A bureaucracy representative of historically oppressed groups in society has been linked to better outcomes for those groups, especially in key policy areas such as education, child welfare, and law enforcement. Most of the empirical work in education has used the case of the United States, finding that representation leads to academic improvements for the represented group. Would the same effects be seen in national contexts beyond the Western World?

This paper examines how and when a female bureaucrat in the Indian education system leads to enhanced outcomes for female students, using data gathered by the Government of India on nearly 1.5 million schools, from 2014-15 to 2017-18.  We find a modest representative effect of female teachers on the academic achievement of female students which is enhanced with more class days, longer teacher hours, and a smaller student teacher ratio. Additionally, in situations where active representation would be extremely difficult due to a severe lack of resources and opportunities (schools located in rural areas and with poor infrastructure) we also see a positive effect of female teachers on female student academic achievement, which possibly indicates the presence of symbolic representation via the role-model effect, in these environmental conditions.