When men raise daughters: changing gender norms through fatherhood.

The objective of this project is to conduct exploratory work for designing an intervention aiming at modifying men’s gender norms. Research shows that having daughters rather than sons may alter attitudes towards gender roles. We would like to understand if the experience of parenting daughters provides a unique, and not yet fully exploited opportunity, to implement gender awareness workshops with fathers on how to expand their daughters’ prospects in terms of education and labor outcomes. We will conduct a survey and qualitative research on different groups of fathers, considering low and high-educated parents, as well as fathers of daughters in preschool years and late adolescence. This will provide guidelines for the design of a potential intervention that considers heterogenous degrees of malleability in gender norms according to different socioeconomic strata and life stages. The field work will gather information on fathers’ attitudes towards gender roles, aspirations related to their daughters’ education and career, fathers’ time allocation to childcare and domestic chores, and childrearing practices that could potentially affect the future trajectories of their daughters. Additionally, we will talk to potential implementation partners, such as organizations working on gender issues and educational institutions. Overall, our results will provide guidelines for the design of a pilot for an RCT that aims to modify gender norms embedded in parenting practices by leveraging the potential sensitization of men when parenting daughters.