Underrepresentation of Female Referents as Pronouns, Examples and Pictures in Introductory College Textbooks

Abstract

A series of recent studies have investigated the impact of male referents such as “he” and “mankind” on the gender that listeners and readers attribute to a statement. A review of these experiments provides compelling evidence that underrepresentation of similar female referents leads people to attribute the roles presented as more representative of males than females. The review also suggests that the attributional bias is robust and not attenuated by a variety of stimulus and response conditions. Actual under-representation of female referents has been documented in children's readers, preschool picture books, and some adult communications. Selected documentation of underrepresentation has occurred for college textbooks in marriage and family studies, introductory sociology, and graduate study in psychology. A broader, more representative sample of female representation in college textbooks was judged to be needed. The current research program involved two natural process experiments conducted on a random sample of introductory-level texts. This article reports the findings from the second experiment, confirms those of the first, and establishes generalizability. Textbooks from different disciplines were analyzed for representation of females and males in genetically intended nouns and pronouns, examples, pictures of people in authority, pictures of employed or active people, and pictures of groups of people. In every analysis females were significantly underrepresented.