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A Comparative Analysis of Gender Inequalities in BRICS Textbooks: Evidence for Inclusive Education Policy

Sat, March 28, 1:15 to 2:30pm, Hilton, Floor: Fourth Floor - Tower 3, Union Square 19

Proposal

While the importance of inclusive and representative curricula is widely recognized (Organización de
las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 2017; Cerna et al., 2021), large-scale,
comparative research on textbook content has been hampered by two key challenges. The first is a
methodological bottleneck: a predominance of analytical methods designed for English systematically
limits the capacity of researchers in the Global South to conduct large-scale curricular studies (Crawfurd
et al., 2024; Vojı́ř and Rusek, 2019). The second is a resulting scarcity of evidence from low- and middle-
income countries (LMICs). This study addresses these gaps by conducting a comparative analysis of
gender inequalities in high school textbook collections from three BRICS nations: Brazil, India, and
Russia. This comparison is strategic; these globally influential nations represent vast and diverse student
populations and operate within distinct cultural and political contexts, making them a critical site for
understanding non-Western educational systems. The central objective is to investigate how gender
is constructed and represented in their curricula. By developing a standardized analytical protocol,
this research asks: How are gender hierarchies constructed and maintained in these diverse curricular
traditions, and what do variations in these patterns reveal about systemic symbolic inequality?
This research is grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which provides the framework for
interpreting our findings (Mullet, 2018; Moore, 2022). CDA guides our understanding of how discursive
regularities in textbooks can naturalize power hierarchies and distribute epistemic authority unevenly.
We interpret that “whoever receives greater textual density” tends to control the boundaries of legitimate
knowledge, a mechanism that influences the construction of historical references and models of excellence
for students (Apple, 2013; Schissler, 2009). This framework allows us to analyze how unequal gender
representation is not merely a numerical imbalance but a practice that reinforces the marginalization of
certain groups from positions of authority and expertise within the curriculum.
To ensure comparability across different linguistic and publishing ecosystems, this study employs a
standardized Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline, adapted for non-Anglophone contexts. The
methodological design follows a three-step workflow, beginning with the extraction and processing of
all textbooks from PDF to clean, machine-readable text. We then applied Named Entity Recognition
(NER) to identify mentions of individuals, a process that required specific technical and linguistic ad-
justments to adapt models for Portuguese and other languages. As a preliminary step to map broad
patterns of inequality, this initial analysis operationalizes gender as a binary category (male/female),
while acknowledging that this is a simplification. This approach provides a foundational baseline that
will be expanded in future research to incorporate more nuanced representations of gender. Finally, to
synthesize these initial findings, we calculated the differential between male and female mentions as a
primary indicator of representational asymmetry. This protocol was applied to a diverse corpus of texts
central to the construction of national identity: 102 humanities and language arts textbooks from Brazil,
13 history textbooks from India, and 3 history textbooks from Russia. While the collections differ in
size and scope, our use of proportional analysis is designed to account for these variations and allow for
robust comparison.
Our preliminary findings, based on a binary analysis of male and female mentions, reveal a systematic
inequality in textual visibility across all three countries, though its intensity varies significantly. In Russia,
we found 87.97% male mentions versus 12.03% female mentions. In India, the ratio was 71.12% male
to 28.88% female mentions. Brazil showed the smallest, though still significant, gap at 60.68% male to
39.32% female mentions. These initial results show that male centrality remains hegemonic across these
different curricular traditions. The clear gradient of asymmetry (Russia > India > Brazil) raises critical
questions for further analysis: To what extent is this variation shaped by differing levels of state control
over publishing, the historical influence of feminist social movements, or specific national curriculum
policies? In the Brazilian case, for instance, the persistence of nearly 60% male mentions is particularly
striking given that women constitute a demographic majority, illustrating a clear “dissociation between
population profiles and schooled visibility regimes.”
This study offers three key contributions. First, it provides robust, comparative evidence of gender
inequality in the curricula of three globally significant LMICs. Second, it demonstrates a replicable
auditing protocol that could be used by policymakers and publishers to create monitoring dashboards.
These tools could track gender representation by subject and grade level across different publishing
cycles, providing clear, data-driven goals for text curation and the diversification of authors, in line with
Goal 4.7 of the 2030 Agenda. Finally, by documenting this gradient in visibility asymmetry, this research
offers an empirical foundation for future inquiry. The next phase of this research agenda will extend
the analysis both longitudinally, tracking changes over 20 years, and thematically, moving beyond a
binary analysis to investigate the representation of non-binary identities and a wider spectrum of gender
expressions. This will allow us to move beyond a static snapshot and analyze how curricular biases
evolve, contributing to a growing body of longitudinal textbook research that has tracked long-term
shifts in topics such as nationalism (Lerch et al., 2017), representations of minority groups (Skinner and
Bromley, 2023; Choi and Lerch, 2024), and the emergence of new discourses like climate change (D’Apice
and Bromley, 2023).

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