This study aimed to investigate gender representation in an English
textbook series used in Hong Kong schools. The corpus software AntConc
was used to analyse the collocations of gendered terms He/he, She/she,
Man/man, Woman/woman, women, Boy/boy, Boys/boys, Girl, and
Girls/girls in the textbook series in order to find out if gender stereotyping,
which was a problem in previous studies (e.g., Cincotta, 1978; Sakita,
1995), is still an issue. The results of the study showed that females were no
longer regarded as delicate or weak but stronger than males. In occupational
roles, females were no longer portrayed only as housewives in the family,
but they also worked in society. On the other hand, the stereotyped images
of males wearing shorts, jeans or shirts and females putting on skirts or
dresses still exist. In addition, while it was found that the male terms have
more collocates and both males and females were imbued with positive
characteristics, negative adjectives were only used to describe males and
males were never described in terms of their physical attractiveness.