Fathers of girls vote more liberally on women's issues

A powerful and virtually unregulated special interest group is dramatically influencing the way men in Congress vote on women's issues. These power brokers regularly dine with their congressman, accompany him on vacations and shower him with gifts.

Many even demand that their representative tuck them in and kiss them goodnight.

These ultimate insiders are the daughters of lawmakers, says Ebonya Washington of Yale University. She found that members of the House who have a daughter voted more liberally on a range of women's issues, notably abortion, than those who did not.

Moreover, the more daughters a congressman had, the more likely he was to vote for reproductive rights. (There were not enough female lawmakers to allow Washington to draw firm conclusions about them.)

Washington analyzed the family composition of the 105th Congress (1997-98), as well as how the liberal National Organization for Women ranked each member based on his votes on 20 women's issues. The rating scale ranged from zero (consistently voted against the NOW position) to 100 (always voted in accord with NOW's position).

She found that legislators who had only daughters had NOW scores that were 12 points higher than those with only sons. Among those with three children, "each daughter is associated with an increase of nearly 3 points," Washington said.

It didn't matter whether Daddy was a Republican or Democrat: Having a daughter seemed to transcend partisanship or ideology to promote liberal positions on these issues, she wrote in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.