The purpose of this study has been to look into and analyze the view on sex equality in textbooks and teaching media, and teaching of a group of upper secondary school teachers, through a gender perspective. The teachers teach subjects within social- and political science. The two questions that I wanted to answer are: What views do the teachers have on sex equality in their teaching? What views do the teachers have on sex equality in the teaching media (textbooks and other teacher media) which they have access to? Since I wanted to look into the teachers own views I chose unstructured interviews as the method of gather empirical information. To interpret the transcribed texts I chose the hermeneutic view of people as intentional. I interviewed six teachers in an upper secondary school, four men and two women.

I have interpreted the interviews through a gender perspective, based on theories by Yvonne Hirdman, Maria Hedlin, Ylva Elvin-Nowak, Heléne Thomsson and Britt-Marie Thurén. Theories that have been acknowledged are gender, gender making, the male norm, structure, how to integrate sex equality, mentors and models, and feminism. Previous researches that I have focused on are thesis of Eva Gannerud, and Victoria C Wahlgren.

The conclusion of the study is that some of the teachers’ did not think that most of the textbooks they used contained an aspect of sex equality, some of them seldom used textbooks and if they wanted a sex equality aspect of the teaching they had to find supplement material on their own. In my analysis I found that the teachers felt responsibility but did not feel that they had room for increased teaching by adding sex equality to the existing lesson material. I argue that the responsibility should not lie on the individual teacher to figure out supplement for sex equality aspects on their own, but the responsibility should lay on the school system as a whole, teachers training included.