Daddy’s girl?

That is the title of a new paper by Maddelena Ronchi and Nina Smith:

We study the role of managers’ gender attitudes in shaping gender inequality within the workplace. Using Danish registry data, we exploit the birth of a daughter as opposed to a son as a plausibly exogeneous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes and compare within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the manager’s newborn gender. We find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4% and 2.9% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to replace male workers by hiring women with comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. In line with managers’ ability to substitute men with comparable women, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Finally, we find evidence of rapid behavioral responses which intensify over time, suggesting that both salience and direct exposure to themes of gender equality contribute to our results.

Note that Ronchi is on the job market this year.  Via Jennifer Doleac.  I am not sure of the last part of that last sentence (are other mechanisms possible?  Maybe these fathers simply become better at understanding female talent?), but still this is an interesting result.