From Darkness to Gloom: The Feminine Presence in the Teaching of Human Evolution in Mexico

The main objective of this paper was to analyze gender representation in Mexican elementary education materials from 1960 to the present, particularly on the topic of human evolution, as this is a fundamental subject for the understanding of our ancestry as a species, and for its relationship with questions about human nature. Using gender as a category and an approach that included both qualitative and quantitative methods, a comparison of three generations of textbooks for elementary school and “monographs” was carried out. The results show a deeply entrenched and systemic problems of gender representation in Mexican pedagogical tools past and present.