Education is often recognized as a tool for creating equal opportunities for everyone to succeed despite their background. However, gender bias within the educational system, frequently perpetuated through textbooks and curricula, significantly shapes the experiences of students, particularly women, by creating gender stereotypes. This article explores the many ways gender bias finds itself a place in the curricula and the vulnerabilities it creates for students, particularly women. In this article, I argue that it is essential to recognise that gender bias is not a single, static problem. Instead, it can manifest in multiple ways, including the representation of gender roles, language used, segregation of occupations along gender lines, and reinforcement of stereotypes. It makes gender bias a complex assortment of problems, requiring attention to each of the facets of gender bias, whereby textbooks and curriculum being one.
Why Textbooks?
Textbooks play an essential role in shaping not only the classroom discourses but also the upbringing of the students. Sadker and Zittleman (2007) cite that ‘‘students spend as much as 80 to 95% of classroom time using textbooks, and teachers make a majority of their instructional decisions based on these texts’’ (p. 144). The considerable amount of time that students spend engaging with the textbooks highlights the importance of a textbook in shaping the implicit as well as explicit values of the young generation. Having textbooks as a significant guide or framework, students draw much of their inspiration and opinions from them. This makes it very important to question the presence of gender bias in textbooks that perpetuate gender stereotypes.
Hidden Curriculum
In 1968, Phillip Jackson coined the term ‘hidden curriculum’, which educators teach students, without realizing it, through their interactions and school or classroom environment; it comprises unsaid values, beliefs, and cultural norms (Betkowski, 2023). The hidden curriculum has been elaborated on in different ways. In their work on hidden curriculum theory, Assor and Gordon (1987) raised some other points on hidden curriculum: a) the dominant authority repeatedly uses various methods to impart the knowledge it wants the students to retain over time, b) this expected knowledge remains imprinted, not merely because of its repetition, but because of general lack of alternative narratives that can challenge this knowledge, and c) the knowledge taught through implicit learning is based on beliefs, ideologies, and conforming values for socio-economic life.
How Does the Hidden Curriculum Work?
Having explored the many ways researchers have defined hidden curriculum, I argue that we should be paying attention to it because it is one of the many ways the ideology of a state, hence of the society it wants to create, is sponsored through textbooks. Textbooks are not mere collections of chapters meant to increase the knowledge of students; instead, they can reproduce, define, and promote the privilege of certain groups and certain realities over others in society.
Maira Asif (2021) conducted research on textbooks for grades 1-5 under the Single National Curriculum (SNC) by the Government of Pakistan to analyze gender bias within them. In doing so, she found that women were presented in stereotypical roles, like caregiving with limited representation in sports, STEM, and other professions (Asif, 2021). She only found two female doctors, one sportswoman, and two pilots who had ‘strayed’ from the conventional ‘women’ jobs (Asif, 2021). Similarly, Durrani (2008) argues that curriculum remains integral for states to transmit a national identity with its integral gender norms and relations. For this, the states can rely on textbooks to construct an ‘ideal’ woman. In her analysis of Pakistani textbooks, Durani (2008) found that three elements stood out for women: morality around dress codes, the gendering of work, and gendered public and domestic spaces. Thus, I argue that the significance of education for developing a national identity is closely intertwined with gender identity, and both are reciprocated through textbooks and curricula.
Why should Hidden Curriculum matter?
The feminist perspectives have already argued that there are areas of hidden curriculum that put females at a disadvantage, and these areas include academic hierarchy, stereotyped attitudes, textbooks, and subject choices and activities (Abbott, Wallace, & Tyler, 2005). Thus, the two studies (Asif, 2021; Durrani, 2008) discussed above complement the argument that textbooks are tools for subtly promoting gender stereotypes and projecting how a state envisions an ‘ideal’ woman. Textbooks show limited representation of women (that too in feminine roles), gendered division of domestic and public spaces (domestic restricted to women and public restricted to men), and the ideal dress codes (with morality being associated with what a woman wears) reaffirm the main argument of the essay that hidden curriculum in our textbooks remain one of the many ways through which the power relations are constructed, putting women at a disadvantage. This also allows us to see how textbooks and hidden curricula can serve the interests of dominant groups (i.e., the state) and marginalise the interests of women.
Students rely on textbooks to develop their understanding and broaden their thinking horizons. Suppose a textbook has a reception of passages showing women in limited and feminine roles while men are in masculine roles, it will prevent students from envisaging women in leading roles. Thus, gender inequality will subtly find its root in students’ minds. I emphasize that the students critically need to engage with gender justice to create a society where everyone and anyone has the opportunity to thrive. For this, it is essential to remain vigilant and curious about the hidden curriculum in our textbooks that reinforces gender stereotypes, normalises patriarchy, and promotes unequal power relations.
Bibliography:
Abbott, P. A., Wallace, C. D., & Tyler, M. (2005). An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Asif, M. (2021). Gender stereotypes in the single national curriculum, Pakistan. International Journal on Women Empowerment, 7(1), 47–59. https://doi.org/10.29052/2413-4252.v7.i1.2021.47-59
Assor, A., & Gordon, D. (1987). The implicit learning theory of hidden‐curriculum research. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19(4), 329–339. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027870190404
Betkowski, A. (2023). What is the hidden curriculum in education?. GCU Blog. https://www.gcu.edu/blog/teaching-school-administration/what-hidden-curriculum-education
Durrani, N. (2008). Schooling the ‘other’: the representation of gender and national identities in Pakistani curriculum texts. Compare. 2008;38(5):595–610.
Sadker, D., & Zittleman, K. (2007). Gender bias from colonial America to today’s classrooms. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (pp. 135–169). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
