Abstract Textbooks, authorized by the national education agency to be major teaching materials used in schools in China, are a kind of cultural capital. Textbooks assimilate and spread the culture of a certain society, which standardizes and restricts the compilation of textbooks. The culture of a society, especially the main ideology inevitably permeates textbooks. Therefore, what content is chosen in textbooks, how to organize the knowledge and how to present it to the target readers and evaluate it，are surely influenced by ideology. And the influence is neither obvious nor hidden. EFL teaching materials, the bridge between students and their teachers, are indispensable from English language instruction. Within the framework of Critical Linguistics, this paper studies the complicated relationship between language, power and ideology, based on one of the widely used EFL textbooks in Mainland China Fun with English. It tries to expose hidden sexism in Fun with English through quantitative analysis, textual analysis and comparative analysis. Moreover, it shows how sexist EFL teaching material affects their users and tentatively suggests several practical suggestions for overcoming negative effects of such materials.