Discriminación de género en las calificaciones de las escuelas públicas uruguayas

This paper analyzed the existence of a gender bias in the final performance’s grading set by teachers of third grade and six-grade of public schools in Uruguay. For this, administrative data, blind test scores (TERCE) and non-blind tests scores (final performance’s grading) of third-grade and sixth-grade of school students are used. The econometric strategy consisted in controlling the performance’s grade with the blind test scores and certain characteristics of the students, the social-economical background, the school’s characteristics, the teacher’s grading of student’s behavior and a dummy of the sex of the child. A bias was found in performance’s grading in favor of men in third-grade but no differences were found in sixth-grade performance’s grading. The different teacher’s behavior in each grade could be a consequence of the matching mechanism between teachers and classes, that would seem to assign the better teachers to sixth-grade.