"daughters and left-wing voting"

if you were listening to the panel today on radio nz, you would have heard a little item towards the end about research which shows that "having daughters makes people more likely to vote for left-wing political parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party." thanx to the wonders of google, i've found the original research paper, should you wish to wade through the whole thing.

some of the literature review was quite interesting:

• support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters (and particularly for fathers)
• people who parent only daughters are more likely to hold feminist views (for example, to favor affirmative action)
• congressmen with female children tend to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues such as teen access to contraceptives
• the gender of children appears to affect both labor supply decisions and parents’ attitudes to their own roles in the family
• the single most important concern to males is that of low taxes. For females, by contrast, it is the quality of the National Health Service

as to their main thesis, the research data came from great britain, and they have many graphs and tables which i will leave for you to assess. sue bradford was a guest on the panel, and totally pooh-poohed the findings, on the basis that she is a parent of four sons, and that other green MPs also have sons.

there is the fact though, that women are more likely to vote left than men. the authors of the research give the following reason for this:

because by assumption
• there is pay discrimination against women, and
• females derive greater utility from public goods like community safety,
it transpires that unmarried women are intrinsically more left-wing than unmarried men. When compared to males, women prefer a larger supply of the public good and a greater tax rate on income: the reason is that their marginal utility from the first is relatively high and the tax penalty they face from the latter relatively low.

in other words, because women are lower paid, they are less likely to benefit from tax cuts but more likely to benefit from social services. i'm a mother of daughters, but i was already a strong lefty from my university days. i can't imagine that my views on (for example) social justice and equal opportunity would have changed if i'd had sons.

so, i'm not sure if i agree with this overall, and would be interested to hear the experiences of others.