International Journal of Education Vol. 14 No. 1, April-2021, pp. 30-38 ©2021 Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia doi: 10.17509/ije.v14i1.30553 30 Gender Stereotypes as Hidden Curriculum: A Case of Vietnamese English Textbooks Anh Phan 1 , Tho Xuan Pham 2 1 University of Auckland, New Zealand 2 University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam anh.phan@auckland.ac.nz First draft received: 18 Dec 2020 Date Accepted: 31 March 2021 Final proof received: 28 Apr 2021 Abstract Gender equality and women empowerment have become a buzzword for development during the past decades with numerous national and international policies, including educational policies. However, gender equality is normally conceptualized in quantitative terms of education such as low disparity in access to education between boys and girls, while qualitative aspects of gender equality are still left uncontested, among which is gender stereotypes in hidden curriculum. Gender stereotypes as a social construct, once imbedded in education and educational materials, certainly intervene the gender socialization process of students. The paper attempts to investigate this issue by employing a mixed qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the illustrations in English textbooks for Upper-secondary students in Vietnam. The analysis reveals stereotypes reflected in three main areas: occupations, sports and pastimes, and life duties, all of which confirm social and cultural norms of Vietnamese society towards a woman. Keywords: Gender stereotypes; gender socialization; hidden curriculum; Vietnamese English textbooks To cite this paper (in APA style): Phan, A., & Pham, T. X. (2021). Gender stereotypes as hidden curriculum: A case of Vietnamese English textbooks. International Journal of Education, 14(1), 30-38. doi: 10.17509/ije.v14i1.30553 INTRODUCTION Gender equality and women empowerment have become a buzzword for development during the past decades with NGOs, IGOs and governments using this “fashionable concept” (Medel-Anovuevo & Bochynek, 1995, p. 7) to include as one of their goals in policy and strategy documents. One example is The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) established following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations, in which Goal 3 is to ‘Promote gender equality and empower women’. The target is eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2015, specifically to have more equal ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education. However, it can be argued that gender equality does not simply lie in equal access to education or equal opportunities to the labour market. Worldwide studies show that gender imbalances in education remain significant obstructions to achieving gender equality (UNESCO IBE, 2011). The study, henceforth, would like to examine such mentioned imbalance, specifically gender stereotypes in textbooks, or in other words, how women and men are portrayed in education. According to Bourdieu (2005, cited in Madureira, 2009), the macro-social level of analysis facilitates our perception of “the reproduction of a hierarchical structure of gender that expresses inequalities between men and women in different domains”, for instance autonomy, prestige or social status (p. 145). Given the importance of textbooks in the Vietnamese society, though being just a part of the national written curriculum, textbooks can be seen as either vehicles for such reproduction of social representations like gender stereotypes or tools for gender equality promotion (Levtov, 2014). Although gender stereotypes are traditionally examined in linguistical, verbal and textual materials, we chose to focus on the illustrations, meaning the pictures and drawings in the textbooks, and sought to answer the question of what gender stereotypes are embedded in the illustrations of English textbooks for Vietnamese Upper-secondary students. To examine this issue, a mixed qualitative and quantitative content analysis method will be employed to analyze the illustrations in the selected set of textbooks for Upper- secondary (grade 10-12) students, coupled with the findings from previous studies conducted on gender stereotypes in textbooks for Primary students and Lower-secondary students in Vietnam as analytical points to shed light on this issue in Vietnamese education. Vietnamese cultural, political and educational context In order to understand gender stereotypes in the Vietnamese education in general and in textbooks in particular, it is essential to have an overall picture of the cultural and political contexts in which the Vietnamese education system is located.