A Study of Japanese Intermediate and Advanced Textbooks from a Gender Perspective:

Gender Balance in Real-life Characters and Authors of the Works Featured

Abstract

From the perspective of gender studies, I investigated the following facts about upper-intermediate and intermediate Japanese language textbooks. (1)Ratio of male to female real-life characters in textbooks (2)The ratio of male to female authors of the works featured in textbooks (3)Gender ratio of textbook authors (1)84.5% of the real-life characters were male; (2) 74.5% of the authors of the works featured were male; (3) 73.3% of the textbook creators were female. This suggests that while the gender of textbook characters and authors of the works featured skewed toward males, the textbook authors were mostly female.