The effects of teacher gender composition on students’ noncognitive characteristics

Previous studies have often emphasized the gender effects of individual teachers but have paid less attention to the gender composition of teacher teams. We examine the effects of teacher gender composition on the noncognitive characteristics of students by use of randomly assigned cross-sectional data of middle school students in China. Our results show that mixed-gender teacher teams significantly improve the noncognitive characteristics of students. The underlying mechanism analysis shows that both the better-functioning mixed-gender teams per se and the strong gender identification between teachers and students and between teachers and the parents of students could help explain how mixed-gender teacher teams affect the noncognitive characteristics of students.