Amzad Hossain Presents Paper on Effects of Gender Matches in Higher Education

Friday, March 6, 2020

Amzad Hossain, 4th year PhD student, presented his paper on "The Match Between `She' and `Her': Performance Gains from Gender Match in Higher Education" at the Eastern Economic Conference in February 2019. Using a novel and confidential administrative dataset from a highly reputed economics program in a developing country, he assessed the benefit of the match between female students and female teachers and found that female students gained in terms of both grade performance and better long-term outcomes, such as cumulative GPA and degree completion time.  Comparing the test scores of the blind and non-blind exams for the same course, he showed that the gain from gender-matching is not driven by gender bias in teachers' assessments. He also presented several novel results: First, the interaction effect  (the gender-match gain) is much higher when students are matched with more experienced female teachers. Second, the female teacher-student interaction effect monotonically increases over successive semesters. Finally, the interaction effect is much higher when the female teacher has a Ph.D. degree than when she does not.