Rowing with and against the flow: Fatherhood of daughters and perception about women

Assi Okara, Massimiliano Tani and Linguère Mously Mbaye

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2025, vol. 118, issue C

Abstract: We investigate whether having a daughter in a patriarchal society gives fathers a reason to reject prevailing social norms favouring gender discrimination against women. In particular, we develop a utility (rather than behavioural) model to frame the problem and derive hypotheses that can be empirically tested using cross-sectional data from the Senegal 2023 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). We find that fathering daughters can positively influence men’s attitudes toward gender equity. In particular, men with daughters exhibit more positive attitudes toward women compared to their peers without daughters. This finding is robust across various sub-samples, particularly regarding violence-related outcome variables.

Keywords: Men; Daughters; Perception about women; Gender norms; Utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 J16 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804325000989
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:118:y:2025:i:c:s2214804325000989

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2025.102434

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().