Gender stereotyping has long been an issue for gender and language research from as early as the 1970s, and analyses on gender representation in English language textbooks have been frequently conducted. However, gender representation in assessment papers, another commonly occurring genre in education, remains unexplored in Hong Kong research. Therefore, this paper was aimed to explore how males and females are represented in Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA), a territory-level assessment administered in Hong Kong, to find out if gender stereotyping is still an issue. The data of the current study include the recent 10 years of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers. A total of 33 sets of TSA Primary 3 English Language Reading & Writing papers was analysed by using content and linguistic analyses for their written texts and visual analysis for visual elements. The key findings include: males and females are represented similarly in the written texts and in the visuals, and females are portrayed as involving in occupational roles more frequently than males in both the written texts and visuals. However, it is always females who were drawn to be focused on family matters, and the marital status of a female is still distinguished by the use of either Miss or Mrs. Suggestions for test paper designers and examination authorities are given and implications for future research studies are drawn at the end of this paper. Copyright ©Springer New York LLC.

The present study examines how gender is represented in the visuals (or illustrations) of two English Language textbook series used in most primary schools in Hong Kong. Instead of conducting frequency counts of the occurrence of male and female characters in illustrations or the spheres of activities they engaged in as in previous textbook studies, this study involves qualitative analyses of how visualised male and female characters are represented in the selected illustrations of the analysed textbook series in terms of their hair length and clothing. The results show that human females were more often portrayed having long hair than short hair and wearing dresses than trousers in both line drawings and photographs. For the colour of clothing, although blue and pink are generally considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ colours respectively, less than half and only a small percentage of the human males and females were portrayed wearing blue and pink respectively. For non-human characters, again, colour is not always a reliable cue to their sex. Yet, they can be recognised as males and females by the generally accepted ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ colour and clothing items.