When a family finds itself in tough economic times, parents are likely to be more financially generous to a daughter than to a son. And the reason has to do with something parents often tell their adult children — they really want grandchildren.
“It turns out, this desire to have grandchildren steers parents’ decision-making long before their children’s wedding day,” says Kristina Durante, an associate professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School in Newark and New Brunswick.
But why would that translate into girls getting a larger inheritance than their brothers? The reason, Durante explains, is that statistically, daughters are more likely to produce grandchildren than sons. Far more men, than women, go through life without ever procreating and in tough times, the number of men who never find a mate increases, so favouring the daughter becomes a safer bet for parents.
Bias and scarcity
The extraordinary aspect of this calculation is that parents don’t deliberately make it, Durante says. Rather, subtle cues that resources are becoming scarce lead parents to unwittingly and instinctually, favour girls, whose procreative powers have been proven over thousands of years of human history. “These are subtle things that are happening when people are exposed to information about scarcity,” Durante says. “And even though we have relative abundance now, there hasn’t been enough time to remove those biases.”
The research involved several experiments, including one in which 629 participants read a news article describing the economy as either improving, getting worse or neutral. The volunteers were then asked to make a will dividing their assets between an imaginary son and daughter. During the research, participants showed a tendency to dedicate more assets to daughters than sons during hard economic times. They did that despite saying they love and treat both children equally. Where they perceived the economy as healthier, girls and boys got the same.
Source: www.futurity.org
