📌 What Was Tested

This study investigates how passive gender representation — when a teacher's gender matches a student's — affects students' academic self-concepts in math. Theoretical ideas from representative bureaucracy are combined with insights from social and educational psychology to build a model that explains individual-level mechanisms linking gender congruence to student outcomes.

🔎 How the Study Was Conducted

• A survey experiment administered to high school students in the Netherlands.
• The core hypothesis: gender congruence between teacher and student increases students' academic self-concept in math.
• Proposed mechanism: this positive effect is mediated by students' gender-stereotypical beliefs and is moderated by the teacher's self-confidence.

📈 What Was Found

• The predicted mediated relationship (gender congruence → stereotypical beliefs → academic self-concept), with moderation by teacher self-confidence, was not supported by the experimental data.
• Clear gender differences exist in both stereotypical beliefs and academic self-concepts among students.
• Notably, students' math self-concept — for both male and female students — is higher when the math teacher is a woman.

💡 Why It Matters

• Results challenge simple mechanism assumptions about how passive representation operates at the individual level, showing that expected pathways via stereotypical beliefs and teacher self-confidence did not explain effects in this setting.
• The observed link between female math teachers and higher student math self-concept suggests meaningful representational effects that merit further investigation.
• The study concludes with recommendations for future research to unpack when and how stereotypical beliefs shape the relationship between gender representation and student performance.