Since books are essential tools in educational development, there is a need to ensure gender equity in textbook production. Existing books show a strong gender bias and there are several areas that can be explored and improved. This paper discusses some areas of gender bias in textbook production and suggests how they could be improved to reflect gender equity and thus help children, especially girl-children, develop a more positive image of themselves. The analysis is based on some of the Primary English, Maths and Science textbooks used in West Africa. In order to understand language bias as more than superficial, it is important to acknowledge the cyclical relationship between language and reality.
Language is a reflection of reality and also works to produce imbalance coercively.
The construction and use of language is not neutral, but rooted in ideology. Very often words like man and he are used to refer to both sexes, subsuming female identity under male terms. In these examples the pronouns he and his are being used generally. When anyone or humanity becomes he, women and girls are immediately demoted, since they have fallen into a mixed gender category, where male plus female equals male. A clerical officer on a salary of 2,000 naira a year was allowed 1,200 naira tax free.