Study: Afghan Fathers of Daughters Likelier to Believe in Gender Equality

Activists with Pen Path, a male-led civil society organization lobbying for girls’ education, hold a sign at a protest.

Researchers at UMass Amherst’s Human Security Lab will publish the first scientific paper from the Lab’s Afghan Voices Project this month in the peer-reviewed open-access science journal PLOS ONE. The finding from this new randomized controlled survey experiment shows that, while there is broad support for women’s human rights in Afghanistan, fathers of eldest daughters are among the Afghans most committed to women’s human rights as a national priority.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UMass Amherst - Charli Carpenter (Political Science), Bernhard Leidner (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Kevin Young (Economics) and Kristina Becvar (DACSS), collected and analyzed data collected inside Afghanistan in the months after the US withdrawal about their vision for the country. The project was funded by a National Science Foundation RAPID grant after the Taliban takeover and involved teams that included ten undergraduate students researchers.

In collaboration with global research firm RIWI, the research team generated a random sample of all 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 situation of women.

The new paper, entitled “The ‘First Daughter’ Effect:  Human Rights Advocacy and Attitudes Toward Gender Equality in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan” finds significant evidence that Afghan fathers of single daughters hold significantly more gender-egaliatarian 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.” Thus far, 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 to date in rich Western countries like the United States and Canada.

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.  These findings suggest that the human rights and humanitarian community could usefully spend more time and attention on the framing of 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,” said political scientist and Principal Investigator Professor Charli Carpenter, adding “The question of men’s support for women’s human rights is not just a question for Afghanistan, but for all countries.”

The research team is now interested to explore whether ‘priming’ fathers to think about their daughters makes a difference in other country contexts as well such as the United States, or a difference in their actual behavior and willingness to take a stand on behalf of women’s human rights in national governance processes.

The article will be published online at 2pm on 17 July as an Open Access article, at this link.