The effect of same-sex teacher assignment on student outcomes: Evidence from Australia and New Zealand

Abstract: This essay investigates the effects of a same-sex teacher assignment on female and male 8th grade students in Australia and New Zealand using data from the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). I employ the first difference (FD) method introduced by Dee (2007) to analyze the impacts on students' math and science academic achievements, as well as their attitudes toward these subjects. TIMSS has the appealing aspect of providing observations of students attending both subjects and their teachers in the corresponding disciplines, allowing to account for unobservable subject-invariant student characteristics. When restricting the assessment to the knowing cognitive domain part, I find that girls’ test scores increase significantly by around 0.040 SD when assigned to a female teacher and that this effect is driven by advantaged girls. This effect is smaller when using the standard test scores, but these outcomes seem more likely to cause biased estimates due to spillovers. The gender match effects I find on students' subject perceptions are larger and mostly positive. The comparison with previous estimates shows that the gender match effects on academic performance are not primarily caused by a change in students’ attitudes toward the disciplines. Overall, my findings show that boys do not experience any strong and significant positive effects of gender match on academic achievement and that the effects on students’ subject perceptions are also observed predominantly on girls. Therefore, my results provide little support for policies that are based on this argument to encourage the recruitment of male teachers to attenuate the growing feminization of the teaching profession.