Back in 2020, I wrote a post about research from the US Air Force Academy, showing that matching female students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects with female professors improved the students' grades, closing the gender gap in performance, particularly among the best-performing female students. That research suggested that role modelling might be important for female students (as also identified here, here, and here).
Those results receive further support from this 2020 article by Jaegeum Lim (National Assembly Budget Office, Republic of Korea) and Jonathan Meer (Texas A&M University), published in the Journal of Human Resources (ungated earlier version here). Lim and Meer used data from Korean middle-school students who were followed from seventh grade until the end of high school, and looked at how the effect of teacher gender in seventh grade affected their subsequent outcomes. As with my post from earlier this week, a relevant problem is selection bias, if students (or, their parents) can choose teachers. This isn't a problem in this case, as Lim and Meer explain:
Several features of the South Korean educational system make it well suited to study the impact of teacher–student gender matches. First, elementary school graduates are assigned to a local middle school (spanning Grades 7–9) by lottery... Second, middle school students are randomly assigned to a physical homeroom classroom, through which subject teachers rotate to give lessons.
This randomisation ensures that there is little in the way of selection bias. Many Korean schools do engage in 'ability tracking', sorting students into different classes and teachers by ability, but Lim and Meer account for that with school-by-subject-by-ability-class fixed effects, meaning that they compare students that were assigned female seventh-grade teachers with students that were assigned male seventh-grade teachers, within the same school, subject, and ability grouping. Their data come from between 2000 and 4000 students from 74 schools in Seoul, followed over six years (with the sample size decreasing over time due to attrition). Analysing the effect on standardised seventh-grade test scores, Lim and Meer find that:
Boys with a female teacher rather than a male teacher see a statistically insignificant decrease in performance of 0.06 standard deviations, but a girl with a female teacher relative to a male one has an increase of 0.08 standard deviations.
The negative effect for boys having a female teacher loses statistical significance in the preferred regression specification, leaving a result that suggests that girls' academic outcomes improve significantly when they have a female teacher. And, this effect persists over time:
Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the gender gap effects persist even five years after the initial teacher–student gender match. The effects vary slightly over time, but there are no significant differences between the contemporaneous effect and the effects in the following years...
Specifically, the effect remained statistically significant and sizeable all the way through to 12th grade. The surprising thing is that this is the effect of a female student having a female teacher in seventh grade. We'll come back to that point later.
Turning to high school choices, Lim and Meer find that:
Girls are 15.1 percentage points (SE = 7.5) more likely to choose the math–science track in high school when taught by female versus male math teacher in seventh grade... female students are 15.7 percentage points (SE = 6.6) more likely to take at least one advanced math course when they were taught by a female math teacher in seventh grade versus a male teacher... the male-female gap in attending a STEM-focused high school is substantially reduced when a female student has a female math teacher in seventh grade.
These results clearly demonstrate that the gender gap in STEM can be reduced by having female students have female maths teachers in middle school (specifically, in seventh grade). Now, it is worth noting that there is nothing particularly special about seventh grade compared with other grades. Lim and Meer focus on seventh grade because it is the first year of middle school, so the randomisation is cleanest for students in that grade, and so the causal impact of the results is more defendable. However, given that the results show large and persistent effects, it is reasonable to ask why.
Lim and Meer are able to exclude cumulative exposure to female teachers, as students taught by female teachers in seventh grade are no more likely to have female teachers in later years than students taught by male seventh-grade teachers. They also find no evidence that students with female teachers jump up to higher ability groups in later years, so while their academic performance improves within their ability group, it is not so large that they change groups (and students in higher ability groups will have different aspirations and preferences for high school). Lim and Meer then look at an index of student engagement, and find that:
While female students have a lower engagement score than male students, having a female teacher in a particular subject in seventh grade eliminates this gap, and the effects persist into high school.
So, having a female teacher leads to higher engagement for female students. This is not dissimilar to results from the research I discussed on Sunday. Unfortunately, beyond the effects on high school choices, Lim and Meer aren't able to show any additional statistically significant effects beyond high school. Nevertheless, that seventh-grade teacher-student gender match has effects up to high school is remarkable, and again points to the importance of having more female teachers teaching STEM subjects.
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