Teaching is by nature an emotional-burden endeavor for which emotion regulation is of crucial importance for teachers' effective teaching and well-being. Teachers' burnout and turnover rate have been an global issue. The present study aims to explore whether teacher gender impacts how they regulate emotions and related outcomes with the intersect impact from teaching grade level and culture/region norms. 

Two research questions were addressed:

1. What are the relationships between teacher gender, their emotion regulation strategies, teaching efficacy and well-being?

2. Are the relationships between teachers’ emotion regulation strategies and related outcomes moderated by (1) teaching grade level, or (2) culture/region?

By answering these questions, three related emotion regulation theories were utilized to form the key conceptual skeleton of this study:

(1) Gross's process model of emotion regulation refers to that emotions are generated and regulated through situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change/reappraisal, and response modulation processes.

(2) Emotional labor theory: three emotional labor strategies have been discussed widely, namely, deep acting, surface acting and expression of naturally felt emotions.

(3) Grandey proposed that emotional labor as emotion regulation by focusing on two broad strategies: antecedent- and response-focused strategies.

Baesd on that, this study classified teachers' emotion regulation into antecedent-focused strategy (e.g., deep acting and reappraisal) and response-focused strategy (e.g., surface acting and suppression). The related outcomes included teaching efficacy and well-being (e.g., job satisfaction and burn out).

Although previous empirical studies have examined the influence of teacher gender on emotion regulation, the quantitative review evidence is still scarce. This present meta-analysis included 21 quantitative articles and 141 correlations published between 2006 and 2023. A systematic literature search including the eletronic search and the hand search was adoptedd. The Web of Science, ProQuest, Eric, University Library, Google scholar and the reference list of each existing related review have been searched. The Comprehensive Meta-analysis version 3 was used to analyze the data, such as correlation, moderation, and publication bias analysis.

It was found that there was no significant gender difference in using response-focused emotion regulation strategies (e.g., surface acting and suppression), while females were more likely to use antecedent-focused strategies (e.g., deep acting and reappraisal) and expressions of naturally felt emotions. Regarding the related outcomes, it was found that teachers who adopted antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies more often tended to have greater teaching efficacy and well-being. By contrast, teachers who were more likely to use response-focused strategies tended to report less teaching efficacy and well-being. This gendered emotion regulation may be due to the gendered emotional display rule, which expects female teachers to be caring and emotionally available. Besides, the teaching grade with different pressures on teachers and the cultural/region norms may moderate the relationship between teacher gender and emotion regulation. This study provides review evidence from a quantitative relationship perspective for examining the role of teacher gender in their emotion regulation and outcomes, which echoes what the content-analysis review found that female teachers used more deep acting. However, there is also inconsistency on whether male teachers used more response-focused strategies. This study extended the existing review evidence by examining the strategy of expressing naturally felt emotions that has been neglected and can not be attributed to antecedent-focused or response-focused emotion regulation.

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