Gendered Worlds in a Chinese University English Textbook Series: Balance in Numbers, Stereotypes in Substance

Abstract

Textbooks are rarely neutral artefacts. The choices their compilers make about who appears, who speaks first and which work is worth doing carry values that reach learners alongside the language being taught. Research on gender in EFL materials has concentrated heavily on primary and secondary schooling, leaving the textbooks used by English majors – students who will largely become the next generation of teachers and materials writers – comparatively unexamined. This article reports an analysis of a four-volume series published in China between 2020 and 2021, Core Curriculum: Comprehensive English, combining frequency counts subjected to chi-square testing with qualitative coding of activities, evaluative adjectives and occupations. Three findings stand out. First, balance has been reached on several measures: pictures are close to parity (76 female, 74 male), the gender of source-text authors does not differ significantly, and men are named before women no more often than the reverse in the reading passages. Second, older habits survive elsewhere: male figures outnumber female ones by 316 to 203, men hold 109 of the 131 occupations recorded, and 219 instances of “he” or “man” are used generically. Third, the qualitative picture is not uniform, since the series contains women who are bold, ambitious and heroic and men who are emotional. We read such contradictions as a symptom of a society in which women’s public presence has grown faster than the domestic arrangements and status perceptions that surround them.