Female representation in school management and school quality

Using administrative data (2012-18) of schools in India, in this paper we construct a large panel comprising of more than 6 million observations to examine the extent to which female representation in school management is associated with improvement in school quality. We exploit the variation in number of female members in committees that govern government funded school activity to study our research question. Using a fixed effects methodology, we show that increased female representation in school management committees is associated with improvement in school quality, measured in terms of number of teachers hired, qualification of teachers, academic resources and student enrollment. The results are robust to including initial school characteristics interacted with year. Besides, using individual level data on learning outcomes for rural India, we provide suggestive evidence of positive association between female representation in schools management committees and learning outcomes of children, particularly for girls.