The Daughter Effect

Ashley K: Looking back, I think we can all recognize and appreciate the role that our parents played in shaping who we are, but have you ever thought about the impact you had on your parents, how they view themselves and others? For this episode, we’re going to turn the tables and take a look at the role that children can have on shaping and influencing their parents. Specifically how daughters can shape how men view and interact with women in the workplace, especially men in leadership roles. This is also known as the Daughter effect. I’m thrilled to introduce Zhan Z Wu with Erasmus University and Lucia Nadi with Jan Shopping University, who collaborated with their fellow authors on a study recently published in the informed journal Management Science titled Learning from Their Daughters Family, exposure to Gender Disparity and Female Representation in Male Led Ventures. Z, and Lucia, thank you so much for joining me to share your work on Resoundingly Human. My own dad was strictly a girl dad, so I’m very interested to dive into your findings.

Zhiyan Wu/Lucia Naldi:        Thank you actually for having us. Yeah, glad to be here.

Ashley K:        Why don’t we start by having you tell me a little bit about yourselves and your fellow authors. I’d love to know how you all came together to work on this topic. I think you can start, right?

Zhiyan Wu:        Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I’m an associate professor in strategy at Erasmus University and in this paper Lucia and I also work with Carl Berg, who is a professor at Stockholm School of Economics and T is a professor in accounting, Jo University. Actually it starts five years ago in the fall 2019, I think Carl was at the time affiliated with the Institute of Analytical Sociology at Ling. She University. They were recruiting a robot merchant visiting scholarship and provide potential visitors with access to Swedish register data to work on some joint projects. I saw this exciting opportunity. I applied with a particular interest on venture bars and Carl gave me positive response and also introduced me to Lucia and Timo because of our common interest in venture borrow as well as more kind of detailed data Lucia and Timo have at helping young she university. So in early 2020 I started my visit. So we brainstormed the idea and we thought it would be interesting to introduce the doctor effect to the entrepreneurship scholarship because I think in the entrepreneurship literature, entrepreneurs are always conceptualized as economic agents who maximize their performance. But we also thought actually entrepreneur can also be social agents who actually make decisions just beyond all for those profit maximization. And that’s where we want to cut in and want to sell the data effects to the literature.

Lucia Naldi:        Yes, I can add a bit on Z that exactly. This has been very much my research interests as well, this more family and social dimension of entrepreneurs because exactly Z says is that oftentimes in the literature, but also if we take textbook, I mean what our students study in the courses we teach, these are just economic people, right? They are in a business, they run their business, but we forget that they are also family people. They might have a wife or a partner, they might be men, women or whatever. And especially also the children Dimension plays a very important role. So I have done other studies connected to this trying to bring more this family dimension into this economic individual’s perspective.

Ashley K:        So your paper mentions that your research actually builds on other recent studies regarding daughter to father influence. Could you tell me a bit about that research and what these findings were?

Lucia Naldi:        Yes. This is the research that spans across multiple disciplines is actually called the Daughter effect. And it’s research that studies how fathers change their behavior. After that they have given birth to a daughter. And it started, for example, I think mainly in interestingly enough in political science, there was an influential researcher. She studied how giving birth to a daughter has actually changed the decision that congressmen in the US take when it comes to, for example, bills connected to women, issues that given birth to Doha, make this congressman more liberal in the type of decisions they make. And then this has continued again in political science and in sociology they have studied how giving birth, for example, influences decision of judges. They have also looked at influence decision of also more regular people in voting patterns. And lately this effect has been also studied within organizations.

Lucia Naldi:        So for example, scholars have looked at what extent CEOs that have daughters are more generous in terms of salaries. There are other studies that show also that the CEOs that have daughters tend to invest more in corporate social responsibility. And finally, they are also studies more connected to what we are, what have done. They show that giving birth to a daughter or having a daughter makes CEOs also more gender equal in the hiring. So you have, for example, those CEOs that have daughters tend to have more women in executive positions or tend to have more women on the board of their companies as compared to those that only have sounds.

Ashley K:        So the theory you explore in your research involves gender homophily and gender neutrality interventions. Could you take a moment to explain these terms and how they relate to your work?

Zhiyan Wu:        Sure. Gender homophily is the tendency for people to form connections of relationship with others of the same gender. So essentially it’s the idea of a similarity attraction in the context of gender. So for example, imagine yourself going to a conference where nobody and whom do you want to start a conversation with? Perhaps someone who looks similar with you such as the same gender, same race, similar age. And that’s the idea of homophily. So this similarity attraction can be seen in various social settings such as schools, workplace, social networks, so individuals just gratitude towards and feel more comfortable interacting with those of similar others. And regarding the gender neutrality interventions, you can think about it as efforts to taken to reduce distinctions between genders in various settings like schools, public space. So those interventions aim to ensure that everyone, regardless of their gender identity feels equally included and respected. So this could involve using gender neutral language in the documents or conversation. Or you can also think about more broader policy examples like gender quotas, where actually it was rules and policies as require certain number of people in the role or the position in the workplace to be filled by individual of a particular gender. So is often to ensure that women or many other underrepresented gender have better representation opportunities and where they are actually historically excluded and underrepresented.

Ashley K:        So when you talk about male led ventures, does that imply that these are companies or organizations where the primary leadership is male or is it sort of a broader look at fields that have been traditionally male dominated?

Lucia Naldi:        In our research we look at male led ventures. So ventures, we actually study new ventures started by men. However, it’s also important to say that in the context of Sweden, the majority of venture started new ventures actually started by men. So if you look for example, I look quickly at the statistics and it seems that only one third of new ventures in Sweden are started by women. So yes, our study focuses only on ventures started by men, but in general, ventures in this country tend to be started by men.

Ashley K:        Alright. Now let’s take a closer look at your research. Could you set the stage for your study where it took place? You mentioned already but and what kind of data and information you included?

Lucia Naldi:        Yes, it took place in Sweden, that is the country where I’m located and where the data comes from. And we have taken advantage of the fact that Sweden has an amazing registry data. So we could study the entire population of ventures. So meaning new firms started by men from 2004, two 2017. And we could link these individuals to the firm they work for, but also to the family they have. So we knew exactly when they gave birth. We knew also who they hire in their companies, who they promoted in the firm. And all of this is made possible by the fact that Sweden has this amazing registry and they can all be connected with identification numbers. But Sweden is also in many ways a good context for our studies beside the fact of the availability of the data. Sweden, as you know, is probably one of the country in the world that is most famous for gender equality.

Lucia Naldi:        If you think about gender equality, many of us would think about Scandinavian countries in Sweden. So Sweden, there’s a very high participation of women into the workforce. However, this gender equality is very much connected to gender equality within the household. So this is a country where truly fathers and mothers, for example, share fairly equally responsibilities at home. So fathers are truly what we would call them involved fathers. These are men that really emotionally and practically are engaged in their children’s life and upbringing. So it’s actually the perfect context for really studying this Doha effect. At the same time is also a country where the gender equality is not as strong. If you look at employment in private sector. So women, yes, if gender equal if we take the economy at large, but if you look at the private sector, still many industries are only male dominated. There is still quite a differences in salaries because of that. And there are issues of glass ceiling. So women have a difficult time to be promoted to managerial positions and to be promoted to board positions. As I said, it’s perfect for starting the fathering effect. At the same time, it’s also country where the issue of hiring women and promoting women within male led ventures is a very important question.

Ashley K:        Alright, now let’s talk about the daughter effect. What are some of the ways the daughters are influencing how their fathers are viewing and interacting with women in the workplace?

Zhiyan Wu:        Yeah, I think daughters are not intentionally influencing their father. Actually the influence happens through those social dynamics in the family environment. So for example, when the daughters have a frustrated day in the school or in the workplace and they tell their story to their father about how they experienced that, and the father will just learn from those stories and become more aware of the challenges and constraints that women face either in the school or in the workplace. And this increased awareness actually can nudge men to become more gender egalitarian in their workplace decisions. For example, they can do something to change something that they think may be beneficial to their daughter in the future or to general society in the large. So they are more likely to hire and promote women within their organizations when they have this opportunity. However, we also find this behavior change actually doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, this daughter effect only happens when the daughters grow up and began to socialize in the school and workplace. So before that it’s just about information channel, but this information channel only comes when the daughter experienced those constraints. So we think this influence is not intentional, but really about social influence through the dynamics.

Lucia Naldi:        Maybe I can add something about this as well. It’s quite interesting because as I said, this data effect has been quite studied in the literature. And there are two hypothesis as to why this effect should take place. There is one hypothesis that is called the socialization hypothesis. And it’s basically the idea that giving birth to a daughter is the most important, one of the most defining moments in men’s life. And that by this event, men just become better persons, they become more socialized into what is called feminine values. So they just become better persons. And this is one of the hypothesis. And if this hypothesis was true, then we would expect this effect to be immediate. The other hypothesis, and that is the one where we stand to find support for, is that this is not just a sudden change in people’s values just because they are surrounded by women.

Lucia Naldi:        But it is more because they, over time, they can learn about the challenges that these women face in society. And it’s through this vicarious learning. So learning through their daughter’s challenges, challenges that people they care about are experiencing. They will sort of see this and realize and maybe make changes in their behavior. So the first hypothesis, as I said, if the first hypothesis was true, we would see this effect almost immediately after that these CEOs give birth to daughters. But what we observe instead is that this effect actually materializes after that the daughters have entered school and become stronger as the do grew up. So we somehow argue that our study also shows that this Doha effect is not due to the fact that just being by surrounding the women, you become a better person. But it’s more a question of that you can really learn from listening to people you care about your challenges.

Ashley K:        So now what do you think is the biggest takeaway from your findings and how can it be leveraged to possibly improve working conditions for women overall? So

Zhiyan Wu:        Although our finding centers on varying doubts, we by no means suggest that using family interventions as a practical recommendation for engaging men in building a gender neutral workplace ORR society. Actually the broader idea of our work wants to convey is the folding. So when proximate others like daughters or potential other loved ones are vulnerable to this gender disparity norms, men are physically and socially emotionally embedded in this social collectivity of those who are vulnerable. And this will actually nudge men to do something to make a behavioral change that benefits women en large. So our suggestion that can taken from our work is that those seeking to cultivate a more gender egalitarian economy may benefit highlighting the personal stakes and responsibilities of those male leaders in helping building a gender e society for their loved ones rather than the woman in general. So we need to highlight these personal stakes, how they can help their future loved ones to have a better chance in the society.

Ashley K:        Alright, Z and Lucia, I know we covered a lot, but is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners about your work, maybe next steps or even future studies that’ll build off your findings?

Lucia Naldi:        We actually have a future study. Do you want to tell about it? Z?

Zhiyan Wu:        Yes. So we are actually doing a follow-up study now. We are actually using fatherhood of daughters as an instrument variable to study actually how gender equality in the boardroom can contribute to venture performance in a positive way and what other channels are actually underlying those positive kind of influence.

Lucia Naldi:        So now we show we are going to look at whether having more women on the board or having more women in this venture is this can beside being very important for equality in general, if it’s also economically good for these firms. And the preliminary findings that we are still working on, they seem to show that. So we are very happy about this.

Ashley K:        Well, you’ll have to keep me posted and I’ll have you back on the podcast to talk about that study’s results too. Again, thank you both so much.

Zhiyan Wu:        Thank you for having us, Ashley. Great to talk with you.

Lucia Naldi:        Thank you, Ashley.