Long before he had a tribe of children to call his own, actor Brad Pitt broke down in tears on primetime TV when talking about how much he wanted to have a daughter.
“Little girls, they just crush me — they break my heart,” he said.
Now with three daughters — and three sons — to call his own, Pitt has more than achieved his dream. He will also have had ample opportunity to experience the powerful influence that little girls have on their fathers: The most masculine man will learn to love pink, take part in endless games of dressing up and even bake fairy cakes if that’s what his little princess desires.
New research shows, however, that daughters have an even more profound effect on their daddies: Fathers, say Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick and Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the University of York, will shift their political allegiance for their daughters. Using research from the British Household Panel Survey, Oswald and Powdthavee found that the more daughters there are in a household, the more likely their father is to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat.
In an unpublished paper that has been submitted to an economics journal, the pair say: “This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing.”
The academics go on to speculate that left-wing families become so through a predominance of females down successive generations, as anecdotally evidenced by British actor Tony Booth [father of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie Blair] and his many daughters, or the late leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, and his three daughters.
The study showed that in the UK, compared with males, females tend to be more in favor of higher taxes to fund provision such as the country’s health service. Higher taxation also affects them less since they tend to be in a lower income bracket.
“As men acquire female children,” Oswald said, “those men gradually shift their political stance and become more sympathetic to the ‘female’ desire for a ... larger amount for the public good. They become more left-wing.”
“Similarly, a mother with sons becomes sympathetic to the ‘male’ case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods. Political feelings are much less independently chosen than people realize,” he said. “Children mold their parents. It’s so scientifically attractive because it’s out of the parents’ control — whether they have a boy or a girl.”
The researchers have been accused of propagating gender stereotypes and of perpetuating the idea that women go in for softer politics than men. But their work mirrors recent findings by US researchers who looked at the voting records of US congressmen before and after having children. In a joint paper, US sociologist Rebecca Warner from Oregon State University and the economist Ebonya Washington from Yale University found that support for policies designed to address gender equity was greater among parents with daughters. The result, they said, was particularly strong for fathers.
Because parents invest a significant amount of themselves in their children, the authors argue, the anticipated and actual struggles that offspring face and the public policies that tackle those begin to matter more to those parents.
They say that people who parent only daughters are more likely to hold feminist views, with congressmen who have female children tending to vote liberally on issues from reproductive rights and teenage access to contraceptives to flexibility for working families and education.
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