Representative bureaucracy in challenging environments: Gender representation, education, and India

Abstract

A bureaucracy representative of disadvantaged groups in a society has been linked to better outcomes for those groups in a wide variety of policy areas. Most of the empirical work identifying this link has used United States data, a highly conducive case for representation. Would the same relationship be seen in more challenging organizational and environmental contexts? Using the K-12 education context in India as a proxy for a challenging environment, this article examines how and when gender representation in K-12 schools leads to enhanced outcomes. We find a modest relationship between the presence of female teachers in a school and the academic outcomes of female students. Contextual factors both within the organization (more class days, longer teacher hours, and a smaller student to teacher ratio) and related to the external environment (infrastructure, rural location) enhance this association between teacher gender and student performance.