Dads who avoid washing the dishes and doing the laundry at home tend to raise “girlie girls,” daughters who prefer dolls and aspire to be housewives, new research reveals.

Daughters are more likely to believe they can grow up to work outside the home if their fathers have egalitarian attitudes about child care, cooking and cleaning the house and actually take on those jobs, said University of B.C. psychologist Toni Schmader, who presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology last week.

“You have to talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to gender stereotypes,” said Schmader. “And what dad says and does matters.”

Rather than emulating the behaviour of fathers who are focused on paid work, girls appear to align their attitudes about male and female gender roles to “complement” their father’s behaviour, Schmader said.

“Girls may be looking at their father not as a model for who they could be, but as a model for who they could be with [as a spouse],” Schmader said.

Schmader’s research team did computer-based questionnaires with more than 360 elementary school children and at least one parent for each, using the Living Lab at Science World.

While women are entering the workplace in greater numbers than ever, the division of labour at home has been slow to change, said Schmader.

“Women continue to have a difficult time juggling a successful career alongside a family life. We still haven’t seen the cultural shift in what we consider appropriate for men to do in the home and what we consider appropriate for women.”

Schmader wanted to know why egalitarian attitudes aren’t fully reflected in people’s behaviour, especially in children.

She found that children express beliefs about gender roles that are similar to those of their mother, which is well-established by past research.

But the new study revealed a strong association between the fathers’ beliefs and behaviours and their daughters’ preferences in toys and entertainment and their aspiration to take on a career.

“Daughters have more flexible ideas of what their future options to the degree that their dads have more egalitarian beliefs about men and women,” she said.

Her results hinted at how “girlie girls” are made and the unique role fathers have in shaping their daughters belief systems.

Fathers who help out with the child care, cooking and cleaning tend to have daughters who are less likely to choose stereotypically feminine toys and pastimes, Schmader found. They are as likely to play with a Transformer as they are to play Barbies.”

The findings raise the possibility that otherwise egalitarian couples who make conscious, rational choices about dividing household chores along traditional lines could be modelling behaviour that reinforces outdated stereotypes that their daughters will adopt.

The study did not show a similar effect by fathers on boys’ beliefs and preferences.

rshore@vancouversun.com