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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 one in three gendered words were female.

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