Does Instructor Gender Matter for Student Performance in Introductory Physics?

A small number of prior studies have investigated whether instructor gender has a measurable impact on student course grades, though to our best knowledge no study has specifically examined physics courses. We explored the effect of instructor gender on student performance in calculus-based introductory physics courses at a large land-grant university. The data set included the scores on midterm, final exams, and final letter grades for more than 8200 students taught by 11 male and 4 female instructors between 2007-2018. We found no persistent correlation between student gendered performance and their instructor gender. While statistically significant differences in student performance were found for particular exams or in final letter grades, the effect sizes were weak or small. When comparing male and female instructors, we found that the instructor gender had a larger effect on female students than on their male classmates.