Teacher Gender and Parenting Style: Evidence from Junior High Schools in China

This paper investigates the role of teacher gender in shaping the parenting style within families of teenage students. Utilizing a representative sample of junior high school students in China and leveraging on the random assignment of students to classes, we discover that the presence of a female class head teacher prompts parents of girls to adopt a parenting style characterized by higher levels of demandingness and responsiveness and to have a closer emotional connection with their children. However, we do not detect significant effects of teacher gender among parents of boys. These gender-differentiated effects are potentially mediated through improved teacher-parent communication and shifts in parental beliefs concerning child education. Subsample analyses further highlight that the impact of teacher gender on parenting style for girls is more pronounced among students with lower levels of maternal education, those with siblings, and those in the seventh grade, in comparison with those in the ninth grade. Our findings enrich the research on the determinants of parenting style and gender disparities in intrahousehold investments and enhance our comprehension of the interplay of family and school inputs in students’ human capital production in adolescent years.