Gender Inequality in English Textbooks Around the World: an NLP Approach

Textbooks are important for shaping children's understanding of the world. Previous studies of individual countries have suggested that gender inequality exists. There lacks a study that compares gender inequality in textbooks around the world. This study uses NLP approaches to quantify gender inequality in English textbooks in 7 cultural spheres, 22 countries, by measuring the count, firstness, and TF IDF words by gender. The study also counted the names that appeared in TF IDF word lists and sorted the names by gender, found out that LLMs can distinguish between the different TF IDF word lists, and mapped the TF IDF words to GloVe to see that some keywords are closer to one gender than the other. The study found more male count, firstness, and names. The study found that there is significant gender inequality in all the textbooks. Gender inequality is demonstrated the least in textbooks of the Latin Cultural Sphere.