Asymmetrical portrayal of gender within professional, recreational, and domestic spaces in locally developed Pakistani English Language Textbooks: A multimodal analysis

Language textbooks often include visual elements such as images that contribute significantly to the construction of gender ideologies which play a crucial role in shaping the worldview of language learners towards gender. While prior critically oriented studies on gender have contributed to our understanding of discourses that reproduce gender bias in the textual content of English language textbooks (ELT), there has been limited attention to multimodal features in the depiction of gender. Adopting van Leeuwen's socio-semantic inventory, the current study aims to contribute to this niche area by conducting a multimodal examination of gender portrayal in secondary-level English textbooks used across four provinces of Pakistan. Our findings indicate that both text and images contribute to the asymmetrical portrayal of gender within professional, recreational, and domestic spaces. These results underscore the need for a critical review of the textbooks by Pakistani ELT educational authorities in promoting a more balanced and equitable representation of gender in classroom materials.