Fathers whose first child is a girl tend to have more egalitarian views about gender roles and support policies that promote women’s rights. Recent research published in quarterly public opinion We suggest that this shift occurs even in culturally conservative countries where gender inequality remains prevalent. The findings provide evidence that daughters’ parenting experiences can change parents’ political attitudes toward specific social issues.
Political scientists often study how families share and pass on beliefs. This process is known as political socialization. Traditionally, experts have viewed this as a top-down process in which parents transmit their political and social views to their children. Recent research suggests that the opposite process may occur, as children can influence their parents’ beliefs through their unique life experiences and challenges.
Researchers Ona Chiba and Yoshikuni Ono wanted to explore this dynamic. “What I found particularly interesting is that political socialization is often studied as something that flows from parents to children, but the results of this study suggest that children can also influence their parents’ political attitudes,” explained Ono, a professor in Waseda University’s Department of Political Science and Economics.
One famous example of this reverse influence is the first daughter effect. This concept represents a natural experiment in which researchers compare fathers whose first child is a girl with fathers whose first child is a boy. Assuming that the gender of the firstborn is random, subsequent large differences in fathers’ political views may be related to their experiences in raising their daughters. Previous research in Western democracies has shown that fathers of first-born daughters are more likely to support gender equality.
Chiba and Ono sought to determine whether a culturally progressive environment is required for the effect to take hold. “I have long been interested in how gender shapes voters’ political attitudes and behavior, and 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 influences a father’s political attitudes is already being considered in countries such as the United States. “We wanted to investigate whether a similar pattern is observed in Japan,” Ono said. “This project began when my co-author, Ona Chiba, discovered a large-scale Japanese social survey that asked voters about the gender of their children. This allowed us to examine this question empirically.”
Although Japan is characterized by a stable democratic government, it still suffers from high levels of gender inequality. For example, women in Japan face large pay disparities and hold a very small percentage of seats in the national government. Traditional expectations regarding the division of roles between men and women also remain strong in Japanese society.
In other East Asian countries, fertility sex ratios have been manipulated by cultures that favor sons. In Japan, the ratio of boys to girls at birth has remained completely stable for more than a century. This stability means that the gender of the first child in a Japanese family is naturally random. This randomness provides researchers with an ideal environment to test the first-born effect without the data being skewed by parents’ choice of their child’s gender.
To explore this question, Chiba and Ono analyzed data from Japan’s General Social Survey. This is a large-scale survey of Japanese adults representative of the national population, conducted every two years. Participants will complete an in-person interview and complete a self-administered questionnaire. The researchers examined survey responses collected between 2000 and 2018, with a particular focus on male respondents who had at least one child.
Depending on the survey year, sample sizes of these fathers ranged from approximately 250 to more than 1,500. In this group, 46.8 percent of the men had an eldest daughter and 53.2 percent had an eldest son. The researchers then compared these two groups across a variety of research questions related to gender, politics, and social policy.
To measure gender-related attitudes, the survey asked fathers to rate their agreement with traditional gender roles. There was a question about whether a husband’s job is to earn money and a wife’s job is to take care of the house. The survey also asked about legal reforms. This included a major debate in Japan involving a law requiring married couples to share a single surname (usually defaulting 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 and support for female monarchs. The latter would allow a child born to a female member of the imperial family to become emperor, marking a major shift from Japan’s patriarchal traditions.
The researchers also examined opinions on two policies that are deeply tied to women’s well-being in Japan. The first is 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 prevention, as women in Japan report higher fear of crime and are more likely to be victims of certain crimes.
This data provides evidence that the eldest daughter effect exists in Japan. Fathers of first-born daughters were significantly more likely to reject traditional gender roles than fathers of first-born children. There was also a strong tendency to support legal reform that would allow married couples to have separate surnames.
The eldest daughter’s father also expressed strong support for the female line of succession in Japan’s royal line. Additionally, these fathers were more likely to support increased government spending on income redistribution and crime prevention. The only major indicator that did not show a significant difference was general support for female monarchs, which did not reach statistical significance.
Ono said these results met his general expectations. “This finding was not entirely surprising in the sense that it was pretty much in line with what would be expected, but it was still very interesting,” Ono told Cypost. “Of course, these are average trends; not all fathers change this way, and the estimated effects are not overwhelmingly large.”
The existence of these changes in traditional societies is noteworthy, even if the scale of the impact is not large. “In Japan, where the gender gap in politics remains wide and the society is often described as socially conservative, we see a similar pattern to that reported in some Western contexts: fathers whose first child is a daughter tend to have more egalitarian views on gender roles than fathers whose first child is a son,” Ono said.
According to Ono, fathers of daughters are more likely to reject traditional gender roles and support reforms related to gender equality. “While many fathers of daughters may not consciously think that their daughters will change their political views, our findings suggest that the experience of raising daughters may increase fathers’ awareness of gender equality,” Ono said.
To confirm that these attitude changes were indeed gender-related, the researchers tested a second set of survey questions. These placebo questions address topics unrelated to gender equality, meaning that the answers should not be influenced by the child’s gender. 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. The birth of a first daughter does not necessarily make fathers more liberal in general or change their views on immigration. The study also examined attitudes toward homosexuality. The researchers found no effect there either, but this suggests that changes in fathers’ attitudes are specifically focused on women’s rights and opportunities.
“One important limitation is that the differences we are observing are concentrated in attitudes about gender equality,” Ono said. “We found no clear differences in broader political ideology or attitudes on issues such as national security policy.”
The reader might think that any birth order or number of daughters would produce similar changes in attitude. “Another important point is that our study mainly identifies the effect of the gender of the first child,” Ono says. “It doesn’t fully capture the impact of the broader experience of having a daughter.”
Families often choose whether to have more children based on the gender of their previous children. This means that looking at the entire family structure can skew the data and make it difficult to trace direct causes. “Whether parents start parenting with a daughter or a son may be particularly important, 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 this study only collected personal opinions and attitudes at a specific point in time. The data cannot show whether these changes in beliefs translate into actual changes in behavior. For example, the study did not measure whether these fathers vote differently or actively participate in political advocacy in support of women’s rights.
Ono hopes to address some of these unknown factors in future research. Ono said, “I would like to continue examining how gender influences voters’ political attitudes and actions.” “Experimental research can visualize how men and women sometimes perceive politics differently, react differently, and act differently even under the same political system.”
The authors also want to take a closer look at how households are run. “I also want to continue researching how family structure and family experiences shape political behavior and attitudes,” Ono said. “More broadly, we are interested in identifying how gendered patterns of behavior under the same institutional conditions can influence political outcomes such as candidate emergence, electoral competition, and election outcomes.”
On the other hand, our findings suggest that family experiences may act as a subtle mechanism to promote gender equality. “One of the broader implications of this study is that politics is connected to everyday life in ways that people don’t necessarily realize,” Ono said.
Ono added that political attitudes are shaped not only by institutions, economic circumstances and formal education, but also by experiences within the family. “In this sense, family relationships may be one of the important channels through which social attitudes change over time,” Ono says.
The study, “Do daughters change their fathers? Evidence of the first-born effect in Japan,” was written by Ona Chiba and Yoshikuni Ono.
