directly observe a manager’s thoughts, so it cannot establish precisely what happens psychologically after the birth of a daughter.
However, the timing provides an important clue.
The changes in women’s employment and earnings appeared relatively soon after the birth. That makes it less likely that managers were changing their hiring practices simply because they expected their daughters to enter the labor market decades later.
One possible explanation is that becoming a father to a daughter makes gender inequality more personally salient.
A manager who previously thought about workplace gender issues in abstract terms may suddenly have a close personal connection to the experiences of girls and women. That experience could affect perceptions of female workers or make existing gender biases more noticeable.
The researchers describe the birth of a daughter as a shock to managers’ gender attitudes. Their findings therefore offer a way to study an issue that is otherwise difficult to measure: whether managers’ personal beliefs influence the people they hire.
Does the study prove that “girl dads” are better managers?
No.
That conclusion would go beyond what the research establishes.
The study identifies an association between the birth of a first daughter and changes in workplace outcomes among the male managers examined. It does not establish that every man who has a daughter will become more supportive of women, nor does it show that fathers of daughters are generally better managers.
The researchers also cannot directly measure the internal attitudes of individual managers. Their conclusions are based on observable changes in employment, earnings and hiring patterns.
There is another important limitation: the evidence comes from Denmark and focuses on a particular group of male managers, especially those running small, single-manager establishments. Aarhus University notes that the study’s core analysis concerns these owner-managed or manager-controlled workplaces.
Whether the same effect would appear in large corporations, different industries or countries with different workplace cultures remains an open question.
Why does this research matter for workplace gender inequality?
The study shifts some attention away from formal diversity policies and toward the people making everyday employment decisions.
Hiring managers determine who enters an organization, who receives opportunities and, in many workplaces, who moves into better-paid roles. Even modest differences in those decisions can accumulate over years.
The research suggests that managerial attitudes may be one part of the explanation for persistent gender differences in employment and earnings.
It also points to a broader question: if personal experiences can change workplace behavior, can professional experiences do the same?
For example, exposure to female colleagues, mentors or employees may change how managers evaluate women’s capabilities. The current study does not test those interventions, so it cannot establish that they would reproduce the observed effect. But it provides evidence that managerial behavior is not necessarily fixed.
That may be particularly relevant for smaller businesses, where one manager can have substantial influence over recruitment decisions.
What are the study’s biggest limitations?
Several limitations are important when interpreting the findings.
First, the evidence is country-specific. The research uses Danish administrative data, so the results cannot automatically be applied to managers in the United States or elsewhere.
Second, the study focuses on male managers. It therefore does not establish whether having a son or daughter produces comparable changes among female managers.
Third, the research measures behavior rather than private attitudes. The researchers infer changes in gender attitudes from employment and hiring outcomes rather than directly observing what managers believe.
Fourth, the result is specific to the birth of a first daughter. The study reports that the strongest effects occur around the first daughter, rather than showing that every subsequent daughter produces the same change.
These limitations do not negate the findings. They define what the study can—and cannot—tell us.
What does the research tell us about personal experiences at work?
The broader lesson is less about daughters themselves and more about how people can bring their experiences into professional decisions.
Managers are not detached decision-making machines. Their judgments can be influenced by experiences outside the workplace, even when those experiences have no obvious connection to hiring.
In this case, the researchers found that the arrival of a first daughter was followed by measurable changes in the gender composition of hiring and in women’s relative employment outcomes.
That does not mean workplaces should rely on personal circumstances to produce greater equality. Instead, the research highlights why hiring systems, evaluation processes and managerial decision-making deserve scrutiny even when there is no explicit discriminatory policy.
A workplace can have formally gender-neutral rules and still produce different outcomes if the people applying those rules have different assumptions about candidates.
The study offers one unusual piece of evidence that those assumptions can change.
The takeaway
The research by Ronchi and Smith provides evidence that the birth of a manager’s first daughter was followed by a 4.4% increase in women’s relative earnings and a 2.9% increase in their employment in the firms studied. The main mechanism appeared to be greater hiring of women with characteristics comparable to male hires, with no detected negative effect on firm performance.
But the finding should be read narrowly.
It does not mean that having a daughter automatically eliminates gender bias, that fathers of daughters are inherently more inclusive managers, or that the same pattern will occur in every workplace.
What it does show is more specific—and arguably more useful: a personal life event can coincide with a measurable change in how managers make employment decisions.
For companies trying to understand why gender gaps persist, that finding puts the spotlight on an often overlooked factor: the person making the decision.
