Gender Gaps in Different Assessment Systems: The Role of Teacher Gender

Abstract Previous research that investigates the gender gap in student achievement has identified a gender gap in the difference between teacher grading and scores on national exams at the end of secondary school. In this paper we go a step further and look at how teacher characteristics may influence this gender gap. Our identification strategy takes advantage of a rich dataset that allows us to match each student with the respective teacher and contains information regarding scores obtained by each student from teacher grading, and in curriculum based national exams. Using fixed effects at the student level we find that exams are relatively more favorable for boys, regardless of the teacher gender or the gender matching. Results suggest that having a male teacher tends to increase the assessment gap for all students through a greater decrease from teacher to exam scores, the impact being less for boys.