Managers' Gender Attitudes and the Gender Gap

Abstract: Do managers' gender attitudes shape gender-gaps within firms? To answer this question, we build on sociological work showing that a child's gender influences parental attitudes and behavior towards women, and we extend it to the context of human resource management. Using social-security data from Denmark we exploit birth events within manager-establishment spells and show that female employees working in establishments where male managers parent an additional daughter, as opposed to a son, experience an improvement in labor outcomes. In particular, we find that the female earnings ratio increases by 2.5% and the share of female employment increases by 2.3% and that these effects are stronger for the birth of the first daughter (4.4% and 2.9% respectively). These results are driven by a higher propensity to hire women with more education, who work full time, and who are the establishment's top earners. To shed light on the mechanisms behind the link between fathering a daughter and managers' gender attitudes, we further exploit the timing of the estimated results. We find that the effects on female relative earnings and employment kick in right after the birth event, and persist in the following years, consistently with a change in preferences of managers. In addition to a change in preferences, we provide suggestive evidence for a change in managers' beliefs about women as, relying on cross-sectional variation, we find that the positive effects on female earnings and employment are increasing in the age of the first daughter. Finally, as we do not find any effect of fathering a daughter on firms' performance, we conclude that there is no equity-efficiency trade-off in our setting.