efl/esl textbooks have been regarded as essential language teaching materials with which the learners spend about 70 up to 90 percent of their class time. the important role they play and their vast use make them not only influential in learning the language but also in shaping values and attitudes. put it another way, textbooks socialize learners using their contents (i.e. texts, illustrations, pictures and even words) and this results in different ideologies. therefore, they are valuable devices for shaping individuals identities one of which is gender identity meaning how an individual perceives her/himself as a female or male in the society and world. due to such significant impacts on learners and readers educational and social lives, policy makers, authors and publishers should be careful in choosing contents in order to include gender sensitive language in textbooks. for consciousness raising, there have been many studies on gender representation of efl/esl textbooks; however there exist very few gender analysis of textbooks based on the field of systemic functional linguistics (sfl). the current study aimed to shed light on the equality/inequality of genders in iranian (or in other terms local) and internationally published efl/esl textbooks. because of almost close date of publication and since both series are the revised form of previously published textbooks, the iran language institute (ili) english textbooks, designed and published in iran, was chosen as local efl textbooks and interchange series v published by cambridge university press (cup) was chosen as international efl/esl textbooks. adopting hallidays (1985, 1994) sfl and his transitivity theory the researcher focused on processes (material, relational, verbal, mental, and existential) and participant types (females and males) to detect the underlying hidden gender orientation. the results revealed that although there were no significant differences between local and international english textbooks regarding process types, the distribution of participants types in international series were almost equal, whereas in locally published textbooks the distribution of female participants was much lower than male participants. the findings have implication for efl materials developers.