Is gender stereotyping still an issue? An analysis of a Hong Kong primary English textbook series

This study aimed to investigate gender representation in an English textbook series used in Hong Kong schools. The corpus software AntConc was used to analyse the collocations of gendered terms He/he, She/she, Man/man, Woman/woman, women, Boy/boy, Boys/boys, Girl, and Girls/girls in the textbook series in order to find out if gender stereotyping, which was a problem in previous studies (e.g., Cincotta, 1978; Sakita, 1995), is still an issue. The results of the study showed that females were no longer regarded as delicate or weak but stronger than males. In occupational roles, females were no longer portrayed only as housewives in the family, but they also worked in society. On the other hand, the stereotyped images of males wearing shorts, jeans or shirts and females putting on skirts or dresses still exist. In addition, while it was found that the male terms have more collocates and both males and females were imbued with positive characteristics, negative adjectives were only used to describe males and males were never described in terms of their physical attractiveness. Copyright © 2012 Centre for Applied English Studies, The University of Hong Kong.