Daddy's Girl: How Daughters Shape Managerial Decisions and Gender Gaps

Abstract: Do managers’ gender attitudes affect gender gaps within the workplace? Building on previous work showing that parenting daughters affects fathers’ gender attitudes, we exploit birth events within firms and show that females’ relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% in firms where male managers experience the birth of their first daughter. These effects are driven by a change in the gender mix of new hires and by an increase in managers’ propensity to hire women with post-secondary education, who work full time, and who are high earners relative to the firm’s salary distribution. Finally, as we do not find any effect on firm performance, we conclude that the observed improvement in gender equality did not undermine firm efficiency.