The daughters of CEOs have an impact on the pro-female company policy

Girl and Working Father Holding Hands --- Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

The group of scientists from Denmark and USA made recently an analysis of the impact the daughters of male CEOs have on their father’s attitude towards gender policy in their companies. Their assumption was, that despite the evident progress towards reducing gender differences in education and workforce in the last decades, the “unequal pay for equal work” persists and women’s wages are steadily 9% to 18% behind men’s wages for comparable work. There are many reasons for it, but not all potential factors influencing this fact have been investigated. One of them is namely the topic of the research: the potential influence of a chief executive officer (CEO) on a firm’s gender-related wage policies. The experiment was made based on the observations of the employees, CEOs, and families of CEOs in Danish firms – and the results of this research was astonishing.

We argue that CEOs’ concepts of fairness and attitudes about gender in the workplace will impact a firm’s gender-related wage policies, and that these attitudes are influenced by the gender of CEOs’ children. Specifically, based on research showing that daughters influence fathers to adopt more feminist attitudes and behaviors (…) we hypothesize that having daughters prompts male CEOs to implement wage policies that ultimately increase the wages of female employees relative to those of male employees. We find strong confirmatory evidence for this hypothesis. 

Read the full raport below or at the website of Columbia Business School.