What does it look like?

Is there really gender inequality in ELT? On the surface it may seem that women have equality with men in our industry, after all, we’re all educated enlightened people, aren’t we? Weren’t all four of the plenary speakers female at this year’s IATEFL conference in Brighton? Let’s take a closer look both at what we teach and how we teach it, as well as how the ELT industry is run.

In the classroom

Let’s start by considering the English language itself and how it is used and how we teach it. There are a few ways that show that there is sexist bias built into the language and that this affects the way we think about women and men and their societal roles.

Sexism in the English language

There are three main ways that the English language shows bias against women. ‘Firstness’ refers to the idea that male forms are somehow the default and historically go first. We’re all familiar with this from grammar charts like this one.

Figure 1: Example grammar box

There’s no reason why the male form needs to go first. From what we know about how our experiences and our biology interact to affect the way we think and behave, we really need to consider the message that male firstness transmits, that is, that all things male for some reason take first place.

The generic male refers to the way we use male forms as the ‘default’. For example, with many professions, unless we specifically state that they refer to a woman, we assume they are male, for example: astronaut, professor, athlete, architect, engineer.

There are, of course, ‘female as default’ professions, such as secretary or nurse, but they are very heavily stereotyped as female and lower prestige than the male examples mentioned above. You may well be saying ‘well most astronauts are male, most nurses are female’, but this does not take into account how the use of language and our reality and environment are related. Our brains are shaped by our experiences, so if male forms are always placed first or are used by default, this affects the way we think about gender.

The third way that language encompasses sexist attitudes is through what is called ‘semantic derogation’, that is, the way words and phrases used to talk about and describe women have become derogatory compared to their corresponding male terms. For example, consider the term ‘spinster’ and all its connotations compared to the word ‘bachelor’ or the connotations of ‘girly’ compared to the word ‘boyish’.

Stereotyping

Another way we observe sexism in the ELT classroom is in the use of gender stereotyping in the way we talk to and about girls and women and the way we inadvertently may be reinforcing these stereotypes. It’s easy to dismiss gender stereotyping as ‘harmless fun’ or as a way to get learners engaged and interested in an English discussion. For example, asking students to read about and discuss whether women or men talk more (or gossip more, or focus more on appearance, or make better language learners) may really get students producing a lot of language but, at the same time, it’s important to note how this encourages the use of stereotyping. Consequently, those stereotypes are reinforced and then serve to limit people’s views of what they and others can do and become. ‘Harmful stereotypes perpetuate inequalities’ (United Nations OHCHR, 2024).

What can we do about sexist language use in the classroom?

First of all, we can become aware of gendering in class, in materials and in the language we use. We can reject ‘firstness’ of male terms in grammar terms, in names of professions and when we use female and male names. In general, we can be more aware of language use and more careful and conscious with how we talk to and about girls and women. We can also consider this openly with learners. We can talk with learners about gender-fair language (GFL) and compare the use of the male terms, female terms and gender-neutral terms like ‘policeman’, ‘policewoman’ and ‘police officer’.

We can look at corresponding female and male terms that show evidence of semantic derogation: ask a language corpus to give examples and/or get AI to use examples (for example, ‘girly’ vs ‘boyish’) and discuss them with learners.

Secondly, we can consider materials through the lens of gender and think about how they can be ‘ungendered’. We can look closely at classroom materials and look at things like:

  • pictures and illustrations
    • How many pictures of girls and women appear vs how many pictures of boys and men?
    • Do the pictures show the female and male characters in traditionally gendered roles or gender-neutral roles?
  • texts
    • How often are female and male characters protagonists in the reading and listening texts?
    • How often do female characters initiate conversations compared to male characters?

Of course, an important question to ask is whether it actually makes any difference to use gender-neutral language. Sczesny, Formanowicz and Moser (2016) surveyed the research on how effective the introduction of GFL in various countries in the world has been. They conclude that GFL is more accepted when there is some authority officially backing its use and when, on the contrary, language which is not neutral has some kind of official policy prohibiting its use. This seems to be a good argument for talking about and using GFL in the ELT classroom.

In the ELT profession

We now move on to look at sexism in the ELT profession as a whole. One look at the school where you work, or have worked, or any teacher’s conference you have attended will tell you that teaching English is a female-majority profession. Women make up over 65% of the teaching profession overall and a lot more at some levels (particularly Young Learners). However, as we move up the school or institution to the levels of upper management we find that the number of women in these elite positions goes down and here women are outnumbered by men.

What could explain this? Well, there are several interconnected explanations and reasons. Firstly, we cannot deny that the male-dominated system that we live under means that women face barriers in the workplace that men do not face. For example, women are often expected to cede promotions and higher-position jobs to men, while they are expected to drop in and out of the workforce as they have children. In fact, research shows even people who work in human resources still consider men to be more ‘suitable’ for upper management jobs. A 2023 survey of 907 human resources professionals in England and Wales showed that 15% of them agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that ‘men are better suited to senior management jobs than women are’. (Young Women’s Trust survey, 2023).

Women often don’t receive the support they need to be able to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance, because they are still often expected to bear the majority of responsibility for childcare and domestic duties. It’s interesting to note that as the patriarchal system spread and took hold around the world – partly through the spread of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries – it also played a role in the ELT world. Pennycook (1989:611) has argued that the beginnings of language teaching led to ‘a hierarchically organised division between male conceptualisers and female practitioners’ and this seems to still be evident today. It is also well documented that women’s contributions to the industry are still undervalued. It seems hard to see how this system can change without the creation of more supportive workplace cultures that focus on equality for everyone.

What can we do about sexism in the ELT industry?

How can we really make a change so that our profession is more equitable? In reading and researching this topic over the last couple of years, three things really seem to stand out in terms of ways to bring about change. Firstly, the idea of awareness, that is, actually recognising and becoming aware of gender inequalities in our industry. Heywood and Adzajlic (2023) talk about doing audits, that is, checklists that help you to become aware of, and take stock of, your own behaviour, in this case, towards your own teaching and your treatment of female and male students. This means asking yourself questions like:

Do I refer to students in gendered ways?

Do I give equal attention to female and male students?

Do I treat female and male students in the same way?

Cameron (2024:167) argues that ‘What’s really needed is for men to change their behaviour’ and this is something for us all to think about. Often the assumption is that women need to take assertiveness training courses and change the way they speak and act, but why aren’t we considering courses for men in how to support equity in the workplace and in the home better? What about short, diversity-training courses that simply draw attention to how much extra work women are expected to do and what can be done to support women at work, at conferences and in the home? This has been shown to be effective in changing men’s attitudes to women in STEM (Jackson et al., 2014).

Apart from awareness, we can include diversity and gender equality in teacher education. Many teachers at all levels and in all content areas state that they are unsure of how to recognise, call out and deal with sexism and misogyny in the classroom, which points to the necessity of including this in teacher education. This brings us to the third related point, that schools often don’t have a clear policy or procedure for challenging and combatting sexism when it happens in the institution. Insisting that your school has something like this and knows how it is to be implemented seems like an important step. There is no quick and easy way to bring about systemic change to the industry, and ‘We can only start from where we are, and keep talking about where we want to go’. (Cameron, 2024:178)

Useful resources

Free online course
The British Council. (2024). ‘Exploring gender equality in education’. Available from https://www.britishcouncil.org/exploring-gender-equality-education (Last accessed 7 June 2024).

Sexual harassment checklist for those working in ELT
EFL Magazine. (2024). ‘Speak out, but be heard: against sexual harassment in ELT’. Available from https://eflmagazine.com/speak-heard-sexual-harassment-elt/ (Last accessed 7 June 2024).

References

Cameron, D. (2024). Language, Sexism and Misogyny. Taylor & Francis.

Heywood, S. & Adzajlic, B. (2023). Challenging Gender Stereotypes in the Early Years: changing the narrative. Routledge.

Jackson, S.M., Hillard, A.L. & Schneider, T.R. (2014). ‘Using implicit bias training to improve attitudes toward women in STEM’. Social Psychology of Education 17 419–438.

Pennycook, A. (1989). ‘The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching’. TESOL Quarterly 23 4:589–618.

Sczesny, S., Formanowicz, M. & Moser, F. (2016). Can gender-fair language reduce gender stereotyping and discrimination?’. Frontiers in Psychology 7 154379.

United Nations. OHCHR and women’s human rights and gender equality (2024). ‘Gender stereotyping’. Available from https://www.ohchr.org/en/women/gender-stereotyping (Last accessed 7 June 2024).

Young Women’s Trust. (2023). ‘The Long Road to Change. Young Women’s Trust Annual Survey 2023’. Available from https://www.youngwomenstrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Young-Womens-Trust-Annual-Survey-Report-2023.pdf (Last accessed 7 June 2024).

 

Carol Lethaby has been a teacher and teacher educator for over thirty-five years. She is based in San Francisco, California and is an honoured instructor at UC Berkeley Extension.

Carol has worked on several textbook series for learners of English, as well as the ELTons-shortlisted An Introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom (2021). Her forthcoming book (with Patricia Harries) on women in ELT will be published by Pavilion ELT in 2025. More information at clethaby.com

clethaby@clethaby.com