Gender bias in Malaysian primary English language textbooks: where do we stand?

Gender bias in school textbooks has been a contentious issue in the last few decades. Systematic representation of one gender as more powerful or subservient to the other, or associating stereotypical descriptions with a particular gender becomes part of the hidden curriculum that can have harmful repercussions on students’ social and psychological development. In Malaysia, the last status check on gender bias in the primary English language textbook was conducted on textbooks published prior to 2015, and there has been no published study since assessing the textbooks that are currently in use in state-funded schools. This study sought to determine the extent of gender bias, namely, inclusion/exclusion of gender and gender stereotyping in the English language textbooks used in Malaysian state-funded primary schools. Content analysis using a corpus-assisted approach was employed to examine selected reading texts and their question sets in the Year 5 and 6 textbooks. The findings show that although, overall, there is a small positive development in gender representation in the current selection of English language textbooks, the improvement was not uniformly seen in the two textbooks examined. Differences are observed between the representations of males and females in the textbooks with reference to inclusion, family relationships, occupations, and character descriptions, notably with females overrepresented in the family domain but underrepresented in a range of occupations compared to males. In light of the findings, it is recommended that gender bias be included as part of the textbook evaluation criteria used by textbook selection committees, and that textbook writers and producers should ensure that the books they produce are free of gender bias.

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