Study: Do Daughters Help Ease Gender Pay Gap? (Columbia Business School, 2011, Ross, Dahl, Deszo)
Finding: The wage gap decreases measurably when a male CEO has daughters.
InPower Insight: Know that people’s personal experiences – including yours – effect their hiring practices.
Summary:
In a new study, researchers found that wage gaps between male and females decrease when male CEOs have daughters. When male CEO’s have daughters, the wage gap was decreased by .5 percentage points. If their first borns were girls, the closure was by almost 3%.
This “daughter effect” does not show up when the CEO has no daughters. No changes occurred when CEOs had sons or when women had children. The data suggests that having a daughter could make male CEOs more sensitive to gender issues.
“The researchers also found that this “daughter effect” was strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which could be because chiefs of smaller firms are typically more directly involved in individual pay decisions than CEOs of much larger firms.” Reported in the Wall Street Journal 3/2011
Career Coaching Tip: Understand that personal bias has a direct impact on the organizational culture you are joining (or already working in). This will be the case no matter where you work, so don’t fight it – understand it. Realize that you may face less unconscious discrimintation where the people you work with have personal lives that help them relate to you. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a job where you have different experiences than you do, but in those situations be very discriminating in your judgement about whether you think they can appreciate you – and you them. Where we have different life experience, diversity is high and we can learn a lot from each other, but it has to be a conscious effort.
Keywords: wage gap, pay gap, male ceo, daughter effect
