You may have heard of the 'mighty girl effect' (also called the 'eldest daughter effect') - the idea that fathers whose eldest child is a daughter are less likely to support traditional gender norms, and have more progressive views. There are several studies that support the existence of this effect (see here or here for examples). However, less studied is when this effect occurs. Does the birth of a daughter have an immediate impact, or does it take time for fathers to change their views? And if it takes time for father's views to change, how long does it take?
This 2019 article by Mireia Borrell-Porta, Joan Costa-Font, and Julia Philipp (all London School of Economics and Political Science), published in the journal Oxford Economic Papers (open access), provides an initial answer. They used data from the British Household Panel Survey waves between 1991 and 2012, a sample of nearly 28,000 observations of over 11,000 parents (about 44 percent men). Their key measure was agreement with the statement "a husband’s job is to earn money; a wife’s job is to look after the home and family", initially measured on a five-point scale ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree", but in most analyses they use a binary version of the variable, set equal to one where the respondent strongly agreed, agreed, or neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement (thereby demonstrating some level of support for traditional gender roles).
Borrell-Porta et al. take advantage of the fact that the gender of a child is essentially random, and compare parents with at least one daughter in the household with those with no daughters. They then extend that analysis (which is similar to previous research) to consider the age of the oldest daughter (in three categories: 0 to 5 years; 6 to 10 years; and 11 to 18 years). The first set of results are well summarised in the simplest analysis, presented in Figure 1 of the paper:
Fathers with daughters are less likely to support traditional gender roles, but the results are less clear for mothers. So far, nothing so different from earlier work in this area. In the full analysis, separating daughters by age, Borrell-Porta et al. find that:
...fathers’ probability to support traditional gender norms declines by approximately three percentage points (8% change) when parenting primary school-aged daughters and by four percentage points (11% change) when parenting secondary school-aged daughters. In contrast, the effect on mothers’ attitudes is smaller and generally not statistically significant.
All of that is based on self-reported responses to the question, so Borrell-Porta et al. look deeper for behavioural change, specifically looking at whether fathers of daughters are less likely to be in a couple that follows a 'male breadwinner norm' (with the father working, and the mother not working). They find that:
Parenting pre-school daughters is associated with a higher probability to behave traditionally. However, parenting primary and secondary school-age daughters is associated with a lower likelihood to follow a traditional male breadwinner norm in which the man works and the woman does not work, and this result holds both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. In terms of effect size, FEs estimates... indicate that parenting daughters aged six to 10 reduces the probability of a traditional gender division of work by seven percentage points, and parenting daughters aged 11 or older reduces that probability by five percentage points. Compared to the baseline probability of following a traditional norm for those without daughters of 20.3%, this is a sizeable reduction of 36% and 25%, respectively.
So, being father to a daughter not only appears to change attitudes, but also behaviour, but only when those daughters reach school-age. Borrell-Porta et al. note that these results are consistent with exposure theory (which says that men develop or change their understanding of women's place in society when exposed to situations that make them more sympathetic - something that mothers would have already experienced, but fathers experience through their daughters), as well as identity theory (which says that the child's wellbeing enters into the parent's utility function - that is, the parent feels better off when the child is better off). Borrell-Porta et al. aren't able to tease apart those possible mechanisms underlying the results.
I find these studies interesting, but I think they raise as many questions as they answer. Fathers have had daughters for millenia. If each generation of fathers became less likely to support 'traditional' gender norms than the previous generation, by the amounts that these studies find, then the 'traditional' gender norms would have disappeared long ago. What is really missing here is an answer to the question of, why now? Is there something about modern times that facilitates this change? Are there certain pre-conditions that need to be in place before daughters can have an appreciable impact on the attitudes and behaviours of their fathers? Do these results hold across cultures that are less progressive than the UK and the US (where the studies that I have seen have been based)? These are all questions that would be interesting to answer, and give us a better understanding of how daughters contribute to the breakdown of fathers' support for traditional gender norms.
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