Bringing Women In: Gender and American Government and Politics Textbooks

Where Are the Women? An Analysis of Gender Mainstreaming in Introductory Political Science Textbooks

“…First, following Olivo (2012), I examined the percentage of pages on which I found references to women. As shown in Table 2 Table A2) for full explanation of non-substantive applications; they also query for lady/ladies, congresswoman/congresswomen, and sex/sexual.…”

“…While we should take pains to avoid conflating gender and women (Di Stefano, 1997), it is women's voices and experiences that are largely missing from political science and the extant literature on gender and textbooks examines terminology largely related to women, females, and feminism. The research has primarily focused on introductory American government textbooks as these are among the most widely read textbooks in political science (Olivo, 2012). Studies indicate that gender-related content is limited in American Government texts and is most often found in chapters that address the women's suffrage and women's rights movements in the context of civil rights (Cassese et al, 2012;Cassese et al, 2014;Olivo, 2012).…”

“…The research has primarily focused on introductory American government textbooks as these are among the most widely read textbooks in political science (Olivo, 2012). Studies indicate that gender-related content is limited in American Government texts and is most often found in chapters that address the women's suffrage and women's rights movements in the context of civil rights (Cassese et al, 2012;Cassese et al, 2014;Olivo, 2012). This is problematic in that it segregates gender from the rest of the American government curriculum rather than treating it as "an important analytic construct that is directly applicable to the main themes, concepts, and lessons in the course" (Cassese et al, 2012, p. 240).…”

“…In this article, I expand the field by examining more general introduction to political science textbooks in order to determine whether or not the lack of gender mainstreaming is also at play in other areas of political science education. Following Olivo (2012) and Cassese, Bos, and Schneider (2014), I conduct quantitative and qualitative content analysis to determine both the quantity of and quality of the material related to women and feminism. Just as in American government texts, I…”

A Forgotten Minority? A Content Analysis of Asian Pacific Americans in Introductory American Government Textbooks

“…Some textbooks include Asian Pacific Americans in tables, fi gures, graphs, and pictures (for the relative importance of these sections, see Olivo ( 2012a ) …”