having daughters might make you more liberal

A recent paper by Ebonya Washington (Yale) in the American Economic Review considers whether congressmen & women who parent daughters tend to vote differently than otherwise similar representatives that father sons instead. Unlike many papers in economics, her abstract is easy to read:

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson's propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence.

How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers