Where Are the Women? An Analysis of Gender Mainstreaming in Introductory Political Science Textbooks

ABSTRACT

Textbook content is a powerful indicator of what is and is not considered important in a given discipline. Textbooks shape both curriculum and students’ thinking about a subject. The extant literature indicates that gender is not well represented in American government textbooks, thus signaling to students that women and gender are not part of the mainstream in political science. I contribute to this literature by using quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine gender mainstreaming in 10 introductory political science textbooks. I find that the quantity of gendered content is small, and the quality of that content varies considerably from text to text.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• gender
• Introduction to Political Science
• textbooks

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Jennifer Piscopo, Dr. Christina Xydias, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful advice concerning this article. All errors or omissions are my own.

Notes on Contributor

Amy L. Atchison is associate professor in the department of political science and international relations at Valparaiso University. Her research interests include gender mainstreaming in political science education and gender and politics in advanced industrial democracies. She has been published in, among others, Politics & Gender, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Poverty & Public Policy.

Notes

Such as the gendered nature of institutions, the gendered effects of ostensibly gender-neutral laws, etc.

For longer arguments in favor of gender mainstreaming, see the “Teaching Politics & Gender: Views from the Field.” Critical Perspectives in Politics & Gender, June 2013, 9(2): 207–238; for suggestions as to how to mainstream gender, see “’Mainstreaming Gender in the Teaching and Learning of Politics” symposium in PS: Political Science & Politics, July 2016, 49(3).

I used only texts available on VitalSource and excluded country-specific editions of texts (e.g., the “Canada edition”). These 10 books are not a sample; they are the latest editions of the introductory texts that were available on VitalSource at the time of this writing.

See Cassese et al. (2014, Appendix Table A2) for full explanation of nonsubstantive applications; they also query for lady/ladies, congresswoman/congresswomen, and sex/sexual. As these are more specific to American government and concerns in American politics, I chose not to include them in this study.

Capturing the page number allows me to track the number of distinct pages on which references to gender can be found.

While Grigsby does do an excellent treatment of feminism, the text is lacking in terms of descriptive versus substantive representations, as well as women’s movements and suffrage.

Etheridge and Handelman, Heywood, Parsons, Reimer et al., Roskin et al., and Shively.

That is, when there are more women in office, they produce policies that are more favorable to women.

Wallace and Allen (2016) find that similar messages are sent in American government texts in regard to affirmative action policy.

For more information on college students’ opinions/perceptions of feminism, see Houvouras and Scott Carter (2008).