Abstract
Schoolbooks convey not only school-relevant knowledge; they also influence the development of stereotypes about different social groups. Particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, many studies analysed schoolbooks and criticised the overall predominance of male persons and of traditional role allocations. Since that time, women’s and men’s occupations and social functions have changed considerably. The present research investigated gender portrayals in schoolbooks for German and mathematics that were recently published in Germany. We examined the proportions of female and male persons in pictures and texts and categorized their activities, occupational and parental roles. Going beyond previous studies, we added two criteria: the use of gender-fair language and the spatial arrangements of persons in pictures. Our results show that schoolbooks for German contained almost balanced depictions of girls and boys, whereas women were less frequently shown than men. In mathematics books, males outnumbered females in general. Across both types of books, female and male persons were engaged in many different activities, not only gender-typed ones; however, male persons were more often described via their profession than females. Use of gender-fair language has found its way into schoolbooks but is not used consistently. Books for German were more gender fair in terms of linguistic forms than books for mathematics. For spatial arrangements, we found no indication for gender biases. The results are discussed with a focus on how schoolbooks can be optimized to contribute to gender equality.
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Notes
Overall chi2 tests comparing frequencies of the genders across the two school subjects were insignificant for human characters (since three out of the four single comparisons were in the direction of males predominating over females: see Fig. 1); χ 2 (1, N = 1,193) = 0.360, p = 0.55 and significant for non-human characters: χ 2 (1, N = 82) = 4.94, p = 0.03, φ = 0.25.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Michael Schulte, Katharina Marquardt, Mario Datts, Sara Matthies and Joanna Schiweck for their help in conducting this research and to Friederike Braun for her comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This research was conducted within the Marie Curie Initial Training Network: Language, Cognition, & Gender, ITN LCG, funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 237907 (www.itn-lcg.eu).
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Franziska Moser. Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Educational Science and Psychology, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: franziska.moser@fu-berlin.de; Web site: http://www.ewi-psy.fu-berlin.de/en/einrichtungen/arbeitsbereiche/ewi-psy/mitarbeiter_innen/Moser_F/index.html. She was a research fellow of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network—Language, Cognition, and Gender (ITN LCG) at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Current themes of research:
Gender equality. Gender-fair language. Development of gender roles. Attitude–behaviour relations with respect to language use.
Prof. Bettina Hannover. Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Educational Science and Psychology, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: bettina.hannover@fu-berlin.de; Web site: http://www.ewi-psy.fu-berlin.de/en/einrichtungen/arbeitsbereiche/ewi-psy/mitarbeiter_innen/Hannover_B/index.html. She is heading a research group at the Freie Universität Berlin, whose program focuses on the mechanisms underlying the development of gender differences in interests, skills and occupational careers and on measures aiming at their attenuation. She has combined the pursuit of basic and applied issues from social and educational psychology, in order to gain a better understanding of the self, as it relates to gender identity and gender-typed behaviours.
Current themes of research:
Aspects of education (e.g. sex differences in social beliefs; gender-fair instruction). Gender stereotypes. Training and teaching techniques. Observational methods. Behavioural measures. The conduct of experimental field trials. The development and evaluation of trainings.
Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education:
Vervecken, D. & Hannover, B. (2012). Ambassadors of gender equality? How use of pair forms versus masculines as generics impacts perception of the speaker. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 754–762.
Kessels, U. & Hannover, B. (2008). When being a girl matters less. Accessibility of gender-related self-knowledge in single-sex and coeducational classes and its impact on students' physics related self-concept of ability. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 273–289.
Hannover, B. & Kessels, U. (2004). Why German school students don’t like math and sciences. A self-to-prototype matching approach. Learning and Instruction, 14, 51–67.
Hannover, B. (2000). Development of the self in gendered contexts. In Th. Eckes & H.M. Trautner (Eds.), The developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 177–206). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Appendix
Appendix
Gender composition of groups and dyads
To test whether the critique of earlier studies that female and male persons are mostly shown in interactions with same-gender others (e.g. Lindner and Lukesch 1994) still applies, we examined the gender composition of groups and dyads. We differentiated three codes: A person was part of either a group of three or more, of a dyad (e.g. girl–boy, boy–man) or was alone.
Cohen's Kappas for the codings of gender compositions were high (books for German: Cohen’s Kappatext = .88, Kappapicture = 0.97; books for mathematics: Kappatext = 0.96, Kappapicture = 0.89). Table 2 shows that in books for German, girls and boys were typically depicted in groups or dyads and rarely alone. Overall, we found mostly mixed-gender group and dyadic constellations. Girls and boys were significantly more often depicted in mixed-gender groups or dyads than in same-gender groups or dyads; girls: χ 2 (1, N = 99) = 16.98, p < 0.001; boys: χ 2 (1, N = 101) = 8.33, p = 0.005. Similarly, women and men were more often depicted in mixed-gender than in same-gender constellations; this difference was, however, not significant, χ 2 (1, N = 24) = 1.50, p = 0.31.
Table 3 shows the depictions of female and male persons in mathematics books. Girls and boys were mostly shown in groups or dyads and seldom alone. Again girls and boys appeared more often in mixed-gender groups/dyads than in same-gender groups/dyads; girls: χ 2 (1, N = 80) = 54.45, p < 0.001; boys: χ 2 (1, N = 79) = 38.29, p < 0.001. In contrast, women and men were shown equally often in mixed-gender and same-gender constellations.
To summarize, our analyses revealed that children/adolescents (but not adults) were significantly more often depicted in mixed-gender than in same-gender compositions, in both books for German and for mathematics. This clearly contradicts the situation in the real world. As studies on interpersonal relations, friendships and peer choices showed, children aged 3 up to about 11 years have a strong preference for same-gender others (cf. Blakemore et al. 2009; Maccoby 1990). An explanation might be that schoolbook producers try to make illustrations and texts equally appealing to both male and female students, by disregarding real word differences in the frequencies of same-gender and mixed-gender groups.
Locations
Locations were criticised by earlier studies, showing that girls are mainly depicted indoors and boys mainly outdoors (e.g. Silbermann and Krüger 1971). We therefore differentiated whether the characters were performing their activities indoors or outdoors. These codes could be combined with codes for specific locations such as school, work or houses/rooms.
Cohen's Kappas for the codings of locations were good (books for German: Kappatext = 0.77, Kappapicture = 0.86; books for mathematics: Kappatext = 0.87, Kappapicture = 0.83). The coding resulted in a very high percentage of uncodable information: Many of the backgrounds in pictures which might have contained location information were blank (e.g. white background), and many texts did not contain any reference to location (books for German: 209 (47 %) locations out of 445 not codable; books for mathematics: 368 (70.4 %) locations out of 523 not codable). The remaining locations were analysed for indoor/outdoor information. In general, in books for German, the characters were significantly more often depicted in an outdoor than in an indoor location, χ 2 (1, N = 353) = 16.50, p < .001. In both school subjects, gender was independent of whether the person was depicted in an indoor or an outdoor location (books for German: χ 2 (1, N = 214) = 0.14, p = 0.71; books for mathematics: χ 2 (1, N = 141) = 0.62, p = 0.43).
To summarize, our hypothesis that gender might be systematically related to the locations in which characters are shown was not confirmed. Possibly, blank backgrounds and unidentifiable locations are chosen intentionally by illustrators and authors of schoolbooks, trying to avoid the gender biases found in earlier studies where females were often shown inside a house and males outdoors (cf. Lindner and Lukesch 1994).
Secondary texts
Secondary texts were analysed to see whether schoolbook producers choose female and male authors to the same extent and whether texts of these authors include a balanced number of male and female main characters. Only three secondary texts were found in mathematics books, and in each of them, animals were the main characters. We subdivided the secondary texts into older (produced before the 1940s) and recent (from 1940s upwards) ones and coded persons, if present, for their gender and the authors of these texts.
We found a preponderance of male authors for older texts (19 male compared to two female authors and two not specified; χ 2 (1, N = 21) = 13.76, p < 0.001). For recent secondary texts, we found a balanced number of female and male authors (18 female and 18 male authors). With respect to the persons the secondary texts were about, we found a preponderance of male protagonists for all texts, χ 2 (1, N = 68) = 5.88, p = 0.02.
Two things are noticeable about these results. First, in older secondary texts, male authors clearly dominated. It seems that female authors are rarely considered when selecting secondary texts for schoolbooks, a finding which is in line with the underrepresentation of female historic personalities in history schoolbooks (cf. Schröter 2002). Second, although the number of female and male authors was balanced for recent secondary texts, characters appearing in these texts were still predominantly male. Although the majority of contributors (authors, illustrators, editors) to both books for German and mathematics were female, they were more inclined to choose secondary texts of male authors and with male protagonists. With respect to gender fairness, it would be preferable to include more secondary literature written by women in former times and with female protagonists.
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Moser, F., Hannover, B. How gender fair are German schoolbooks in the twenty-first century? An analysis of language and illustrations in schoolbooks for mathematics and German. Eur J Psychol Educ 29, 387–407 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-013-0204-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-013-0204-3