TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hoffman,Florian
AU  - Oreopoulos,Philip
TI  - A Professor Like Me: The Influence of Instructor Gender on College Achievement
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13182
PY  - 2007
Y2  - June 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13182
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13182.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Florian Hoffman
Department of Economics
University of British Columbia
997 - 1873 East Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Tel: 604-822-4792
E-Mail: hoffma10@interchange.ubc.ca

Philip Oreopoulos
Department of Economics
University of Toronto
150 St. George Street
Toronto, ON  M5S 3G7
Canada
E-Mail: philip.oreopoulos@utoronto.ca
AB  - 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 helps identify average effects from male and female college students assigned to male or female teachers.  In contrast to previous work at the primary and secondary school level, our focus on large first-year undergraduate classes isolates gender interaction effects due to students reacting to instructors rather than instructors reacting to students.  In addition, by focusing on college, we examine the extent to which gender interactions may exist at later ages.  We find that assignment to a same-sex instructor boosts relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small.  A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a course by 1.2 percentage points.  The effects are similar when conditioning on initial ability (high school achievement), and ethnic background (mother tongue not English), but smaller when conditioning on mathematics and science courses.  The effects of same-sex instructors on upper-year course selection are insignificant.
ER  -