This is a linguistic study of the EFL textbooks Wings 6 and Wings 9 which are used in Swedish schools today. It is a partially quantitative and partially qualitative study which sets out to look at the representation of gender in the narrative sections of the two textbooks. The texts are looked at with consideration of four different linguistic aspects, namely female/male visibility, activeness, relational/occupational terms and verbs. A historic and linguistic background is provided through the presentation of previous work within the fields of gender and language, gender and EFL material and discourse analysis. The findings show that since the 1970's, little progress has been made concerning the representation of female and male characters in EFL textbooks. This study also exemplifies the fact that different methods although within the same field of research and applied to same material can produce different and sometimes even contradictory results.