By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Textbooks for primary school students have been accused of containing illustrations that could create a gender bias.
Male characters appear about 30 percent more often than girls in textbook illustrations and are portrayed as main characters, according to a paper coauthored by Prof Kwon Chi-soon of Seoul National University of Education and Kim Kyung-hee, a teacher at Euncheon Elementary School in Seoul.
``Male characters play important roles in many cases while female characters often play passive roles,'' the research team said in the paper. ``Children are vulnerable to the biased role models and textbook writers have to remove those sexual stereotypes.''
The paper said men are depicted as a president, politician, judge, doctor and university professor, while women appear as a teacher, nurse and bank tellers.
Male characters play the main roles about 60 percent more often than their counterparts in textbooks, it said. In social studies textbooks, male characters appeared twice as often as females.
But textbooks for domestic affairs and arts have more female characters than male figures in their illustrations, the paper added.
kswho@koreatimes.co.kr
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