One Week for Women? The Structure of Inclusion of Gender Issues in Introductory Textbooks

Abstract

Gender inclusiveness is studied by a content analysis of index citations on women and women's issues in 36 introductory sociology textbooks published between 1982 and 1988. The number of citations and the number of unique devoted to women were coded for location in one of 26 sociological areas. The amount of information on women averages less than five percent of the total number of pages in the book for the sample as a whole. Most of the information on women is ghettoized into a single chapter on gender, which contains two-thirds or more of all the information on women for the sample as whole, and into topics traditionally associated with women, such as the family and socialization. Individual textbooks are compared by their rankings on overall inclusiveness and gender ghettoization, especially in terms of the effect of various theoretical perspectives. Implications for teaching and for developing a gender-inclusive sociology are discussed.