The gender gap in academic performance increases as students progress through school; girls outperform boys by large and increasing margins in teacher-assigned course grades and standardized reading tests, and eventually surpass boys in standardized math tests. I investigate if and how teachers affect these patterns, focusing on their gender-differentiated impacts on course grades and standardized test scores in each subject. Using administrative data from North Carolina, I estimate value-added measures of teacher effectiveness for fifth-grade teachers, separately for test scores and course grades, and examine their heterogeneous impacts on boys' and girls' middle school outcomes. I find that teachers with high value-added in test scores disproportionately benefit girls (particularly in math), while teachers with high value-added in course grades disproportionately benefit boys (particularly in reading). These patterns are consistent with a two-factor model in which test scores (course grades) are relatively intensive in cognitive (non-cognitive) skills -- and observed gender gaps imply a relative proficiency in cognitive (non-cognitive) skills for boys (girls). Under this framework, teachers improve students most along the dimension where the students have a relative deficiency. This interpretation differs from explanations centered on role-model effects or teacher bias, suggesting that gender-differentiated teacher impacts reflect how teachers' strengths interact with students' underlying skill mixes.
Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns that they result in lower worker productivity and efficiency losses. We study the relative productivity of workers benefiting from an aggressive affirmative action policy in a setting where hiring constraints are especially likely to bind. In India, colleges are required to reserve approximately 50 percent of faculty hires for individuals from disadvantaged caste and social class groups. We collect and analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. We find that reservation category faculty have lower levels of education, lower professorial ranks and fewer years of experience in academia than general category faculty who are not hired through reservations. Yet, even with lower qualifications, we find no evidence that reservation category faculty provide lower quality instruction across a wide range of measures that include course grades, follow-on course grades, standardized test scores, dropout, attendance, graduate school plans, and graduation. In fact, we find that, at least for immediate effects on course grades, students taught by reservation category faculty perform slightly better than students taught by general category faculty. We find no evidence of positive "teacher-like-me" effects of reservation category faculty on the relative course performance and longer-term outcomes of reservation category students. Furthermore, even in the face of potential discrimination and resentment against faculty hiring quotas, general category students perform slightly better in classrooms taught by reservation category faculty than general category faculty. The findings have implications for the heated debates over affirmative action programs found in many countries around the world and in India.
This study provides causal evidence on the impact of exposure to female faculty on female STEM students. We leverage the random assignment of undergraduate STEM students to instructors, which is rarely feasible in higher education settings, to circumvent identification issues arising from non-random sorting of students to classrooms based on instructor or peer characteristics. We find that female students taught by female faculty achieve higher course grades, improving by 2.7 percentile points. Moreover, increasing female faculty exposure by 10 percentage points over two years (from a baseline of 34 percent) yields a 0.03 standard deviation improvement in standardized test scores of female students. Beyond academic performance, we find that exposure to more female faculty leads to a reduction in STEM anxiety among female students and more equitable gender beliefs among male students. These findings suggest that exposure to female faculty helps improve the performance of female students in STEM through higher academic achievement and reduced anxiety as well as helping reshape traditionally held gender-based stereotypes in STEM.
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