Linguistic sexism and gender role stereotyping in Malaysian English primary school textbooks

Abstract

Sexist language expresses bias in favour of one sex, treating the other sex in a discriminatory manner and in most cases it is bias in favour of men over women. Its existence in society has unintentionally spread to the education system through learning materials such as school textbooks. Such a development provides an opportunity for research to be carried out. Consequently, a study was conducted to analyze sexist language and gender role stereotyping in nine Malaysian English primary school textbooks of Year 1 to Year 6. Its purpose was to determine the extent of gender disparities and discriminations in the textbooks. This descriptive quantitative qualitative study utilized a software programme, Wordsmith Tools 4.0, to generate a wordlist from the textbooks through a digitization process which included the scanning and converting of the textbooks into document files. From the corpus created, 390 potential gender bias words with frequencies of 4861 times were identified for analysis according to five categories; Pronouns, Kinship Terms, Hobbies and Activities, Professions and Salutations. In the second stage of the study, Wanjiku and Masheti's (1997) ABC Gender Analysis Framework was used to analyze the selected gender associated words qualitatively for linguistic sexism and gender role stereotyping. The findings reveled that there was an under-representation of females and an overrepresentation of the superiority of males. In other words, males were the focus in most of the pages as proven by the high frequencies of male characters in the textbooks. Second, there were also biasness and gender stereotyping in activities and employment roles: female roles and occupations were limited compared to males. Muscular words such as 'strong', 'brave', 'football' and 'scouts' were often associated with males and feminine words such as 'cooking', 'nursing', 'sweeping', 'netball' were associated with females.