Friday Notes, February 9, 2024
Dear Friends —
According to social and behavioral scientists, there are four ways a father affects a daughter’s worldview, and one way a daughter affects a father’s. If you are a daughter or a father of one, you might say there are infinite mutual influences. But social scientists say there are four and one, so we’ll go with that.
[A disclaimer: Like much in social science, everything I say below carries a lot of sweeping generalizations about fathers being present in a nuclear family, about maternal and paternal roles, and about heterosexuality. Sincere apologies for the lack of nuance.]
Fathers affect daughters’ relationships with men by being the first significant male figures in a girls’ lives. Through the reliability and strength of the relationship between a girl and her father, and through what a girl observes in her parents’ bond, a set of expectations gets established early. Those play out much later, influencing a woman’s choice of her own partner. While much of the research has looked at the negative side of this — how having an absent or abusive father increases the risk for future romantic relationships — the positive side is equally salient: if your father is present and loving, you face more favorable odds of ending up in a healthy, loving partnership.
Fathers affect daughters’ self-confidence and ability to manage adversity. When they encourage risk-taking and express a belief in their daughters’ ability to make good choices and reach their goals, fathers have a powerful influence on girls’ mental health and belief in their own abilities. The impact of fathers on daughters is particularly profound around adolescence, when fathers’ impulses to protect girls from new risks and early sexual experiences can undermine a girls’ sense of self-efficacy and self-worth. In contrast, it is around the teenage years when fathers may encourage their daughters in sports and other types of competition, both of which can reinforce an “I can do it” spirit. A father can support or undermine a teenage girl’s transition to independence. Dr. Linda Nielson, a scholar who wrote Father-Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research and Issues, says:
The overall effect of having a strong father-daughter relationship is it prepares the girl to become a teenager and a woman who is better able to deal with stress. . . . A father prepares his daughter for the road, rather than preparing the road for the daughter.
Fathers affect daughters’ aspirations about education and work life. Particularly when opportunities in non-traditional occupations are opening up for women from one generation to the next, fathers can offer a pathway into male-dominated sectors, and influence decisions about school and work. While mothers’ lives reflect the norms of their era, fathers’ experiences in the workforce can inform their daughters about a broader set of possible futures: what it looks like to be a mechanic or a small business owner, how much money they can make, how much financial independence they might have.
As they do for their sons, fathers can provide guidance and connections to networks for their daughters. In the multi-country study Breaking Barriers: Female Entrepreneurs Who Cross Over to Male-dominated Sectors, researchers found that early exposure to fathers’ (or other male role models’) occupations systematically affected the likelihood of women entering nontraditional employment. Sociologists call this “transmission of occupation-specific human capital” and have documented it in the United States in recent years, but you can just call it a leg up. Fathers can give their daughters a leg up — and that assist may have a more powerful impact on girls’ lives than on sons’. (Shout out to Russ & Daughters, the first American business to have “& Daughters” in its name, starting in 1933.)
A father can affect his daughter’s experiences and worldview indirectly, as well, as a result of the type of partnership he has with the girl’s mother. Mothers often have the primary influence over children’s health, nutrition, school completion, and many other determinants of a person’s life chances. (It is for that reason that so much of public policy and social programs are oriented toward moms.) But mothers’ ability to create a home environment in which children thrive is affected in many ways by the behavior and financial contributions of the men in their lives.
And how do daughters affect their fathers? When a man has daughters, and particularly when the first-born is a girl, he tends to become a stronger supporter of equal rights for girls and women. The empathy he feels for his own daughter combined with his observation of gender bias she encounters can turn him into a more committed advocate for the rights of all women. As researcher Jill Greenlee said:
It appears there’s something about entering fatherhood with a female child that makes men think about gender in a different way. Perhaps they recognize gender discrimination for the first time. Or it may be they develop new insights into the ways that gender shapes opportunities differently for girls.
This correlation can translate from the personal to the political. In “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues,” Ebonya Washington studied representatives’ voting patterns in a Clinton-era Congress. She found that politicians were more likely to vote liberally on women’s issues, especially reproductive rights, if they had more daughters (relative to the total number of children in the family). Other studies have found that male CEOs with daughters are generally more aware of the harms of employment discrimination against women and other gender bias in the workplace — and more likely to do something about it. According to researcher Zhiyan Wu:
The CEOs that we studied spoke to us about how their corporate decisions have changed after their first-hand learnings from their growing daughters about the constraints women face. They recognized that those constraints had escaped from their attention till their daughters became potentially vulnerable to those constraints in their adolescence and early adulthood.
Fathers matter to daughters. Daughters matter to fathers.
* * *
I have been thinking about all of this over the past few weeks, as my own father, Gilbert Levine, approached his last days. He passed away this week at the age of 96.
There are an uncountable number of ways in which my life was shaped for the better by my father’s unqualified love, encouragement, guidance, and partnership with my mother during their marriage of 73 years. I am grateful beyond words.
My dad’s obituary is here.
A blog I wrote about how global development shifted over our generations is here.
An article we co-authored is here.
-Ruth