Number one girl: Female top scorers and peer academic performance in junior high schools

In a tournament-style education system, the high salience of ordinal academic rankings may amplify top performers’ influence as role models. This paper investigates how the gender of the top scorer in the class affects peer students’ outcomes in Chinese junior high schools. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design that exploits minimal score differences between the top-performing female and male students in a class, we find that having a female first-ranked student in a major exam significantly improves subsequent academic performance among girls, while no comparable effects are observed among boys. This gender-specific effect potentially operates through multiple channels: when a female student ranks first in the class, other girls exhibit higher levels of self-confidence, academic aspirations, study effort, and receive more parental support—effects that are not present among boys. Furthermore, the impact of top performer gender is particularly pronounced among academically lower-ranked girls and those from disadvantaged families. In sum, this paper provides the first causal evidence of the gender-differentiated external effect of ordinal ranks in educational settings.