Gender representation in Hong Kong primary school ELT textbooks – a comparative study

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate whether the improvement of the status of women in Hong Kong in recent decades, effected through various efforts to promote the values of equal opportunity concepts, is reflected in patterns of gender representation in primary school textbooks used in Hong Kong. A comparison of a popular series of primary school English-language textbooks that was published in 2005 with the same series published in 1988 (12 books in total) revealed increase in gender equity in the more recent books, including increased visibility of women both visually and textually. Nevertheless, the findings also revealed a perpetuation of some stereotyped images of the two genders and portrayals of women in a more limited range of social roles than men. The ‘male-first’ phenomenon and the visual and textual under-representation of women were still prevalent in the contemporary textbooks. The potential impacts on children of unbalanced gender representation in textbooks are discussed within the framework of social cognitive theory.

Keywords:

• gender
• Hong Kong
• sexism
• stereotype
• textbook

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and the Editor for their valuable comments on the earlier draft of this article. This article is one of the outcomes of a project, ‘Gender Representation in Educational Materials’, which was supported by a research grant from the Hong Kong Institute of Education.