Sexist textbooks? Review of over 1200 English-language textbooks from 34 countries reveals persistent pattern of stereotypical gender roles and under-representation of female characters across countries
PLOS
image:
Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world.
view moreCredit: Jessica Ruscello, Unsplash, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world, with male-coded words appearing twice as often as female-coded words on average, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lee Crawfurd from the Center for Global Development, United Kingdom, and colleagues.
School textbooks play an important role in shaping norms and attitudes in students—one reason why controversy over textbook content is high in many countries today. In this study, Crawfurd and colleagues investigated how gender norms are depicted in textbooks around the world.
The authors used a particularly large corpus of textbooks to conduct their analysis: 1,255 publicly available online English-language school textbooks spanning subjects and grade levels from grades 4-13 from 34 countries downloaded over 2020-2022. They compared textbook content with predefined lists of gendered nouns and pronouns (e.g. “Auntie/she/her/woman”) and investigated how often these gendered words were associated with key words used in previous studies relating to achievement, appearance, family, home, and work (e.g. “powerful/gorgeous/household/executive”) within the textbook. Finally, the authors compared their text analysis results with other measures of gender equality at the country level.
They found that on average across the full sample of textbooks, there were more than twice as many occurrences of male words (178,142) as female words (82,113), though there was considerable variation between countries. After adjusting for book length, grade, and subject, the countries with the lowest representation of women and girls were Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan, where fewer than 1 in 3 gendered words were female.
Across all countries, the adjectives most likely to describe only female and not male characters included “married”, “beautiful”, “aged”, and “quiet”. Verbs for only female characters included “bake”, “cook,” and “sang”. The adjectives most likely to describe male and not female characters included “powerful”, “rich”, “wise”, “certain”, and “unable”. Verbs for only male characters included “rule”, “guide”, “sign”, and “order”. Almost all of the individual achievement- and work-themed words showed a stronger association with male words than female words, and the individual appearance- and home-themed words showed a stronger association with female words than male words. The authors note that countries with textbooks containing a greater number of female characters also had stronger GDPs and more legal rights for women compared to countries with less female representation, though this is only correlation and cannot speak to causation.
The authors also note there are several limitations to this work—their tool was not able to assess non-text items (such as images) and was not always correct at parsing names (though the authors used manual validation where possible), and the analysis reflects a binary view of gender illustrated in the textbooks. Furthermore, this analysis is restricted to English language literature and therefore may not be generalizable to languages beyond English. However, the results suggest that combating gender biases in textbooks could potentially lead to real-world effects.
The authors add: “Our findings reveal a troubling reality: school books are perpetuating outdated gender stereotypes. Schools should broaden horizons not limit children's potential. It's crucial for policymakers and educators to address these disparities.”
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Author Interview: https://plos.io/4dybR17
In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310366
Citation: Crawfurd L, Saintis-Miller C, Todd R (2024) Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310366
Author Countries: U.K., U.S.A.
Funding: This research was supported by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Echidna Giving. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Journal
PLoS ONE
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries
Article Publication Date
9-Oct-2024
Interview with Lee Crawfurd, Center for Global Development, United Kingdom
Author of PLOS ONE paper "Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries"
image:
Lee Crawfurd
view moreCredit: Lee Crawfurd, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Interview with Lee Crawfurd
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What first drew you to study gender bias in school textbooks, and why did you choose to investigate this topic?
I was raised by a gay feminist single mother who was a school teacher and loves to challenge gender stereotypes, so this is something I've always been interested in. This personal background, combined with recent advancements in computerized text analysis and the new availability of digital textbooks, led me to this line of research.
What are the key findings from your research?
It's not really news that there is some gender bias in textbooks. What is new about our paper is being able to show how much bias there is, and how this compares across different countries. In some places, female representation is less than 30% of all characters in textbooks.
What most surprised or interested you about your findings?
One thing that really stood out to me is that there is still some bias in books being funded by the British government's aid agency, despite years of political focus on girl's education.
Your findings suggest that gender representation is more balanced in higher income countries, though stereotypes in textbooks remain common. Can you tell us more about the stereotypes seen in high income countries and low income countries?
Overall the stereotypes we see are similar in richer and poorer countries - male characters in books are more likely to be associated with words describing work and achievement, for example "leader" or "business". Female characters are more likely to be associated with words describing home, family, and their appearance, such as "wedding" or "slim".
Which countries showed highest and lowest levels of gender bias, and were there any countries that surprised you as to where they ranked?
There is really low female representation in all the large South Asian countries; India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan, which wasn't too surprising but did make for depressing reading. There were some more positive surprises at the other end, with Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Rwanda showing less bias than the British and American books we looked at.
Your analysis rests on a binary view of gender, but do you think your findings suggest anything about non-binary representations of gender in the countries studied?
While our analysis currently focuses on binary gender representations, the findings highlight a broader issue of stereotyped portrayals, which could also impact non-binary individuals. Future research could certainly explore this dimension.
What do you hope your findings might lead to, and what are the next steps for your research?
Ultimately I think this is about giving people choice and freedom. Boys and girls should be free to choose how they want to live their lives. If all they see are rigid gender roles then their options are narrowed. We hope our findings will inform textbook writers and educational policymakers to create more balanced content that broadens the horizons for both boys and girls.
Journal
PLoS ONE
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries
Article Publication Date
9-Oct-2024
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