The Daughter Effect in CEO Appointments : Evidence from Swedish SMEs

Appointing a female CEO is an endogenous decision shaped by firm-specific preferences and organizational characteristics, which makes it challenging to identify the causal drivers of gender diversity in executive leadership. This paper examines whether male board directors with daughters are more likely to support the appointment of female CEOs. Drawing on matched employer-employee data from approximately 7,000 Swedish SMEs, I find that firms with a higher share of daughter-having male directors are significantly more likely to appoint a female CEO. To mitigate concerns about reverse causality, the analysis includes robustness checks focusing on directors whose daughters were born after their board appointment. These findings suggest that the gender composition of directors' children may serve as a quasi-exogenous predictor of CEO gender and could be leveraged in future research. However, limitations remain, particularly concerning residual endogeneity and the specificity of the Swedish context.