The impact of teacher gender on students’ class rank

ABSTRACT

Using the random assignment of students to subject teachers in South Korean middle schools, this study investigates the causal impact of teacher – student gender matches on students’ academic rankings within their classes. The findings show that having female teachers improves female students’ rank relative to that of male students. This effect is likely to be driven by changes in teacher behaviours.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher gender
• student gender
• class rank
• South Korea

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• I26
• J16

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor (David Peel) and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Jonathan Meer for his valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ If high-achieving or better-motivated female students are more likely to be assigned to female teachers, then any teacher gender effects may reflect sorting rather than, for example, role-model effects (Lim and Meer 2020).

² Regarding data sampling, 74 middle schools were randomly selected from a population of about 370 public or private middle schools in Seoul. Then, 4,544 students in two randomly drawn classrooms within each school are included in the SELS2010.

³ In South Korea, middle school students live with classmates in their own homeroom classrooms where most subjects are provided. As such, I assume that peers within homeroom classrooms are the reference group of students to obtain their ordinal ranks in a given subject and hence consider classroom – subject cells as classes.

⁴ Including school by subject fixed effects helps to exploit within-cluster (school – subject cell) random variation in teacher – student gender interactions.

⁵ Regarding these questions, students can select a response from the following: 1.‘Completely Disagree’, 2. ‘Disagree’, 3. ‘Normal’, 4.‘Agree’, 5.‘Completely Agree’.

⁶ This evidence might support that my main results are not mediated by role model effects, indicating that students are more engaged in the study when they are assigned to the same-gender teacher (Dee 2007).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.