Conscription is mandatory in 66 countries in the world. Some countries, especially those belonging to NATO and worried by the Ukraine war are considering the (re)introduction of mandatory Conscription. Although there is a growing literature studying the effects of military conscription on different outcomes, evidence-based decisions can only be made if we fully understand the intended and unintended consequences of its introduction. More importantly, these decisions can have long-term consequences, especially if they affect preferences, values, social norms, and beliefs that people hold and get transferred from one generation to the next (i.e., culture). Hence, understanding whether these cultural traits get transmitted to the next generation is very important.

In this paper, I study the effect of military conscription on the cultural traits that the conscript’s descendants hold. To do this, I conducted a survey, exploiting the natural experiment generated by the lottery draft in Argentina, by which respondents’ fathers were randomly forced to take part in the military training or not. I find that sons and daughters of the conscripts tend to adopt more sexist attitudes in dimensions such as justification of sexism and violence, sexual machismo, negative attitude towards homosexuality, old-fashioned sexism, and hostile sexism.