Van typiste naar ingenieur?

Abstract

Studies on English language learning materials indicate that women are underrepresented and often appear in low-status professions, though gender equality increases within the last decade (Sunderland, 2015). To what degree does this finding apply for textbooks for learners of Dutch as a Second Language (DSL)? To our knowledge, there are no studies into gender and profession in DSL materials. Dutch however, constitutes an interesting case as both female, male and ‘gender neutral’ professional role nouns exist, while their use is not formally regulated. We systematically analyzed textual and pictorial representations of female and male professionals in textbook chapters about work in fifteen DSL textbooks published within the last 50 years. We drew on quantitative (e.g., number of fe/male and ‘gender neutral’ professional names; instances of male generics and firstness; number of depicted wo/men) and qualitative (e.g., nature of the most frequent professional names; categorization of textbook images) methods to do so. Results show that women are not underrepresented in dialogues and pictures, but that dialogue themes are unequally divided over women and men. Moreover, women are backgrounded through male generics and male firstness and female professional names appear less frequently than male names. Women are also described in gender typical roles, whereas men are not. This holds for both older (1974–2009) and recent textbooks (2011–2017). Overall, more ‘gender neutral’ nouns refer to men in the corpus, but they are used more frequently to refer to women within the last decade. Future studies should address the present theme from psycholinguistic and classroom discourse perspectives and consider additional analytical domains (e.g. chapters about family) and foci (e.g. analyses of verbs associated with wo/men). We discuss pedagogical implications (e.g., screen materials for male firstness; describe women in a greater variety of roles; reverse gender roles in class) for those with concern for gender equality in language education.