How Patriarchal Norms Permeate Educational Materials and Classroom Dynamics

Schools are often described as spaces of opportunity and social mobility. Yet, long before a student steps into a classroom, the materials they will study and the interactions they will have are already shaped by a deeply entrenched cultural script – one that places men at the centre and women at the margins. Patriarchal norms do not arrive in schools through a dramatic declaration; they seep in quietly, through textbook illustrations, language choices, teacher questions, and classroom silences. Understanding how this happens – and why it matters – is essential for anyone working in or thinking seriously about education.

The theory behind the pattern: cultural reproduction
Gender bias in textbooks: what the research shows
Language and representation
Professional roles and domestic confinement
Narratives that devalue girls
The hidden curriculum: what is not written but is still taught
Classroom dynamics: how teacher-student interactions reinforce gender
Differential attention and participation
Unconscious expectations and their effects
Task assignments and gendered expectations
From textbooks to wider society: why this matters
What needs to change

The theory behind the pattern: cultural reproduction

The reproduction of gender inequality through schooling is not accidental. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his landmark 1977 work with Jean-Claude Passeron, argued that every pedagogic action is a form of symbolic violence – not because teachers are malicious, but because the content of schooling always reflects a “cultural arbitrary”: the values and knowledge of a dominant group, presented as universal and objective. For this system to work, its arbitrary nature must remain hidden. When both teachers and students accept the cultural order as simply “the right way,” the school becomes one of the most powerful mechanisms for reproducing inequality while appearing neutral.

Gender is one of the most persistent hierarchies reproduced through this process. Curriculum materials often present stereotypical gender roles, with men depicted as leaders and women as subordinates. Teachers may unconsciously reinforce gender stereotypes through their expectations of and interactions with male and female students. Peer culture in schools further polices gender norms, punishing those who deviate from dominant ideas of masculinity and femininity. Together, these mechanisms ensure that gendered socialization in schools contributes to the reproduction of patriarchal relations in wider society.

Gender bias in textbooks: what the research shows

Sadker and Zittleman (2007) estimated that students spend 80 to 95% of classroom time using textbooks, and that teachers base the majority of their instructional decisions on these texts. This makes the content and framing of textbooks extraordinarily influential in shaping young people’s assumptions about gender roles, capability, and social place.

The evidence of gender bias in textbooks is both global and consistent. Research across multiple contexts has found that curriculum and textbooks are used to perpetuate patriarchy through inculcating male superiority, with male characters dominating authoritative and professional roles while female characters are relegated to domestic and subordinate ones. Studies from Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and India – as well as UNESCO data covering dozens of countries – all point to the same pattern.

Language and representation

One of the clearest ways patriarchal norms are embedded in textbooks is through language. A study of Bangladeshi primary school English textbooks found that male characters significantly outnumbered female characters through the use of nouns, pronouns, and narrative focus. Biased language was consistently used for female characters, constructing a sense of inferiority that students absorb as natural. Language and identity are deeply linked – when students never see themselves described in positions of authority, that absence is itself a message.

Professional roles and domestic confinement

A critical discourse analysis of Pakistani elementary English textbooks found a consistent pattern: males dominate authoritative and professional roles, while females remain relegated to domestic and subordinate roles. This pattern shapes young learners’ perceptions of what is possible for each gender from the earliest years of schooling. A study of Ethiopian university textbooks found that women were depicted as company employees, school psychologists, and fashion models, while men occupied roles such as scientists, medical doctors, managers, and top government officials – even at the higher education level.

Narratives that devalue girls

In India, the problem is not only about omission but active devaluation. India has been identified as one of the worst regions in the English-speaking world for perpetuating stereotypes through the representation of women and girls in school textbooks. Specific examples from Indian curricula are telling: in the ICSE Hindi story Bade Ghar ki Beti, the absence of sons is lamented, framing daughters as a source of disappointment. A passage in Rajasthan’s English Rapid Reader presents a clerk expressing misery over having three daughters and no son. These are not isolated oversights – they are narratives that embed the idea that daughters are liabilities, presented to children as unremarkable facts of life.

The hidden curriculum: what is not written but is still taught

Beyond the printed page, schools transmit gender norms through what sociologist Philip Jackson, in 1968, called the hidden curriculum – the unsaid values, beliefs, and cultural norms that educators teach students without realizing it, through interactions and classroom environment. The hidden curriculum does not appear on a syllabus. It operates through who gets called on, who is praised for what qualities, what behaviors are tolerated, and whose contributions are taken seriously.

Radical feminist scholars argue that the whole educational system is patriarchal, causing many girls to feel uncomfortable studying certain subjects alongside boys and fostering a sense of dependency. Despite curriculum reforms, these gendered effects persist – not because formal policies endorse them, but because the hidden curriculum continues to operate beneath the level of conscious attention.

Classroom dynamics: how teacher-student interactions reinforce gender

The classroom is not a neutral space. The way teachers interact with students – who they call on, how long they wait for an answer, what kind of feedback they give – systematically differs along gender lines, and those differences have measurable effects on student confidence and achievement.

Differential attention and participation

A meta-analysis of over 80 studies on gender differences in teacher-student interactions found that boys attracted more classroom interactions than girls, receiving both more academic instruction and more behavioural criticism. Girls, on average, participated in only 44% of classroom interactions despite being equally or more likely to volunteer answers. Research consistently shows that teachers exhibit unconscious differential treatment towards male and female students, particularly in the quantity of attention given to boys. Male students also tend to dominate classroom discourse, while female students’ contributions are more collaborative and supportive in style – a pattern itself shaped by social expectations about how girls should behave.

Unconscious expectations and their effects

Teachers rarely intend to be biased. Yet many teacher behaviors and teaching strategies identified as contributing to gender inequity are employed without malicious intent. In science classrooms, for example, teachers may automatically call on male students for technical questions, and examples drawn from contact sports or military scenarios are more familiar to boys than girls – creating an uneven learning environment that functions as a de facto disadvantage. Research on middle school classrooms found that the majority of students were unaware of the inequity in teacher attention between boys and girls – meaning that the differential treatment was being absorbed as normal rather than recognized as inequitable.

Studies in mathematics classrooms have observed that teachers believe they are treating boys and girls equally, while students themselves report receiving clearly different treatment in terms of support, questioning style, and attention. This gap between teacher perception and student experience is significant – it suggests that bias-reduction requires more than good intentions.

Task assignments and gendered expectations

Teachers inculcate culturally dominant gender norms through activities and tasks, both inside and outside the classroom – assigning boys manual tasks like moving furniture while girls are directed toward decorating and cleaning. These micro-decisions, repeated across years of schooling, build a cumulative picture of what each gender is suited for. Students internalize these messages not as social constructs, but as natural facts.

From textbooks to wider society: why this matters

The stakes of gender-biased education extend well beyond the classroom. Researchers have linked gender-biased educational content to broader societal issues including female feticide, dowry harassment, and domestic abuse – arguing that biased narratives absorbed in childhood shape perceptions of gender roles that later manifest in harmful social practices. When a girl grows up seeing women only as caregivers in her textbooks and receiving less encouragement and attention in class, the message she internalizes about her own potential is distorted from the start.

UNESCO has documented large-scale education initiatives across countries including Nepal, Bangladesh, Chad, Guinea, and Ghana with explicit components aimed at eliminating gender bias from curricula and textbooks – recognizing that curriculum reform is a necessary investment in gender equality. Yet reform efforts have been inconsistent, with funding often declining and local implementation lagging behind policy commitments.

What needs to change

Addressing patriarchal norms in education requires action on multiple fronts. At the curriculum level, textbooks need to represent women and men across a full range of roles – including women in STEM, leadership, and public life, and men in caregiving and domestic roles. Language used in materials should be gender-neutral or explicitly balanced. Illustrations and narratives must stop depicting daughters as disappointments and domestic confinement as natural for women.

Research from Athens has shown that introducing non-sexist curricula alone is not sufficient – textbook revisions need to be accompanied by in-service gender-training courses for educators. Teachers who are unaware of the gendered discourses in their materials cannot actively counter them. Professional development that builds gender awareness is not optional; it is a structural requirement for meaningful change.

In classrooms, monitoring interaction patterns – tracking who gets called on, the types of questions asked, and the distribution of feedback – is a concrete step teachers can take to identify and correct unconscious bias. Equitable classroom environments do not emerge spontaneously; they require deliberate attention to the small decisions that, accumulated over years, define a student’s educational experience.

What do you think? If you look back at the textbooks you used as a student, what images or stories stand out to you in terms of how men and women were depicted – and did those representations ever shape your own sense of what was possible for you? And given that much of this bias operates through unconscious habits and hidden norms, what would it realistically take to transform classroom practice at scale?

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Table of Contents

The theory behind the pattern: cultural reproduction 🔗

Gender bias in textbooks: what the research shows 🔗

Language and representation 🔗

Professional roles and domestic confinement 🔗

Narratives that devalue girls 🔗

The hidden curriculum: what is not written but is still taught 🔗

Classroom dynamics: how teacher-student interactions reinforce gender 🔗

Differential attention and participation 🔗

Unconscious expectations and their effects 🔗

Task assignments and gendered expectations 🔗

From textbooks to wider society: why this matters 🔗

What needs to change 🔗