Elect

Family-owned firms are far less likely to appoint daughters than sons to the top job, presumably because of long-standing social norms. But there are costs to carrying on that tradition.

Researchers analyzed 360 successions in Swedish family businesses from 2004 to 2017, constructing their sample to include firms whose families had at least one daughter and one son and eventually elected an offspring to be CEO. Daughters were 75% less likely than sons to get the job, and those who did waited for it nearly twice as long, on average. Notable exceptions were the daughters of female CEOs, who had equal if not slightly higher odds than their brothers of being chosen. In the year after daughters took over, their firms’ industry-adjusted returns on assets were 2.3 times higher, on average, than those of firms newly run by sons.