There has been a lot of anecdotal discussion of how having daughters impacts the attitudes and actions of their fathers - a CEW colleague helpfully sent me a copy of an article that proves that this is so. And that the change in attitude and actions benefits women positively. See the title and synopsis below. I am happy to forward the full paper to anyone who is interested. I titled this "if you are a lawyer". Of course I could equally have used any particular profession or occupation but I think the role of the judiciary is so important at this point in the fight for gender economic equality. I am also interested if anyone is aware of similar research in the political arena or for GLBTI. I doubt the latter will exists as it is much harder data to access.

Identifying Judicial Empathy: Does Having Daughters Cause Judges to Rule forWomen’s Issues?

Adam N. Glynn Emory University Maya Sen Harvard University

In this article, we consider whether personal relationships can affect the way that judges decide cases. To do so, we leverage the natural experiment of a child’s gender to identify the effect of having daughters on the votes of judges. Using new data on the family lives of U.S. Courts of Appeals judges, we find that, conditional on the number of children a judge has, judges with daughters consistently vote in amore feminist fashion on gender issues than judges who have only sons. This result survives a number of robustness tests and appears to be driven primarily by Republican judges. More broadly, this result demonstrates that personal experiences influence how judges make decisions, and this is the first article to show that empathy may indeed be a component in how judges decide cases.