For Ladies By Ladies - Women Follow Fathers' Career Paths, Janitors' Daughters Screwed |

Mar 17 2009

Women Follow Fathers’ Career Paths, Janitors’ Daughters Screwed

Published by Jennifer at 6:42 am under Off the Press

I always used to think of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day as the liberal but less fun version of the father-daughter dance. Certainly those songs like “Butterfly Kisses” were kind of annoying, but they were a lot less annoying than the photocopier. And there was punch at the dance.

A new study shows, though, that Bring Your Daughter to Work Day may have been more effective than previously thought. Women are now three times as likely to follow their fathers’ career paths than a century ago.

Live Science reports:

Just under 6 percent of women born from 1909 to 1915 worked in their father’s occupation, while around 20 percent of women born in the mid-1970s do so (they are in their early 30s now), the researchers found.

Some of this increase is just a result of women’s increased participation in the work force — women’s labor force participation has tripled in the past century.

However, economists Melinda Morrill of North Carolina State University and Judith Hellerstein of the University of Maryland, College Park, also were able to statistically pull out the impact of dad’s work on a daughter’s career choice.

They found that a significant amount of the probability that a woman will follow in her father’s occupational footsteps can be attributed just to the increased transmission of “occupation-specific human capital” between fathers and daughters…

Human capital just refers to skills and experiences that help someone career-wise. Here are some of the possible ways a dad could pass this to his daughter, Hellerstein and Morrill say: teaching a daughter his trade; paying for his daughter to be trained in his trade; spending more time with his daughter and thereby showing the value of working in his field; making referrals to help his daughter get a job or training for a job; giving a daughter a job at his office or company to see if she likes it.

It’s sort of a relief to know that more fathers are teaching their daughters about their professions and giving them the nepotistic boosts sons have been getting for years. More importantly, however, that women view their fathers’ professional accomplishments as attainable speaks volumes about the strides that have been made in gender equality. You go, Sofia Coppola!