A new study reveals why some men may be more generous when conducting business and contributing to charity than others, and the reason may surprise you.
In "Fatherhood and Managerial Style: How a Male CEO's Children Affect the Wages of His Employees," new evidence suggests that fatherhood has a profound effect on the values of men and their willingness to be generous, if the children are female, that is, the New York Times reports.
Researchers Michael Dahl, Cristian Dezso and David Gaddis Ross explored what drives wealthy men to give more money to employees through wages or to charities. They examined the amount of money chief executives paid their employees at more than 10,00 Danish companies and found that changes in pay for employees differed after men became fathers.
On average, after chief executives became fathers, they paid about $100 less in annual compensation per employee. They wrote that a chief executive often aims to claim "a firm's resources for themselves and their growing family, at the expense of their employees," according to the Daily Mail.
But there's a twist. Researchers discovered that the figure they paid employees changed depending on the gender of their child.
Chief exeuctives reduced wages for employees after having a son, but after a having a daughter, wages increased. The researchers hypothesized the having a daughter brought out fathers' caretaking tendencies, provoking them to soften and become more gentle and empathetic. Previous research suggests that American legislators with daughters are more likely to vote more liberally.
"A father takes on some of the preferences of his female offspring," argued the researchers Andrew Oswald at the University of Warwick and Nattavudh Powdthavee, then at the University of York, who found that the same tends to be true of British men.
In addition, social scientists believe that empathetic qualities of girls tend to rub off on their brothers. Psychologist Alice Eagly of Northwestern University demonstrated, for instance, that women tend to do more giving and helping in close relationships than men.
In a a series of studies led by psychologist Professor Paul Van Lange at the Free University in Amsterdam, 600 participants were asked to make choices about sharing a sum of money with a stranger they would never see again. The givers were 40 percent more likely to have sisters than those who made more self-serving choices.
