Representative Bureaucracy and Female Education in Nigeria

Representative bureaucracy literature argues that when public officials share demographic characteristics with citizens, they tend to advance the interests of these groups. To contribute to the applications of this theory in developing countries, this paper explores the transformation of passive representation into active representation among women in Nigeria. Using the 2015/2016 Kaduna State Annual School Census (ASC), the study estimates multiple-regression models of the impact of female teachers and principals on school-level outcomes for female students. The results suggest that female teachers and principals are associated with better female student outcomes, but the effect of female principals decreases as the proportion of female teachers increases.