Biased teachers and gender gap in learning outcomes: Evidence from India

Abstract

We investigate the effect of stereotypical beliefs of teachers on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of secondary school students in two states of India. We measure teacher’s bias through an index capturing teacher’s subjective beliefs about the role of gender in academic performance. We tackle the potential endogeneity of teacher’s subjective beliefs by controlling for teacher fixed effects in a value-added model that includes lagged test scores of students. We find that a standard deviation increase in the biased attitude of the math teacher increases the female disadvantage in math performance by 0.09 standard deviation over an academic year. We also find significant impacts on the gender gap in students’ math attitude, academic self-confidence, and effort as potential mechanisms for the effect on math score. We do not find any significant effect of English teachers’ gender bias on English learning of the students.