This article is from our friends at LearnVest, a leading site for personal finance.
The arrival of your male CEO’s new baby might prompt you to buy him extremely tiny shoes—or it might have you hoping he has a baby girl.
Why? It turns out the sex of your male CEO’s newborn child just might affect your salary, The Wall Street Journal reports.
According to a study of 18,000 male CEOs at 10,655 private companies in Denmark between 1996 and 2006, when said CEO has a baby, his workers’ salaries drop by 0.2% per year.
If that baby is a son, those salaries decrease 0.4%. If that baby is a daughter, it’s more common that salaries rise: Male employees see a rise of .6%, while female employees see a surprising 1.1% increase. When the baby is a son, female employees still make out better: Their salaries shrink only by 0.2%, while those of male workers drop 0.5%.
These effects are particularly notable when the baby in question is his or her father’s first.
The paper, by researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark, and the University of Maryland and Columbia University business schools, posits that the reason women’s salaries fare better no matter the sex of the child is because of a change in the new father’s perspective. “Previous research shows men’s esteem for their wives often rises when they become mothers,” note the study’s authors, who find that this shift leads to a similar rise in esteem for female employees. “Other studies have also shown that men sometimes care more about other people’s well-being after having a daughter,” The Journal writes.
Of course, this doesn’t mean too much for your day-to-day life at the office, but who knows? Maybe the best time to ask for a raise from your male boss is soon after the birth of his daughter (tiny shoes in hand).
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