A Comparative Analysis Of Gender Discrimination In Business English And Chinese Textbooks

The issue of gender discrimination has existed for a long time, both in the societyof the Western and Eastern countries in many areas. Gender discrimination is evendeeply rooted in people’s minds. In social activities, language is the commonestmedium of communication, but easy to be affected by the minds of its users. As aresult, gender discrimination is clearly reflected in language, such as Chinese andEnglish. Scholars whose attention has been aroused by this issue have done a numberof researches. In the course of the study, the issue of gender discrimination inforeign-language-teaching materials cannot be ignored. There are many researchesstudying the gender discrimination in English-teaching materials (mainly for thestudents whose first language is not English). There are also domestic researchesstudying gender discrimination in Chinese and English textbooks. Although thenumber is quite few, they have considerable value of reference.With the development of market economy, China’s economic exchanges with theoutside world have become increasingly frequent. More people have taken to businessEnglish and business Chinese, and the associated certificates become major concerns.As a result, the argument whether gender discrimination exists in both businessEnglish textbooks and business Chinese textbooks has aroused great interest of theauthor. The author then selects two sets of typical textbooks, Business EnglishCambridge series (BEC) and New Silk Road series (NSR), which have representativesignificance in this field, to do a comparative analysis of gender discrimination inthese targeted textbooks.Quantitative analysis is applied in this thesis, focusing on the following aspects:the ratio of female characters in texts and illustrations, the occupations of charactersof different genders, the descriptions of characters, and initiatives and turns of femalecharacters in conversations between different genders. Content analysis andconversation analysis are applied in the research.After summarizing all the results from every aspect, the conclusion of thiscomparative study shows that gender discrimination really exists in both BEC seriesand NSR series, while the problem of NSR series is more serious than BEC series.The author hopes that the conclusion of this thesis can attract great attention to genderdiscrimination in business English and Chinese textbooks, and try to give suggestions on revise.