Five per cent of upper-secondary school textbooks are written by women
Publicerat 23 Jan, 2006
The books that upper-secondary school students read in school are written by men. Although there is no rule without exceptions, books written exclusively by women can in fact be called an exception. The Umbrella Project has conducted a detailed study of the situation.
Women working on their own write five per cent of the books used in natural science and maths courses. Slightly less than 30 per cent are written by men and women working together, but over 70 per cent of these have more male than female authors. This is revealed by a survey conducted by the Umbrella Project. The survey is based on a total of 805 titles from the catalogues of the Swedish Association of Educational Publishers (FSL). These include more than 14 000 items from around 40 different publishers.
“If we want to get more women interested in technology and recruit more women engineers and scientists then it would be good if more women wrote textbooks,” says Göran Hägg, Associate Professor of Literature, author and debater.
Mona Hillman Pinheiro is the Managing Director of FSL. She thinks that it will be difficult to do anything about this.
“Men are more enterprising,” she says. Women don’t dare to take the initiative.”
But Göran Hägg has an idea on how to get more women to write textbooks.
“It might be an idea to ask women who do not have a teaching or educational background. There are a lot of very competent scientists or doctors who could write textbooks.”
The situation is almost the same in the social sciences. Women have written just over ten per cent of the books. Around 13 per cent are written by both men and women, but of these over 70 per cent have more male than female authors.
“It’s a commercial market,” says Mona Hillman Pinheiro. “You produce what the client wants.”
There are major differences between different subjects. Chemistry is the subject where men dominate most. None of the chemistry books studied by the Umbrella Project were written by women exclusively. For the books co-authored by a woman, there were also one or several male co-authors. Women figure most as authors in the field of psychology books, but still only 20 per cent of these books are written by women alone.
There are also differences between the types of book that men and women write. Two of the 33 biology books studied were written by women alone. These books are about the body and sex education and are less technical than most of the others.
“Obviously this has an impact on the content of the books to a limited extent,” says Göran Hägg.
But he does not feel that this is a serious problem. On the other hand, it may affect gender equality in the career choices of young people.
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The aim of the Umbrella Project is to increase interest, awareness and knowledge about diversity at work and the processes behind exclusion and discrimination.