In Italy, publishers have scrapped gender biases in school books
Irene Biemmi, expert in gender teaching and a lecturer at the University of Florence.
What you need to know:
- Until a few years ago it wasn’t unusual to find gender stereotypes in almost every primary school textbook in Italy.
- Today, you can’t put together a school textbook without taking into account a gender perspective.
Mums in the kitchen, dads off to work. Messy and brave little boys, shy and tidy little girls. Are these simply stereotypes that hark back to the 1950s? It would seem so, but until a few years ago it wasn’t unusual to find them in almost every primary school textbook in Italy. Only, in recent years, textbook publishers have decided to take a different direction.
“Today, you can’t put together a school textbook without taking into account a gender perspective,” says Irene Biemmi, an expert in gender teaching and a lecturer at the University of Florence.
For the past four years, she has also been working as an adviser for Obiettivo Parità ("Mission equality"), a project that brings together two Italian publishers, Rizzoli Education and Centro Studi Erickson that have adopted a series of internal regulations aiming to create, write and illustrate a series of books that can give an equal representation of both genders.
Ms Biemmi’s role in Obiettivo Parità, she explains, is double. On the one hand, she has led the team that outlined the guidelines that publishing houses use as a point of reference. On the other hand, she carries out a 'painstaking review' of each book.
Masculine gender
“I read the drafts”, she says, “and ask myself questions, such as; how many male and female authors are included? Do the stories have an equal number of men and women in leading roles? Are there stereotypes? I look at the book as a whole, I don’t focus on a single passage. Then I get down to proofreading its language. For example, I remove all instances of masculine gender from the instructions for homework. Instead of a generic ‘debate with your classmates,’ I prefer using ‘debate with your male and female classmates’ or ‘with your class’."
Ms Biemmi doesn't just proceed by subtraction. “It's not enough to remove stereotypes — our goal is to offer something new, the so-called ‘counter-narratives’. But how you use these is crucial. For me, the best book is not one in which all mothers are astronauts and all dads are busy in the kitchen making dinner. The best book is the one that can offer a multi-faceted representation of reality, because cultural diversity is the stepping stone to reach equality.”
This article is published as part of “Towards Equality”, an international and collaborative initiative gathering 15 international news outlets to highlight the challenges and solutions to reach gender equality.
