Parenting Daughters Does Not Increase Monetary Prosocial Behavior

Abstract. Prior work suggests that parenting daughters makes the preferences of men more in line with those of women. We use behavior in a dictator game as a measure of pure social preferences to test whether parenting daughters increases prosociality, specifically charitable giving. Data are sourced from the German Socio-Economic Panel, where 1,461 participants decided how to split a 50€ endowment between themselves and (separately) a needing domestic or foreign recipient. Our results suggest that parenting daughters does not make men (nor women) more prosocial. The findings remain null across different operationalizations and analytical procedures.