After analyzing six of the most widely used high school biology textbooks in the United States, researchers report these texts depart from established scientific knowledge about sex and gender, instead portraying these categories in a manner consistent with “essentialism” – the assumption that categories of living things have underlying “essences.” To date, what high school biology textbooks have taught adolescents about sex and gender has gone unexamined in studies of the influences of essentialism in this space. The essentialist view on sex and gender is informed by several assumptions. Scientific research on sex and gender is inconsistent with these assumptions, yet they are commonly held. Although sex (a biological phenomenon) and gender (a sociocultural phenomenon) are carefully distinguished among biologists who study these phenomena, this distinction is often absent in public discourse, where sex and gender are typically conflated. If biology textbooks also conflate the two phenomena, they would be “lending authority to an uninformed lay view that is out of step with well-established scientific knowledge,” write Brian Donovan et al. in their Policy Forum.
Donovan and colleagues investigated high school biology textbooks as a sociocultural source of essentialist ideas about sex and gender, focusing on books adopted in at least two of the following highly populous states: California, Texas, New York, and Florida. They identified six textbooks published between 2009 and 2016 that they estimate are collectively used by 66% of introductory high school biology classes across the U.S. The authors analyzed select chapters of these textbooks, that discussed both genetics and sex or gender, looking at whether sex and gender were explicitly differentiated in a given paragraph, as one analysis. Of the paragraphs coded in this category, none differentiated between sex and gender, they report, meaning these texts inappropriately conflate between a biological phenomenon (sex) and a sociocultural one (gender). Further analyses show that textbooks underemphasize the vast amount of continuous variability within sex/gender groups, an idea consistent with those who hold essentialist views (who tend to believe that individuals within a sex/gender group are uniform). Altogether, their results led them to suggest that the textbooks studied convey essentialist messages about sex/gender. “Biology education has long been criticized for presenting an oversimplified view of genetic inheritance,” say Donovan and team. “The present results highlight another important way in which biology education falls short… More optimistically, the present results also suggest how textbooks could be changed to avoid these undesirable consequences.” The authors highlight several aspects of current textbooks that could be revised.
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