UMass Amherst Study: Afghan Fathers with Daughters More Likely to Support Gender Equality
As the three-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan approaches, researchers from the Human Security Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst today published a study showing that while there is broad support for women’s human rights in the war-torn country, fathers of eldest daughters are among the Afghans most committed to women’s human rights as a national priority.
The paper, published in the peer-reviewed open-access science journal PLOS ONE, finds significant evidence that Afghan fathers of single daughters hold significantly more gender-egalitarian attitudes when comparing all respondents’ answers to a question about the gender of their eldest child and their answers to the question asking them on a scale of 1-5 how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement, “I believe achieving human rights for women is among the top priorities for the future of my country.”
The “first daughter” phenomenon, where fathers of eldest daughters show attitudes and behavior more consistent with international norms of gender equality, has been studied primarily in rich Western countries such as the U.S. and Canada.
Just caring about women’s rights is the first step; but men must also act on the behalf of women and girls to truly bring about change. The question of men’s support for women’s human rights is not just a question for Afghanistan, but for all countries.
Charli Carpenter, professor of political science and director of the Human Security Lab at UMass Amherst
However, the researchers found that Afghan fathers of eldest daughters are particularly likely to favor prioritizing women’s rights when they are first primed to think about the gender of their eldest children. The findings suggest that the human rights and humanitarian communities could usefully spend more time and attention on framing advocacy in such a way as to encourage men to think about or act on behalf of their eldest daughters.
“Just caring about women’s rights is the first step; but men must also act on the behalf of women and girls to truly bring about change,” says Charli Carpenter, professor of political science and director of the Human Security Lab, who served as the study’s principal investigator. “The question of men’s support for women’s human rights is not just a question for Afghanistan, but for all countries.”
The findings, from a randomized controlled survey experiment, are detailed in “The ‘First Daughter’ Effect: Human Rights Advocacy and Attitudes Toward Gender Equality in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan,” the first scientific paper from the lab’s Afghan Voices Project. In collaboration with global research firm RIWI, researchers generated a random sample of all adult Afghan internet users using a new method of embedding survey leads into broken internet links, and asked a battery of questions about security, governance, the economy, international aid, human rights and the status of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UMass Amherst analyzed 26,000 survey responses collected in the months after the U.S. withdrawal on Aug. 30, 2021. The project was funded by a National Science Foundation RAPID grant.
The research team is now interested to explore whether “priming” fathers to think about their daughters makes a difference in other countries, such as the U.S., or a difference in their actual behavior and willingness to take a stand on behalf of women’s human rights in national governance processes.