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. Using administrative data from North Carolina, I estimate value-added measures of teacher effectiveness for fifth-grade teachers, 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' test scores and course grades, while teachers with high value-added in course grades disproportionately benefit boys' test scores and course grades. These patterns are consistent with a two-factor model in which test scores are relatively intensive in cognitive skills, course grades are relatively intensive in non-cognitive skills, and observed gender gaps imply a relative proficiency in cognitive skills for boys and a relative proficiency in non-cognitive skills for girls. Under this framework, teachers improve students most along the dimension where the students have a relative deficiency. This explanation links multidimensional teacher effectiveness with multidimensional gender gaps in student achievement, 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.
Despite rising college enrollment among women, gender disparities persist in STEM fields. We leverage a large-scale setting in which STEM undergraduates are randomly assigned to instructors---a feature rarely feasible in higher education---to provide causal evidence on the effects of exposure to female faculty. Female students assigned to female faculty perform better on externally graded course exams and score higher on standardized tests administered two years later, indicating effects of female faculty that persist beyond the immediate classroom context. Gains are largest among female students who report higher uncertainty about belonging in STEM. Female students also report lower anxiety about mathematics and science. We show that these effects are unlikely to be driven by differences in teaching or grading practices, and are instead consistent with exposure to identity-relevant cues that reduce female students’ anxiety about STEM. Exposure to female faculty also shifts beliefs away from stereotypes about women’s ability in mathematics and science, especially among male students. These findings suggest that repeated exposure to female faculty improves performance among female students and fosters more inclusive beliefs about women in STEM fields.
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