Gender Representation in an Indonesia EFL Textbook or Vocational High School: A Corpus Assisted Content Analysis
Abstract
This study aims to investigate and analyse gender representation in English Textbook
a foreign language. The source of data is from an English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
textbooks, Forward an English, for vocational high school students in grade X in Indonesia
2020. Content analysis was implemented as the design, and corpus linguistic tools were utilized
to investigate the ratio of female-to-male appearance, the use of gender-neutral and gender-
marked, the adjectives associated with women and men, the title of address for reference to
women, and the order of mention of women and men. The findings showed an attempt of the
author to represent gender equality, including the equality of the appearance of both women
and men, the strategy to neutralize gender-marked to be gender-neutral, and using the title
address “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.” or “Miss” for the liberation of women. However, there are still
some imbalanced representations of gender that are attached to gender-marked nouns, and the
male-firstness is still dominant with a ratio of 1:3. Furthermore, there is an emergent finding in
terms of occupation. It is shown that men tend to be portrayed as having settled, established,
highly paid, and prestigious jobs compared to women. In conclusion, gender has been
represented equally in this EFL textbook, even though there are still some imbalanced
representations of gender.