The first-daughter effect: How raising girls changes fathers’ political views in Japan

Fathers whose first child is a girl tend to develop more equal views on gender roles and support policies that promote women’s rights. A recent study published in Public Opinion Quarterly suggests this shift happens even in culturally conservative countries where gender inequality remains widespread. The findings provide evidence that the experience of raising daughters can reshape a parent’s political attitudes on specific social issues.

Political scientists often study how families share and pass down beliefs. This process is known as political socialization. Traditionally, experts viewed this as a top-down process where parents pass their political and social views down to their children. Recent research suggests a reverse process can also happen, as children can influence their parents’ beliefs through their own unique life experiences and challenges.

Researchers Daina Chiba and Yoshikuni Ono wanted to explore this dynamic. “What I found especially interesting is that political socialization is often studied as something that flows from parents to children, but our results suggest that children can also influence their parents’ political attitudes,” explained Ono, a professor of political science and economics at Waseda University.

One famous example of this reverse influence is the first-daughter effect. This concept describes a natural experiment where researchers compare fathers whose first child is a girl to fathers whose first child is a boy. Assuming the sex of a firstborn child is random, any major differences in the fathers’ later political views can likely be tied to the experience of raising a daughter. Past research in Western democracies suggests that fathers with firstborn daughters often become more supportive of gender equality.

Chiba and Ono sought to find out whether the effect requires a culturally progressive environment to take root. “I have long been interested in how gender shapes voters’ political attitudes and behavior, and I have conducted various studies on this topic in Japan, the United States, and other contexts,” Ono said.

Ono explained that the question of whether a child’s gender affects a father’s political attitudes had already been examined in countries like the United States. “We wanted to investigate whether a similar pattern could be observed in Japan,” Ono said. “This project began when my coauthor, Daina Chiba, found a large-scale Japanese social survey that asked voters about the gender of their children, which allowed us to examine this question empirically.”

Japan features a stable democratic government but still struggles with high levels of gender inequality. For instance, Japanese women face significant wage gaps and hold a very small percentage of seats in the national government. Traditional expectations surrounding the division of labor between men and women also remain strong in Japanese society.

In some other East Asian countries, a cultural preference for sons has led to manipulated birth sex ratios. In Japan, the ratio of boys to girls at birth has remained completely stable for over a century. This stability means the sex of a Japanese family’s first child is naturally random. This randomness provides researchers with an ideal environment to test the first-daughter effect without the data being skewed by parents choosing their child’s sex.

To explore this question, Chiba and Ono analyzed data from the Japanese General Social Survey. This is a large survey of adults in Japan that represents the national population and is conducted every two years. Participants complete face-to-face interviews and fill out self-administered questionnaires. The researchers looked at survey responses collected between 2000 and 2018, specifically focusing on male respondents who had at least one child.

Depending on the survey year, the sample sizes of these fathers ranged from about 250 to over 1,500. In this group, 46.8 percent of the men had a firstborn daughter, while 53.2 percent had a firstborn son. The researchers then compared these two groups across a variety of survey questions related to gender, politics, and social policies.

To measure gender-related attitudes, the survey asked fathers to rate their agreement with traditional gender roles. One question asked if a husband’s job is to earn money while a wife’s job is to look after the home. The survey also asked about legal reforms. This included a major debate in Japan involving a law that requires married couples to share a single family surname, which usually defaults to the husband’s name.

Another cultural issue involves whether women should be allowed to inherit the Japanese throne. The researchers measured support for female monarchs as well as support for female-line monarchs. The latter would allow children born to female royal family members to become emperor, representing a massive shift away from Japanese patriarchal traditions.

The researchers also examined opinions on two policies that are heavily tied to women’s well-being in Japan. The first was government-led income redistribution. Single-parent households in Japan are overwhelmingly headed by women, and these households face very high rates of relative poverty. The second policy was government spending on crime control, as women in Japan report higher fears of crime and are more likely to be victims of certain offenses.

The data provides evidence that the first-daughter effect is present in Japan. Fathers with firstborn daughters were significantly more likely to reject traditional gender roles than fathers with firstborn sons. They were also more likely to support legal changes that would allow married couples to keep separate surnames.

Fathers of firstborn daughters also showed stronger support for allowing the Japanese royal lineage to pass through the female line. Additionally, these fathers were more likely to support income redistribution and increased government spending on crime prevention. The only primary measure that did not show a major difference was general support for female monarchs, which did not reach statistical significance.

Ono noted that these results met his general expectations. “The findings were not entirely surprising, in the sense that they were broadly consistent with what one might expect, but they were still very interesting,” Ono told PsyPost. “Of course, these are average tendencies; not every father changes in this way, and the estimated effects are not overwhelmingly large.”

Even with modest effect sizes, the presence of these changes in a traditional society is notable. “Even in Japan, where gender gaps in politics remain large and society is often described as socially conservative, we find a pattern similar to that reported in some Western contexts: fathers whose first child is a daughter tend to hold more egalitarian views on gender roles than fathers whose first child is a son,” Ono said.

According to Ono, fathers with daughters are more likely to reject traditional gender-role divisions and to support gender-equality-related reforms. “Many fathers with daughters may not consciously think of their daughters as changing their political views, but our findings suggest that the experience of raising a daughter may increase fathers’ awareness of gender equality,” Ono said.

To ensure these attitude changes were actually about gender, the researchers tested a second set of survey questions. These placebo questions covered topics unrelated to gender equality, meaning the answers should not be affected by the sex of a person’s child. The topics included general liberal or conservative ideology, support for the Liberal Democratic Party, views on immigration, and opinions on national security.

The researchers found no differences between the two groups of fathers on these unrelated topics. Having a firstborn daughter did not make a father more generally liberal or change his views on immigration. The study also looked at attitudes toward homosexuality. The researchers found no effect there either, which suggests the fathers’ attitude changes are specifically focused on the rights and opportunities of women.

“One important limitation is that the differences we observe are concentrated in attitudes related to gender equality,” Ono said. “We did not find clear differences in broader political ideology or in attitudes toward issues such as national security policy.”

Readers might assume that having any number of daughters at any birth order would produce the same attitude changes. “Another important point is that our study mainly identifies the effect of the gender of the first child,” Ono said. “It does not capture the full effect of the broader experience of having daughters.”

Families often make choices about having more children based on the sex of their previous children. This means looking at total family makeup can skew the data and make it harder to trace direct causes. “It may be especially important whether parents begin childrearing with a daughter or a son, but our study cannot fully answer what happens when the second child is a daughter, or when parents have multiple daughters,” Ono said.

Another limitation is that the survey only captured personal opinions and attitudes at a specific point in time. The data cannot show whether these shifting beliefs lead to actual behavioral changes. For instance, the study does not measure if these fathers vote differently or actively participate in political advocacy to support women’s rights.

Ono hopes to address some of these unknown factors in future work. “I would like to continue examining how gender shapes voters’ political attitudes and behavior,” Ono said. “Experimental research can make visible the ways in which men and women sometimes perceive politics differently, respond differently, or behave differently under the same political institutions.”

The authors also want to look closer at how households operate. “I also hope to continue studying how family structure and family experiences shape political behavior and attitudes,” Ono said. “More broadly, I am interested in identifying how gendered patterns of behavior under the same institutional conditions may affect political outcomes, such as candidate emergence, electoral competition, and election results.”

In the meantime, the current findings suggest that family experiences can act as a subtle mechanism for promoting gender equality. “One broader implication of the study is that politics is connected to everyday life in ways that people may not always recognize,” Ono said.

Ono added that political attitudes are shaped not only by institutions, economic conditions, or formal education, but also by experiences within the family. “In this sense, family relationships may be one important pathway through which social attitudes gradually change,” Ono said.

The study, “Do Daughters Change Their Fathers? Evidence from the First-Daughter Effect in Japan,” was authored by Daina Chiba and Yoshikuni Ono.