Gendered professional roles shape everyday institutional practices, yet little is known about how these roles influence learning through direct professional–client interactions. In education, where teaching remains a highly gender-segregated profession in many countries, the gender relationship between teachers and students represents a potentially important but understudied mechanism linking occupational segregation to educational outcomes. This study examines whether and how teacher gender is associated with students’ academic achievement and self-confidence. Teaching occupies a distinctive position among gendered professions. While often framed as a caring occupation, it also entails authority, expertise, and the transmission of socially valued knowledge. Gender imbalances within the teaching workforce vary across education systems, grade levels, and subject domains, yet primary education remains predominantly female in many contexts. Because schools play a central role in the intergenerational transmission of norms and competencies, gendered expectations attached to teaching may shape instructional practices and students’ learning experiences. Learning outcomes emerge through daily teacher–student interactions, where teacher gender may interact with student gender to influence classroom dynamics, pedagogical choices, and expectations, with consequences for both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. Empirical evidence on gendered teacher effects remains mixed and highly context-specific, with most studies focusing on single countries and academic achievement alone. Using TIMSS–PIRLS 2011 grade 4 data, this study adopts a comparative perspective to examine gendered teacher–student relationships across countries. It analyzes associations between teacher gender and achievement in reading and mathematics, as well as students’ self-confidence in both domains. To address student- and school-level confounding, the study employs a student fixed-effects approach that exploits within-student variation across domains, following strategies used by Jerrim et al. (2020) and Cattaneo et al. (2017). Analyses are conducted in 14 countries where students have different teachers for reading and mathematics. Six of these countries are European: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Slovakia, and Sweden. Results indicate significant associations between teacher gender and outcomes in a small number of countries. Male teachers are associated with higher mathematics achievement in two countries, and with higher reading self-confidence in one. A second set of analyses examines whether having a teacher of the same gender as the student is associated with outcomes. Same-gender teacher-student pairings are linked to higher reading achievement in eight countries and higher reading self-confidence in ten countries, with an additional effect on mathematics self-confidence observed in one country.

Cattaneo, M. A., Oggenfuss, C., & Wolter, S. C. (2017). The more, the better? The impact of instructional time on student performance. Education Economics, 25(5), 433–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2017.1315055 Jerrim, J., López-Agudo, L. A., & Marcenaro-Gutiérrez, O. D. (2020). The association between homework and primary school children’s academic achievement: International evidence from PIRLS and TIMSS. European Journal of Education, 55(2), 248–260. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12374