In Indonesia, the awareness of gender equality in school textbooks still needs
paying attention. As an attempt to fill this gap, the ninth grade ELT textbook of
Junior High School was researched. This study has two objectives: (1) to find out
the gender construction in visual images found in the ninth grade ELT textbook of
Junior High School published by Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture; (2)
to explain the representation of gender biasness and stereotyping in the visual
images of the ninth grade ELT textbook of Junior High School published by
Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture. This study is a qualitative research
study that employed textual analysis combined with discourse analysis. In
collecting the data, textual analysis for analyzing gender representation proposed
by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) adopted by Painter and Martin (2010) and Van
Leeuwen (2008) was used and adapted in some parts to answer the research
questions. The results revealed that (1) females relatively were constructed to be
slightly more dominant than males in the textbook; (2) gender biasness and gender
stereotypes were still found in the textbook. Here, it could be concluded that there
were different portions in representing gender in this textbook which drove to the
gender biasness. Then, it also affected gender stereotypes since they are constructed
based on general views about the range of characteristics related to the culture and
social divisions between males and females. Therefore, sociocultural background
of the authors influenced them to determine the contents of the textbooks