Gender Stereotyping in Job Vocabulary in EFL Textbooks

Abstract

[eng] The present study focuses on the representation of men and women in educational materials, specifically in English as a Foreign Language textbooks. Gender stereotyping is still present in our daily lives so it is a common theme in linguistic research, but little attention has been paid regarding how both genders are portrayed when it comes to occupation and job vocabulary in textbooks used in Spain. With this concept in mind, this paper seeks to demonstrate whether, and if so, how jobs are portrayed in a gender biased way when teaching EFL. A total of seven textbooks, from the most recognized editorials used in Spain at the A1 level, were analyzed in order to gather the data. The study examined the images related to jobs and occupations from those selected books, and two analyses of the said images were undertaken: a token count and a categorization analysis. The results revealed that gender stereotyping in relation to job vocabulary was still present in the examined textbooks. There was an imbalance of presence between female characters and male characters. Numerically, the overall number of men represented working was higher than the number of women. A differentiation was detected between genders, the idea of particular jobs being more masculine and others more feminine was indeed predominant in many of the analyzed textbooks. Moreover, there was a clear predominance of certain types of jobs attributed to men and other jobs associated with women.