SWSR: A Chinese dataset and lexicon for online sexism detection

Online sexism has become an increasing concern in social media platforms as it has affected the healthy development of the Internet and can have negative effects in society. While research in the sexism detection domain is growing, most of this research focuses on English as the language and on Twitter as the platform. Our objective here is to broaden the scope of this research by considering the Chinese language on Sina Weibo. We propose the first Chinese sexism dataset – Sina Weibo Sexism Review (SWSR) dataset –, as well as a large Chinese lexicon SexHateLex made of abusive and gender-related terms. We introduce our data collection and annotation process, and provide an exploratory analysis of the dataset characteristics to validate its quality and to show how sexism is manifested in Chinese. The SWSR dataset provides labels at different levels of granularity including (i) sexism or non-sexism, (ii) sexism category and (iii) target type, which can be exploited, among others, for building computational methods to identify and investigate finer-grained gender-related abusive language. We conduct experiments for the three sexism classification tasks making use of state-of-the-art machine learning models. Our results show competitive performance, providing a benchmark for sexism detection in the Chinese language, as well as an error analysis highlighting open challenges needing more research in Chinese NLP. The SWSR dataset and SexHateLex lexicon are publicly available.

Sexism Prediction in Spanish and English Tweets Using Monolingual and Multilingual BERT and Ensemble Models

[EN] The popularity of social media has created problems such as hate speech and sexism. The identification and classification of sexism in social media are very relevant tasks, as they would allow building a healthier social environment. Nevertheless, these tasks are considerably challenging. This work proposes a system to use multilingual and monolingual BERT and data points translation and ensemble strategies for sexism identification and classification in English and Spanish. It was conducted in the context of the sEXism Identification in Social neTworks shared 2021 (EXIST 2021) task, proposed by the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF). The proposed system and its main components are described, and an in-depth hyperparameters analysis is conducted. The main results observed were: (i) the system obtained better results than the baseline model (multilingual BERT); (ii) ensemble models obtained better results than monolingual models; and (iii) an ensemble model considering all individual models and the best standardized values obtained the best accuracies and F1-scores for both tasks. This work obtained first place in both tasks at EXIST, with the highest accuracies (0.780 for task 1 and 0.658 for task 2) and F1-scores (F1-binary of 0.780 for task 1 and F1-macro of 0.579 for task 2).Magnossao De Paula, AF.; Fray Da Silva, R.; Baris Schlicht, I. (2021). Sexism Prediction in Spanish and English Tweets Using Monolingual and Multilingual BERT and Ensemble Models. CEUR Workshop. 356-373. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19056135637

Sexism Prediction in Spanish and English Tweets Using Monolingual and Multilingual BERT and Ensemble Models

[EN] The popularity of social media has created problems such as hate speech and sexism. The identification and classification of sexism in social media are very relevant tasks, as they would allow building a healthier social environment. Nevertheless, these tasks are considerably challenging. This work proposes a system to use multilingual and monolingual BERT and data points translation and ensemble strategies for sexism identification and classification in English and Spanish. It was conducted in the context of the sEXism Identification in Social neTworks shared 2021 (EXIST 2021) task, proposed by the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF). The proposed system and its main components are described, and an in-depth hyperparameters analysis is conducted. The main results observed were: (i) the system obtained better results than the baseline model (multilingual BERT); (ii) ensemble models obtained better results than monolingual models; and (iii) an ensemble model considering all individual models and the best standardized values obtained the best accuracies and F1-scores for both tasks. This work obtained first place in both tasks at EXIST, with the highest accuracies (0.780 for task 1 and 0.658 for task 2) and F1-scores (F1-binary of 0.780 for task 1 and F1-macro of 0.579 for task 2).Magnossao De Paula, AF.; Fray Da Silva, R.; Baris Schlicht, I. (2021). Sexism Prediction in Spanish and English Tweets Using Monolingual and Multilingual BERT and Ensemble Models. CEUR Workshop. 356-373. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19056135637

Sexist Attitudes in Online Video Gaming: Development and Validation of the Sexism Against Women Gamers Scale (SAWGS) in Spanish and English

Sexism is an increasingly prevalent problem in the gaming community. However, until now, assessment instruments focused on the construct “sexism against women gamers” are lacking. We present an 8-item self-report scale: Sexism Against Women Gamers Scale (SAWGS). We studied the reliability and validity of the scores of Spanish and English versions across five independent samples (N = 2,437), with participants from Spain and the United States. Scores on both versions demonstrated high reliability, while exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported their unidimensional structure. The analysis established configural, metric, and scalar invariance across gender. SAWGS was invariant at the configural level across countries. SAWGS scores were independent of social desirability, positively correlated with myths about intimate-partner violence against women, sexism, and social dominance orientation, and correlated negatively with feminism. Using two fictitious scenarios of sexism in online gaming, we found that gamers with higher scores on SAWGS showed a greater tendency to downplay a sexist incident and proposed a less severe punishment for toxic gamers. The SAWGS explained additional variance on responses to scenarios beyond that explained by other measures. The detection of sexism should make it possible to develop programs for its eradication and avoid negative consequences for women gamers

Gender Bias and Sexism in Language: an Analysis of English and Italian Job Vacancies

openOver the last decade, public debate has concentrated on the issue of gender and sexism and of their relationship with language. In particular, sexism, which is discrimination on the basis of sexual membership, pervades society and language too. The main purpose of this dissertation is to understand to what extent sexism is rooted in language use and what strategies have been adopted to avoid the use of sexist language. The first chapter provides an overview of the main topics of this work, such as the definition of gender along with the concept of linguistic gender, the issue of linguistic sexism and of sexism in society, and the work of Feminist Linguistics towards overcoming gender bias in language. The second chapter is devoted to the explanation of the strategies used to promote Non-sexual language, such as Gender Neutralization and Gender Specification and also provides an insight into the case of Italian language. In the third chapter, through the use of a concordancing software, called AntConc, job applications, both in English and in Italian are analyzed; the main aim of this research is to understand whether and to what extent sexist language use is present in job applications and whether strategies for linguistic equality have been employed

GENDER REPRESENTATION IN MALAYSIAN SECONDARY SCHOOL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS

This study was conducted to describe the representation of gender in Forms 1, 2, 3, and 4 English language textbooks in Malaysian secondary schools. Gender-biased materials have been reported to affect the motivation of students who go through the textbooks (Treichler and Frank, 1989). Computer analysis tools and manual analysis were used to perform content and linguistic analyses. These methods in addition to discourse analysis of the text books aided the researchers to disclose the predictable patterns of sexism in the textbooks in order to identify the existence and extent of stereotypes. The results clearly indicate there is an absolute gender bias with males outnumbering females. Further, certain nouns referring to males precede those referring to females; however, males almost exclusively turn out to represent negative characters. Keywords:   Gender; English language textbooks; Content analysis; Corpus based analysis;  Stereo-typed roles

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

We employ Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse 377808 English song lyrics from the "Two Million Song Database" corpus, focusing on the expression of sexism across five decades (1960-2010) and the measurement of gender biases. Using a sexism classifier, we identify sexist lyrics at a larger scale than previous studies using small samples of manually annotated popular songs. Furthermore, we reveal gender biases by measuring associations in word embeddings learned on song lyrics. We find sexist content to increase across time, especially from male artists and for popular songs appearing in Billboard charts. Songs are also shown to contain different language biases depending on the gender of the performer, with male solo artist songs containing more and stronger biases. This is the first large scale analysis of this type, giving insights into language usage in such an influential part of popular culture

THE SEXIST LANGUAGE USED BY THE CHARACTERS IN THE DUCHESS MOVIE

Abstrak Seksisme merupakan suatu hal yang memegang peranan penting dalam film ini. Diskriminasi sangat erat kaitannya dengan kemunculan seksisme. Disini para tokoh yang didasari sifat, bahasa dan latar belakang masing-masing yang memerankan peranan penting dalam munculnya seksisme bahasa di alur cerita dalam studi ini. Dalam film yang di produseri oleh Saul Dibb ini, terdapat empat tokoh yang saling berkaitan dengan masalah internal pernikahan antara Duke dan Duchess dari Devonshire yang membuat keberadaan wanita diremehkan dan dipandang sebelah mata. Teori dari Sara Mills digunakan karena berkaitan dengan bahasa seksis baik secara langsung maupun tidak langsung seperti dalam pemilihan kata atau perumpamaan. Terdapat enam tipe bahasa seksis yaitu: kata generik, derivatif, istilah non-paralel yang menunjukkan semantik degenerasi, seksisme dalam pepatah, seksisme dalam kata-kata makian. Melalui hasil tersebut, studi ini mampu menunjukkan efek atau akibat dari keberadaan bahasa seksis dalam film yang berlatar belakang seksisme ini.  Kata Kunci: gender, seksisme, bahasa seksis.   Abstract Sexism plays an important role in this film. Discrimination is closely associated with the appearance of sexism. The figures here are based on the character personality, language and background of characters which plays an important role in the emergence of sexism in the language of the storyline in this study. The film which was produced by Saul Dibb, there are four interrelated characters with internal marital problem between the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire who makes women presence underrated and underestimated. Sara Mills theory is used because it is associated with sexist language either directly or indirectly as in the choice of words or metaphorical. There are six types of sexist language, namely: the generic, derivative, non-parallel terms that indicate semantic degeneration, sexism in proverb, sexism in swear words. Through these results, this study was able to demonstrate the effect or result of the presence of sexist language in the film which has a sexism background. Keywords: gender, sexism, sexist language.       Introduction Socially, women almost differ in terms of social role in the society; they are considered as a person who does not need a high position and education as men had, women are only needed to maintain the housework and caring the children or having a domestic business in order can also keep their babies in the same time. Women always underestimated as the second or lower creature whereas man as the higher than women from any things. This fact will factually create discrimination and gap between men and women. Women is lack of reproductive, sexual harrasment, and men’s violence againts women. In brief, the discourse of women discrimination definitely cannot be separated from the discourse of patriarchal culture. It shows in a lot of part in our country that women mistreatment is still and always exist. Attitudes and behaviour based on traditional assumptions about women, the stereotypes of women, sexual roles in society have been become phenomenon and belief in our life. It comes from every people minds to think and behave through  that traditional assumptions. We know that as people no matter the sex wants to treat as well and equal  in any aspect of life. Women inhabited a separate, private sphere, one suitable for the so called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness, all derived, it was claimed insistently, form women’s sexual and reproductive organization” (Kent, 1990: 30). Allowing the principle that has been made by men assumption and belief, women consciously made by men like dependence, passive, low and tractable. As Susan Kent observes: “Women were so exclusively identified by their sexual functions that nineteenth-century society came to regard them as ‘the Sex’” (Kent, 1990:32). This research studies about some social phenomenon that are found in our society through the visual media such as movie. The aim of this research is to describe the sexist language that used by the characters in The Duchess movie. This research gives understanding of sexist language and the way how it is used in movie dialogue. The kinds of types of sexist language that found in The Duchess movie based on overt sexism and indirect sexism or contextually meaning and the diction based on Sara Mills theory.   SEXIST LANGUAGE Researchers are mainly concerned about female and male differences in language use and the reasons behind the phenomenon. They stick to the view that language itself is not sexist, but the society is. The social sexism is transferred to language by human being, and at the same time, sexist and insulting words may reinforce biased view, and changes in the society may be reflected. So language is not only a guide, it is even a mirror that reflects the sexism in social reality, and at the same time, it makes people see the social reality more clearly. Sexist language is language that expresses bias in favor of one sex and thus treats the other sex in a discriminatory manner. In most cases, the bias is in favor of men and against women. All kinds of unequal phenomena in society including gender bias are bound to be reflected on its lexis. Gu Jiazu (2002) thinks English as a sexist language is marked with distinctive sexist factors, among which the lexis is the most important aspect. There also have been many critical feminist surveys of English lexis (Nilsen et al., 1977; Schulz, 1990) which have argued that sexism is inherent in many of the labels which English speakers use. Some feminists have pursued the idea that there exist lexical gaps in the language-aspects of women’s lives which are commonplace, but have no words to describe them (Spender, 1985). So it is frequently argued that these usages are sexist. Mills suggests that there are two forms of sexism which are overt and indirect sexism. Overt sexism is clear and unambiguous, while indirect sexism can only be understood contextually in relation to the interpretation of surrounding utterances. Indirect sexism is extremely common and therefore need ways to challenge and analyze its usage in language. (Mills, 2008).     OVERT SEXISM According the Sara Mills’s theory, there are two types of sexism which are overt sexism and indirect sexism. Overt sexism is one of the parts of sexism which can be clearly be understood with some forms that can be generalized about linguistically and contextually. Overt or direct sexism is the type of usage which can be straightforwardly identified through the use of linguistics markers, or through the analysis of presupposition, which has historically been associated with the expression of discriminatory opinions about women, which signals to hearers that women are seen as an inferior group in relation to males. (Mills, 2008:11).  There are some forms of overt sexism such as: Generic nouns, derivational, non-parallel term, sexism in proverb and sexism in swear words. In the other hand, there is also indirect sexism. It necessary to consider more details the proposition. It will be rather difficult to analyze because the reader can be understood because the reader must be really understand with the transparent source of data as like in the script. It shows indirectly in metaphor and irony that usually exaggerate in stereotyping one sex.   In society, men are considered the norm of the human species. They are viewed as those representing all the human beings, male and female. Simply, it can be said that “male = “human” norm. This practice makes women invisible in language. In addition, it marginalizes women and reflects a male dominated society. In accordance to that, Sara Mills and some supporting linguists gives a guideline how to identify the linguistic structure differences used in English, we can analyze morphologically by these following ways: a.       Generic nouns Another well-known example of generic masculine term is “man”. Man and woman as two equal components of human race are actually not equal in English lexicon. Man, besides its reference to male human being can also refer to the whole race. The usage in a general sense of man makes woman invisible. For example;  (1) All men must die. (2) Man is a social animal.   It is easy to see that “man”, and “men” can be used generically to refer to both male and female. In the first sentence the word Men refers to human being. Despite this, in the second sentence also state the word Man  in which it is a human species or animal. Thus, man makes males linguistically visible and females linguistically invisible. From this, one can know that in English using “man” or “men” indicates “the human race”, they treat man as the center of the society, an embodiment of criterion and totally ignore the existence of woman.   b.       Generic Pronouns (he, his, him) In English there are a group of nouns of common gender, which refer to either male or female such as student, person, teacher, etc. When such nouns are used with generic reference in single form, the traditional grammar advocates to use the masculine pronouns in the context for the purpose of coherence with generic nouns.( Zhang Zhenbang,1995).                 Generic pronouns are pronouns that are said to refer, with equal likelihood, to woman and men. But the English language ignores women by allowing masculine terms to be used specifically to refer to males and commonly to refer to human beings in general. According to the rule of traditional grammar when the indefinite pronoun one is used for generic reference, then in the context usually one, one’s, or himself is used to be its relevance. But in order to avoid repetition, he, his, him, or himself is chosen, especially in American English (Zhang Zhenbang,1995) See the examples: (1) If one wants to see the ruins, he must find his own guide. (2) Everyone must do his work well. In the first and second sentences, one and Everyone refers to the concept of people, which is a concept of common gender, we do not know they are men or women but it uses masculine pronoun. He and his in the context formally manifests the imagery of men but semantically represents people of either gender. The operation of the grammatical rule conventionally elevates the status of the masculine pronouns and lowers the feminine ones. c.        Derivational “In English, derivational morphemes are mainly prefixes and suffixes. These affixes often change the part of the stem. The affixes thereby help us to identify relationships within words”. Derivation is a way of word formation. It forms a word with meaning and category distinct from that of its base through the addition of an affix. The original base is the core of the formed word and carries the main complements of its meaning. The affixes are always bound morphemes, which carries information about meaning or function. In English lexicon, one of the most obvious evidences of the sexism is the affixes which lead to a view of women as a derivation from a male term. The feminine one is always derivative of the masculine one by adding a feminine suffix such as -ess and –ette. Actor, for instance, with the meaning of “a person who plays the part of a character in a movie or play”, when attached to a feminine suffix –ess, becomes actress with the meaning of “woman with profession similar to those of “actor” and as for –ette, when usher is adhered to –ette, it becomes usherette. Such pairs of the words are of long lists in English lexicon. Here just list some of sexist based on its derivational: Ambassador - ambassadress Prince - princess Poet - poetess Author – authoress Waiter – Waitress Manager – Manageress That some of lists of sexist derivational word have different meaning based on the classification usage for men or women. The examples show and prove that the suffixes -ette and –ess are for woman only. It is considered sexist because when men do not need any affixes to refer to them, women need it. Furthermore, the terms in the right side are the feminine terms which are only indicated to the women only. Those feminine accents in the words ambassadress, duchess, princess and poetess and so on are not referred to the men or even to all human being, but those are especially marked to the women. d.       The Non-Parallel Term The non parallel term between men and women are also the real example how sexist the English is. In accordance to that, Lakoff pointed out that words that were once equivalent terms for males and females have often diverged in meaning over time. (Chaika, Elaine.1982:205). Non parallel term or semantic derogation between men and women are also the real example how sexist the English is. In accordance to that, Lakoff pointed out that words that were once equivalent terms for males and females have often diverged in meaning over time. Consider these following examples: Mrs, Ms – Mr Mister – Mistress Governor – Governess Lady –Lord Lady – gentleman From the description above, none of feminine terms in the list connotes the same degrees as the masculine terms and almost all of them acquired as secondary sexual connotation. Lexicographers have noted that, once a word or term becomes associated with women, it often acquires semantics characteristics that are congruent with social stereotypes and evaluations of women as a group, a process that has variously been termed ‘semantic derogation’ (Shulz, 1975), ‘semantic degeneration’ (Miller and Swift, 1976) and ‘semantic polarization’ (Eakins and Eakins, 1978). e.        SEXISM IN PROVERBS Proverbs are a short pithy saying in common and recognized use; a concise sentence, often metaphorical or alliterative in form which is held to express some truth as-curtained by experience or observation. The fact that there are many English proverbs which contain the words discriminating, distinguishing women, making women are worry about it. Since proverbs are standard, it is hard to change and create new proverbs substituting the old ones. Consider these following examples of English proverbs: 1.“A man is as old as he feels, and a woman as old as she looks” this example implicitly creates an image that this sexist saying suggest that men age better than women. 2. “A man’s home is his castle”. This example also discriminate the women. It implicitly create an image that the peaceful and lovely house is only man has. 3.“A good man is hard to find” the proverbs means that the difficulties for woman to fin a good man that is suitable for them. Or in finding male patner.   f.        SEXISM IN SWEAR WORDS The swear words is an expression in sometimes conscious or unconsciously said by speaker who is in a bad condition. In some area swear words is a kind of taboo to say, but in the others are very common and probably become a habit. Those swear words are used to insult, to curse, to offend, or to mock at something or someone when the speaker strong emotion which the impact can trivialize women position. Swearing is the way someone uses obscene words orally to insult, to curse or even to offend something (someone or action). Also, for emphasizing when the persons have strong emotion (Hughes, 1991). Usually, when someone has been insulted, someone will feel offended and easy to be angry. According to Crystal (1997) as cited in (Adeoye: 2005), sexist swear words is regarded as an emotive or expressive function of language. Hughes (1991: 224-225) claims that people tend to swear when he/ she angry or disappointed. They are also likely to swear when they would like to express antagonism, frustration, surprise, anger, and shock. Usually some words that belong to this category are fuck, cunt, shit. Swear words are very common in people’s ears, because it sometimes said in the public society or even in the movie. There are several reasons why does swearing occur: 1. To express feeling in words rather than in actions, especially if you do not have bigger vocabulary (Crystal, 1995: 156). 2. To express their anger and frustration. 3.  To seem brave. 4.  To make people afraid when they have been violence by someone in the form of sex or other violence. 5.  To imitate what other people do. There are very little swear words have been written for language learners, yet nearly all- native speakers use it in daily communication. The term such as: “fuck”, “damn”,”bastard”, “son of a bitch, “motherfucker”, “asshole”,  and “bitch”. That can be used as the examples of sexist swear words which provoke the violent confrontation. In other words, according to Eisenson and Boase (in Liedlich, 1973: 107), there is some words that is not supposed to be say in the public society, because it brings the negative meaning for the speaker also the listeners. It also makes a bad habit that the speaker feels very common. If there is someone uses obscene words to swear other people will judge them as people who are impolite, do not have high and well education or having less vocabulary. Those examples above are definitely can refer to both sexes man and women. Unfortunately, in practice those words are mostly indicated to the women behaviors and attitudes. It is the fact that English has linguistic and semantic discrimination through the practice of language usage; it is briefly can be seen in the word motherfucker and bitch.   INDIRECT SEXISM According to Sara Mills, she said that indirect sexism is ironising sexism. Since it both challenging overt sexism and keeps it in play. Benwell (2006) terms this type of indirect sexism ‘new sexism’. She also adds that it’s very reminiscent of, it is not identical to past forms of sexism which clearly shown. It differentiates of they way overt sexism and indirect sexism is used. This type of new sexism is bring the outdated notions of sexism become new term one. That is why Williamson also called this new type of sexism as ‘retro-sexism’. The fact that the humor and irony are used when being sexist does not change the nature of sexism itself, but it just only interpreting simply and different way of respond the new sexism. This term of sexism used to categorize a set of stereotypical beliefs about women which cannot be directly related to a certain linguistic usage or features. (Mills, 2008:10). Overt sexism is now largely seen as anachronistic and so it has been driven underground; indirect sexism is one which in some ways attempts to deny responsibility for an utterance, mediating the utterance through irony or disguising the force of the sexism of the utterance through humor, innuendo, embedding sexism at the level of presupposition, or prefacing sexist statements with disclaimers or hesitation (Mills, 1998:135). Indirect sexism can be found in several aspects such as humor and irony, scripts and metaphor. For example in jokes, it is a complex way constituting women as ‘minority group’ without taking responsibility for that exclusion. Sexist jokes allow generally unacceptable views of women to be expressed, because the person usually tells the jokes generally can claim that they themselves did not make up the joke. (Mills, 2008:71). Metaphor The narrative pathway or script is brought to play in new reports about women and men in a public sphere. This indirect sexism refers to women implicitly. It uses things to refers to the object either men or women. Irony Irony is a common strategy for humorous remarks about women. The term of ironic sexism is often satire the object in polite way. Irony involves a difference or contrast between appearance and reality - that is a discrepancy between what appears to be true and what really is true. RESEARCH METHOD According to Bogdan and Taylor in Moleong (2007:4), descriptive qualitative research is a research procedure that represents data either written or spoken from the people and behaviors which can be observed. In addition, Krik and Miller in Moloeng (2007:4) defines the descriptive qualitative ad a certain tradition in social sciences fundamentally relies on human observation in its own religion and deals with these people in language and terminologies. Qualitative research is mostly associated with words, language and experiences rather than measurements, statistics and numeral figures. Furthermore, in analyzing the types of sexism which are used by the characters of The Duchess Movie, it will be conducted by using the descriptive qualitative research. Qualitative approach is taken because the decided research efforts in discussing, analyzing and finding the social phenomena which is running naturally; it is not a controlled or based on laboratory research. The collected data are the subjects of experiences and perspectives; the researcher attempts to arrive at a rich description of the people, objects, events or conversations and so on. The data are from the words, phrases, clauses, or sentences that found in the dialogues of some charac

Topic Modelling of Everyday Sexism Project Entries

The Everyday Sexism Project documents everyday examples of sexism reported by volunteer contributors from all around the world. It collected 100,000 entries in 13+ languages within the first 3 years of its existence. The content of reports in various languages submitted to Everyday Sexism is a valuable source of crowdsourced information with great potential for feminist and gender studies. In this paper, we take a computational approach to analyze the content of reports. We use topic-modelling techniques to extract emerging topics and concepts from the reports, and to map the semantic relations between those topics. The resulting picture closely resembles and adds to that arrived at through qualitative analysis, showing that this form of topic modeling could be useful for sifting through datasets that had not previously been subject to any analysis. More precisely, we come up with a map of topics for two different resolutions of our topic model and discuss the connection between the identified topics. In the low resolution picture, for instance, we found Public space/Street, Online, Work related/Office, Transport, School, Media harassment, and Domestic abuse. Among these, the strongest connection is between Public space/Street harassment and Domestic abuse and sexism in personal relationships.The strength of the relationships between topics illustrates the fluid and ubiquitous nature of sexism, with no single experience being unrelated to another.Comment: preprint, under revie

Teaching Inequality: A study of gender identity in EFL Textbooks

A command of English is recognised as vital for immigrants to Britain. Textbooks are used widely in learning the language but they cannot be assumed to be value free. As the Prime Minister has highlighted the importance of sexual equality, this paper analyses, from the perspective of a teacher, one book produced in the UK in order to discover how gender is represented. Making reference to key papers, there is a review of which occupations are attributed to women and which to men, which gender is given first when both are mentioned, language features employed by speakers in dialogues within the book and the use of adjectives. It is found that there are some subtle differences and therefore there is likely to be an acceptance of the values represented by its learners. Some practical recommendations are made for how a teacher might deal with such issues in class