Teacher diversity
Do male and female teachers have different self-efficacy and job satisfaction?

Managing diversity involves many challenges, and one of these is that the criteria for success can favour one diversity group with adverse consequences for other workforce members’ feelings of self-efficacy, job satisfaction and performance. Utilizing the fact that the Danish school sector is female dominated (but with different gender composition at the school level), this paper investigates whether (and why) female teachers in Danish schools have higher teacher self-efficacy and job satisfaction than male teachers. Based on a survey with 3439 teachers from 85 Danish schools, it is shown that female teachers have higher self-efficacy and job satisfaction, and that these gender differences are partly explain by the female teacher’s higher level of empathy. The differences between male and female teachers do not, however, depend on the proportion of female teachers at the specific school or on the gender of the school principal. The main implication of the findings is that future research should look more into the reasons behind gender differences in self-efficacy and job satisfaction in order to be able avoid that certain diversity groups have systematically lower self-efficacy and job satisfaction.