Daughters Rule

Posted on March 7, 2011

Everyone knows that men, on average, earn more than women. Indeed, says David Gaddis Ross, a management professor at Columbia Business School, women worldwide earn “9% to 18% less than men who have the same job description and equivalent education and experience.”

However, Ross, along with colleagues Michael Dahl of Aalborg University in Denmark and Christian Dezso of the University of Maryland, decided to study what happened to that gap when male CEOs had a daughter. They chose Denmark as their research site because it is considered an egalitarian society and because the Danish government keeps detailed statistics on the business community, including individual companies, as Ross explains in an article on the Columbia Business School website.

The researchers found that a short while after the daughters were born, the gender wage gap at their firms decreased, yet the birth of a son had no impact on that gap. In addition, “first daughters who were also the firstborn children of a CEO had a bigger effect than subsequent daughters, decreasing the gap by almost 3%. First daughters who were not the firstborn children had a less dramatic but still significant effect, closing the gap by 0.8%. The overall reduction in the gender wage gap was 0.5%.”

The gap was reduced the most at small firms — those with less than 50 employees — which the researchers say is because “CEOs at smaller firms are typically more directly involved in making decisions that affect the pay of individual workers than CEOs at much larger firms.” What had an even more significant impact was the education level of the women employees. Since most CEOs went to college, Ross says in the article, they would probably expect their daughters to do the same. These CEOS would then “be more apt to see their more educated women employees as resembling a possible future incarnation of their daughters.”

According to Wharton management professor Stewart Friedman, “What is interesting about this finding, which doesn’t seem surprising, is how it shows that business issues can really hit home when they are personal. For years, I have observed anecdotally that male CEOs are more likely to adopt family- and women-friendly policies when they have some direct experience as fathers that compels them” to see the discrimination their daughters can face in the business world.

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  • Anonymous

    Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. This may or may not reflect a higher percentage of women staying at home than in the previous decade. But if the percentage is higher, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs, and so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

    As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband.

    If millions of wives can accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) — all of which lower women’s average pay. They can do this because they are supported by a husband who must earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry — which is how MEN help create the wage gap. (If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.)

    See “A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu

    By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tej-Sharma/1001565838 Tej Sharma

    What about the impact of having mothers? I think most CEOs have them too. I guess moms would have greater impact if the CEOs were infants and toddlers. Maybe that is why moms really hate seeing their kids grow up.