Hoffmann, Florian, and Philip Oreopoulos. 2009. “A Professor Like Me: The Influence of Instructor Gender on College Achievement.” Journal of Human Resources 44(2): 479–494.
Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper help identify average effects from male and female college students assigned to male or female teachers. We find instructor gender plays only a minor role in determining college student achievement. Nevertheless, the small effects provide evidence that gender role models matter to some college students. A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a class by 1.2 percentage points.
Florian Hoffmann Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Toronto. Philip Oreopoulos is a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The authors are extremely grateful to Marianne Lynham, Matthew Hendrickson, Josie Lalonde, Rick Hayward, and Karel Swift for helping them obtain and work with the data used in this project, and to Rita Ahmadyar, Nicole Corbett, and Paul Ternamian for outstanding research assistance. They also thank seminar participants at University of California, Davis, the University of Toronto, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Oreopoulos thanks the Social Sciences and Research Council and the Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network for financial support. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2009 through September 2012 from Philip Oreopoulos, #997 - 1873 The East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z1, oreo@exchange.ubc.ca.