Afghan Fathers with Daughters More Likely to Believe in Gender Equality, Says New Study from UMass Amherst Human Security Lab

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. The findings suggest that the human rights and humanitarian communities could usefully spend more time and attention on framing 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," says Charli Carpenter, professor of political science and director of the Human Security Lab, who served as the study's principal investigator. "The question of men's support for women's human rights is not just a question for Afghanistan, but for all countries."

The findings, from a randomized controlled survey experiment, are detailed in "The 'First Daughter' Effect: Human Rights Advocacy and Attitudes Toward Gender Equality in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan," the first scientific paper from the lab's Afghan Voices Project. In collaboration with global research firm RIWI, researchers generated a random sample of all adult 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 status of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at UMass Amherst analyzed 26,000 survey responses collected in the months after the U.S. withdrawal on Aug. 30, 2021. The project was funded by a National Science Foundation RAPID grant.

The research team is now interested to explore whether "priming" fathers to think about their daughters makes a difference in other countries, such as the U.S., or a difference in their actual behavior and willingness to take a stand on behalf of women's human rights in national governance processes.