Do female university students benefit from being taught by female lecturers? Drawing on recent research, Stephan Maurer, Guido Schwerdt and Simon Wiederhold find a positive impact from female lecturers on female educational performance. However, this effect exists when class sizes are small, suggesting that it is direct and frequent interactions between students and their teachers, rather than a role model effect, that is important.

An increasing body of evidence points towards the importance of role models for the educational and professional success of minorities. Exposing female students to charismatic economics graduates, for example, has been shown to increase their subsequent propensity to major in economics. Similar effects have been found among French high school students, where classroom presentations by female scientists managed to attract more girls to STEM fields. Academic advisors and mentors can also act as role models and steer their mentees towards their respective specialisations.

Moreover, there is also clear evidence for gender-match effects in education: female students that are paired with female teachers usually experience a boost in performance. Examples for this come from rural schools in India, Korean secondary schools, the US Air Force Academy, and the University of Toronto.

However, many of these empirical settings are characterised by relatively small classes and thus rather frequent and intensive student-teacher interactions. Whether these effects generalise to large university lectures with dosens or hundreds of students – still common in many countries – is therefore an open question. Perhaps even more importantly, we still know little about how these gender-match effects actually materialise. Are teachers role models who show female students that success in their field is possible? Or is it the classroom interactions that generate these patterns?

Evidence from Germany

In a recent paper, we use administrative data from a German public university to investigate these questions. In the university we study, average classes have around 70 students, but with considerable variation: some classes have single-digit student numbers, while others boast several hundred participants. Thanks to exam data for the years 2006-2018, we can follow the same courses, students, and lecturers over time. Based on these data, we estimate how the male-female performance difference responds to changes in the gender of the lecturer in a given course over time.

Overall, we find substantial gender-match effects for female students: a female student paired with a female lecturer performs significantly better than when taught by a male lecturer. However, this effect is entirely driven by small courses. In courses with relatively few participants, female students are less likely to fail if taught by female professors, more likely to achieve top grades, and also perform better on average.

In relatively large courses, on the other hand, the performance of female students does not react to the gender of the lecturer. This pattern generalises to majors in STEM fields and those in the humanities. Reassuringly, we find that the female gender-match effects also materialise in small compulsory classes, alleviating the concern that some students may just choose lecturers and courses strategically.

The importance of class sizes

This striking difference depending on class size is interesting in its own right. It helps us to understand the nature of gender-match effects in education better. Given the absence of female gender-match effects in large classes, simply seeing a female professor does not seem to be enough to create benefits, speaking against the narrow “role model” channel. Instead, it seems that gender-match effects need direct and frequent interactions between students and professors, which are more typical in small classes.

Our findings are also a cautionary tale for policymakers: increasing enrolment in tertiary education and the trend towards less interactive and more anonymous (massive) online courses might weaken the impact of policies that aim at increasing female graduation rates, by increasing gender diversity among professors.

For more information, see the authors’ accompanying CEP Discussion Paper

Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Ben Moreland on Unsplash.