PESHAWAR, Dec 3: Speakers at a workshop here on Friday were of the view gender inequalities existed in textbooks.

At the concluding session of the three-day workshop on 'Identifying and developing strategies for achieving gender balance in curriculum and textbooks for primary, middle and secondary levels', educationist from public and private institutions recommended that there should be gender equality in the curriculum and in textbooks for Class I to Class X.

The workshop was organized by the NWFP Textbook Board in cooperation with the Institute of Education and Research, University of Peshawar. It was funded by Unesco. Talking to Dawn , Dr Humala Khalid, a consultant representing Unesco, said that the commission was trying to achieve gender equality by organizing workshops, teachers' training and advocacy programmes.

Pakistan is lagging behind in fulfilling commitment made in Dakar to eliminate gender disparities by 2005. The deadline was round the corner and the educationists were to have identified disparities and gender prejudices in textbooks as well as found ways of removing them, a participant of the workshop said.

The participants highlighted disparities in the textbooks taught in the Punjab and in the NWFP. They also pointed out that the number of male authors commissioned to write textbooks was bigger than that of woman writers. They recommended that more women writers should be commissioned to write textbooks.

Begum Shamim Iftikhar, the wife of the NWFP governor, in her speech at the concluding session of the workshop, said that curriculum developers should take gender equality into account. If the country were to make progress it needed to develop a curriculum that conformed to the principle of gender equality, she said.