What Makes Girls Do Better In Language And Math?

Does teacher gender matter? Yes, according to a Texas A&M University study which found female students do better in language arts and math when they have female teachers.

In their paper “The Impact of Teacher-Student Gender Matches: Random Assignment Evidence from South Korea,” which appeared in the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series, Jonathan Meer and Jaegeum Lim of Texas A&M’s Department of Economics, examined the test scores for nearly 12,000 South Korean middle school students in Korean, English and mathematics.

“We found that female students perform substantially better when assigned to female teachers than they do when assigned to a male teacher,” says Meer, an expert in the economics of education. The researchers found that when female students are taught by female teachers, they score almost 10 percent of the standard deviation higher than when taught by male teachers.

The reason for this, Meer says, may be the way female teachers interact with female students in the classroom. “Female students are much more likely to report that their female teachers give them an equal chance to participate and that they encourage creative expression more than their male teachers,” he explains.

The researchers chose South Korea because students there are randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools and, in some cases, to the school itself.

Meer refers to a 2007 paper in the Journal of Human Resourcesin which Tom Dee examined the question of teacher gender using U.S. data. “He found similar results to ours, but given the nature of classroom assignment in the U.S., he had to ensure that his results weren’t being driven by selection of teachers and students. In doing so, he found evidence strongly suggesting that female math teachers were more likely to be assigned students with lower ability levels.”

With no tracking of South Korean students by ability, Meer says they didn’t have to worry about whether or not weaker students were being systematically assigned to female teachers. “We were able to exploit some important features of the South Korean education system to get estimates that reflect a true causal relationship, rather than just selection of students into classrooms,” he notes.

Meer adds that when it comes to male students, there is no commensurate teacher gender effect. “There is a slight positive relationship, but it is not large enough to be distinguishable from zero,” he says.

“With boys falling further and further behind girls in academics around the world, looking at gender-based mechanisms is vital.”

If it really is a matter how female teachers treat female students, Meer says, “At minimum, I think it’s important to be aware of how one’s behavior might affect people of different groups, even if that behavior is subconscious. Of course, that’s difficult to do.”