Apparently, Men With Daughters Make Better Business Decisions
Here's a fun fact: Dads with daughters are better businessmen, according to a new study.
Researchers at Harvard recently looked at venture capital firms and discovered that capitalists with daughters are more likely to hire women, and those firms with more women are more likely to make more money.
"Subtle debiasing can have real effects," Paul Gompers, a professor at Harvard Business School, told The Huffington Post.
For the study, Gompers and his research partner, Sophie Wang, a Ph.D. student, made a list of VC firms and VC-backed startups going back to 1990. They then sent out email surveys to ask about senior partners and the gender of their children. From the 1,400 responses they received, they were able to conclude that having a daughter increased the likelihood of hiring a female investor by 24 percent, proving that the "daughter effect" is real. The "daughter firms" also saw three percent more returns on their investments.
Unfortunately, the VC world is still notoriously male (and so are the projects they fund). In previous research, Gompers has found that 75 percent of VC firms have never had a single female partner. Ouch. But this is definitive proof (not that any woman anywhere needed it) that there are advantages to having more women around. Gompers, a father of three, was partially inspired by the struggles his own daughters have faced with sexism at work.
"The more exposure we have to others who are different from us, the more we become debiased," Gompers told The Huffington Post. "Watching their struggles and issues, especially my 25-year-old who is working in a venture backed enterprise software company in New York City has created insights that are certainly dependent upon having daughters."
This is just the latest research to confirm that dads with daughters are a step ahead in the business world: a 2015 study showed that CEOs with daughters spend more time on social causes, and a 2014 paper revealed that judges with daughters tend to rule more favorably toward women's issues.
Daughters: paving the way to a more equal future (hopefully).
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