Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias*

By Michela Carlana. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019

375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I study whether exposure to teacher stereotypes, as measured by the Gender-Science Implicit Association Test, affects student achievement. I provide evidence that the gender gap in math performance, defined as the score of boys minus the score of girls in standardized tests, substantially increases when students are assigned to math teachers with stronger gender stereotypes. Teacher stereotypes induce girls to underperform in math and self-select into less demanding high schools, following the track recommendation of their teachers. These effects are at least partially driven by lower self-confidence on math ability of girls exposed to gender-biased teachers. Stereotypes impair the test performance of girls, who end up failing to achieve their full potential. I do not detect statistically significant effects on student outcomes of literature teacher stereotypes.

Subfields: Education, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b1aced34a30babdcba6d71ea0411d4bb3af4316

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Citations in the corpus

Bias in the Air: A Nationwide Exploration of Teachers’ Implicit Racial Attitudes, Aggregate Bias, and Student Outcomes (2020, result): “…have shown that teachers’ levels of implicit bias (as measured by the IAT) toward racial/ethnic minorities is associated with test score inequalities within teachers’ classrooms (Peterson et al., 2016; van den Bergh et al., 2010), and similar results have been found for gender bias (Carlana, 2019).”
The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students* (2020, background): “…this article complements a growing body of research demonstrating how perceived discrimination may lead to “selffulfilling prophecies” in education (Carlana 2019), labor markets (Glover, Pallais, and Pariente 2017), and health care (Alsan and Wanamaker 2018).7 While empirical evidence of racial…”
Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement (2020, positive): “These results are very much in line with Carlana (2018), who finds that the gender gap in math progress triples in classes assigned to a math teacher who implicitly associates boys more than girls with mathematics.”
Stereotypes in financial literacy: Evidence from PISA (2020, positive): “More specificall, social psychology has emphasized the role of the same-sex parent and of the teachers in shaping gender-role identity during adolescence (Carlana 2019, Olivetti et al.2020).”