Teacher-rector gender match effects in Swedish private schools

Sammanfattning: A growing body of economic research incorporates insights from social psychology into standard economic analysis to study how group membership and social context affect economic agents. My paper fits into this literature by investigating gender similarity effects in the manager-employee relationship within the context of Swedish private schools. To this end, I use 2010 and 2011 employee survey data from the largest private education provider in Sweden. Through three specifications accounting for unobserved cluster effects, I estimate the impact of teacher-rector gender match on several outcomes, separately for each gender. Focusing on the relative gender match (modelled by a 'difference-in-difference' estimate), I find that teachers of a specific gender working for a same-gender rector (1) report a relatively higher motivation, employee experience and job satisfaction, (2) are relatively more satisfied by their rector as manager and perceive relatively more positively the management skills and behaviour of their rector than when working for a rector of opposite gender (relative to teachers of opposite gender). Moreover, among teacher-rector pairs of opposite gender, male teachers do not report lower levels of satisfaction or rate more negatively the management of their female rector. Lastly, linking employee with customer survey data, I find no direct or indirect effect of teacher-rector gender match on pupil and parent school satisfaction. Thus, my results suggest a need for caution in using subjective evaluations as the sole performance measure in Swedish private schools.