Gender peer effects in university courses: Evidence from tutorial groups

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impacts of peer gender composition on students’ educational outcomes using administrative records from a world top-ranking university in Singapore.¹ Leveraging a unique tutorial balloting system at the university, I explore the near-random variation in gender composition across different tutorial groups within the same course. A modified version of the commonly used balance test method from the literature is applied to demonstrate random fluctuations in gender ratio across tutorial groups. At the baseline, I found positive and significant impact of having more female peers on both male and female students’ academic performance. Nevertheless, there are substantial heterogeneity across student-level characteristics. This paper, in particular, also established a direct comparison of gender peer effects between quantitative and qualitative fields and found asymmetric impacts on male and female students. Overall, the results imply that the impacts of peer gender composition vary considerably across contexts and policy construction must account for this variability instead of aiming for a one-size-fits-all solution.