Over the weekend HEPI published blogs on AI in legal education and knowledge and skills in higher education.
Today’s blog was kindly authored by Hans Luyten, University of Twente, Netherlands ([email protected]).
Across many education systems, secondary-school teaching remains a predominantly female profession. While this fact is well known, less is understood about whether the gender composition of the teaching workforce relates to gender differences in student achievement at the system level. My recently published paper, Overrepresentation of Female Teachers in Secondary Education and Gender Achievement Gaps in PISA 2022 (Studies in Educational Evaluation), takes up this question using recent international data.
The study investigates whether gender differences in reading, mathematics, and science among 15-year-olds vary according to the extent to which women are overrepresented among secondary-school teachers, relative to their share in each country’s labour force.
Data and analytical approach
The analysis draws on two international datasets:
- PISA 2022: Providing country-level average scores for 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. Gender achievement gaps are operationalised as the difference between the average score for girls and that for boys.
- Labour-market data: Measuring the proportion of women among secondary-school teachers in each country and the proportion of women in the wider labour force.
Female overrepresentation is defined as the difference between these two proportions.
Although the analysis focuses on statistical correlations at the country level, it does not rely on simple bivariate associations. A wide range of control variables is included to account for differences between countries in:
- Students’ out-of-school lives, such as gender differences in family support;
- School resources, such as the availability of computers;
- School staff characteristics, such as the percentage of certified teachers.
These controls help ensure that the observed relationships are not simply reflections of broader cross-national differences in socioeconomic conditions or school quality.
Key findings
Three main results emerge from the analysis:
First, gender achievement gaps tend to be larger in favour of girls in countries where women are more strongly overrepresented among secondary-school teachers.
Second, this association holds across all three domains (reading, mathematics, and science), although the size and direction of the gender gap differs by subject.
Third, the relationship becomes more pronounced as the degree of female overrepresentation increases. Countries with only modest overrepresentation tend to have smaller gender gaps, whereas those with large overrepresentation tend to have wider gaps.
These findings concern gender differences in performance, not the absolute levels of boys’ or girls’ achievement. The study does not examine, and therefore does not draw conclusions about, whether boys or girls perform better or worse in absolute terms in countries with different levels of female teacher overrepresentation.
Interpreting the results
The analysis identifies a robust statistical association at the country level, after accounting for a broad set of background variables. However, as with any cross-national correlational study, it cannot establish causality. Other country-specific characteristics (cultural, institutional, or organisational) may also contribute to the observed patterns.
It is also important to note that the study addresses a different question from research that examines the effects of individual teachers’ gender on the achievement of individual students. Earlier classroom- and school-level studies often find little or no systematic effect of teacher gender on student outcomes. The present study, by contrast, examines the overall gender composition of the teaching workforce and its relation to system-level gender achievement gaps.
Implications
Although the findings do not directly point to specific policy interventions, they suggest that the gender composition of the secondary-school teaching workforce is a feature of educational systems that merits closer attention when interpreting international variation in gender gaps. Teacher demographics form part of the broader context within which student achievement develops, and system-level gender imbalances may interact with other structural characteristics in shaping performance differences between girls and boys.
Final remarks
The full paper provides a detailed description of the data, analyses, and limitations. It is available open access at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2025.101544
I hope this summary brings the findings to a wider audience and encourages further research on how system-level characteristics relate to gender differences in educational outcomes.