Arke Primack Scale (APS; Media Literacy)
Category: Student Learning
Despite progress in overall educational attainment, female students remain underrepresented in STEM fields. One proposed mechanism for improving female students' outcomes is exposure to same-gender faculty, yet evidence on both the prevalence and impacts of student–instructor gender matching in higher education remains limited. Using administrative data from ten public research universities in Texas spanning 2011–2021, we document patterns of gender matching in STEM courses and estimate its causal effects on female students’ academic outcomes. Female students are substantially less likely than male students to be taught by same-gender instructors in STEM, particularly in engineering, economics, and computer science, and, even when same-gender matching does occur, are more often matched with non-tenure-track faculty. Leveraging student and classroom fixed effects, we find that same-gender matching improves female students’ course performance and reduces course withdrawals. Early exposure to female instructors modestly increases short-term persistence and subsequent STEM course-taking, though effects on long-term degree outcomes are limited. We discuss these implications for gender diversity in STEM.
Keywords
STEM education; Gender matching; Female students; Higher education; Instructor gender; Academic outcomes
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/b6t9-cs36
