Abstract Research has provided conflicting results regarding gender effects on accounting course performance. Recent work has shown interactive effects of instructor gender and student gender. However, that work did not control for students' general academic aptitude. In this paper the performance of students in four multi-section accounting courses (three introductory and one upper-division) at three state universities was examined. Students' performance within each school was measured in courses which used common final examinations across all sections of the course. In addition, these examinations were uniformly graded within each school, providing a control on individual instructor grading effects. Student performance was evaluated relative to the gender of students and Instructors. The effect of student gender varied greatly across universities, sometimes having a main effect on examination scores and sometimes having an interactive effect with instructor gender. However, use of the students' SAT or ACT scores as a covariate greatly reduced gender effects on examination scores, causing most observed effects to become statistically insignificant. This provides some explanation for the diverse results reported in previous studies of gender effects on accounting course performance, where general academic aptitude was not controlled or studied. Interestingly, a survey of instructors in the studied courses showed that females are perceived to be better accounting students than are male students. Implications of the current findings for future research are discussed.
Buckless et al. (Sun,) studied this question.