Läroböcker: Ompröva språk och visuella representationer

The Challenge

Textbooks carry core knowledge to students in science and engineering. Further, textbooks shape impressions of the nature of scientific work—impressions of who becomes a scientist or of what kinds of problems engineers work to solve. Textbooks that embed stereotypes of sex and gender in materials perpetuate gender assumptions and produce unsound science.

Method: Rethinking Language and Visual Representations

Language (word choice, metaphors, analogies, and naming practices chosen to explain scientific concepts) and visual representations (images, tables, and graphs chosen to illustrate scientific concepts) have the power to shape scientific practice, the questions asked, the results obtained, and the interpretations made. Rethinking language and visual representation in textbooks can help remove unconscious gender assumptions that restrict discovery and innovation, and thereby reduce gender inequalities.

Gendered Innovations:

  1. Revising biology textbooks to incorporate new findings from sex and gender research. In developmental biology, this includes expanding accounts of human fertilization to reflect the active role played by the female reproductive system in sperm transportation and capacitation. In bacteriology, this includes removing scientifically unsound metaphors that present bacteria as sexed organisms.
  2. Revising physics textbooks to illustrate scientific principles through more gender neutral examples.