Survival of gender stereotypes in the images of Spanish music textbooks

Abstract

Musical textbooks in Spain have tried to capture the legislative changes promoted by the government, as well as the differences in the treatment of gender, through the representation of women as instrumentalists. The Music textbook becomes a tool for disseminating stereotypes that may have lost their validity in the musical world, which however are not completely internalized due to the impact of the published stereotyped image. Analysis included 2,414 images of 47 Primary Education Music textbooks from different Spanish publishers for the Valencian Community whose aim was to show the evolution and presence of women as instrumentalists (from 1992 to 2011). A quantitative content analysis was used in order to determine the large-scale patterns of the messages transmitted by the images; and a qualitative analysis was also conducted in which some images were selected based on the results of the quantitative content analysis. Although the presence of women as instrumentalists has not increased considerably, their representation playing traditionally male instruments has undergone a relevant change on a qualitative level, when compared to male representations. Thus, there is more female representation with traditionally male instruments; but women musicians are still less represented. There is still a long way to go for music education textbooks to offer images of instrumentalists that are respectful of sexual diversity; so that they will no longer contribute to the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes.