Female representation in school management and school quality

Abstract

Using a large administrative dataset of schools in India, we examine the impact of increasing female representation in school management on school performance and children's learning outcomes. Exploiting an education legislation that mandated female representation in school governing committees, we show that participation of females in these committees results in improvement in number of teachers, qualification of teachers and student enrollment. Besides, we provide evidence of positive impact on learning outcomes of children, particularly for girls. We conduct an array of robustness checks to ensure that confounding factors like initial school characteristics, pre-trends are not driving the results.