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Promoting Gender Equality: A Systematic Review of Interventions

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• Published: 01 September 2022
• Volume 35 , pages 318–343, ( 2022 )

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• Michaela Guthridge   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5157-9839 1 , 3 ,
• Maggie Kirkman 2 ,
• Tania Penovic 4 , 5 &
• Melita J. Giummarra 1 , 5  

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More than four decades have passed since the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted. Now is an opportune time to consider whether the interventions seeking to realise CEDAW’s aspirations have brought us closer to achieving gender equality. This systematic review aimed to identify and synthesise evidence for the effectiveness of social justice, cognitive, or behaviour-change interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women or girls. Interventions could be implemented in any context, with any mode of delivery and duration, if they measured gender equity or discrimination outcomes, and were published in English in peer-reviewed journals. Papers on violence against women and sexuality were not eligible. Seventy-eight papers reporting qualitative (n = 36), quantitative (n = 23), and multi-methods (n = 19) research projects met the eligibility criteria after screening 7,832 citations identified from psycINFO, ProQuest, Scopus searches, reference lists and expert recommendations. Findings were synthesised narratively. Improved gender inclusion was the most frequently reported change (n = 39), particularly for education and media interventions. Fifty percent of interventions measuring social change in gender equality did not achieve beneficial effects. Most gender mainstreaming interventions had only partial beneficial effects on outcomes, calling into question their efficacy in practice. Twenty-eight interventions used education and awareness-raising strategies, which also predominantly had only partial beneficial effects. Overall research quality was low to moderate, and the key findings created doubt that interventions to date have achieved meaningful change. Interventions may not have achieved macrolevel change because they did not explicitly address meso and micro change. We conclude with a summary of the evidence for key determinants of the promotion of gender equality, including a call to address men’s emotional responses (micro) in the process of achieving gender equality (micro/meso/macrolevels).

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Introduction

The adoption of CEDAW was a remarkable achievement in the history of the women’s movement. Its ultimate aim was to catalyse social transformation that transcends cursory legislative reform (Facio & Morgan, 2009 ). Article 3 of CEDAW promotes this social transformation, calling for state parties to ‘take all appropriate measures’ to achieve gender equality. In practice this has included, but has not been limited to, gender-blind strategies, awareness raising, litigation, international advocacy, art and social media activism, and gender mainstreaming (see Table 1 for definition).

The Global Gender Gap Index 2022 benchmarks 146 countries on the evolution of gender-based gaps in economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment (World Economic Forum, 2022 ). Although the Index measures gender parity (defined in Table 1 ) rather than substantive equality, it is a useful tool for analysing progression and regression. With scores depicting the distance to parity on a scale of zero to one hundred, the 2022 Report found the average distance completed to parity was 68 per cent. With the present trajectory, it will take 132 years to close the gender gap and 151 years to achieve equal economic participation and opportunity (World Economic Forum, 2022 ). Moreover, these estimates are predicted to worsen as the world faces crises in politics, economics, health, food, and the environment. Now more than ever we must assess our successes and failures in attempting to reduce gender inequality and discrimination.

The aim of this systematic review was to identify and synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of social justice interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women and girls. Because recent systematic reviews have examined the effectiveness of interventions targeting violence against women and sexuality (e.g. Karakurt et al., 2019 ; Bourey et al., 2015 ; Yakubovich et al., 2018 ) we did not include these types of interventions. We were unable, however, to identify systematic reviews examining other interventions targeting gender equality. Therefore, this review focused on interventions that sought to achieve gender equality in any political, social, cultural or economic context, except violence against women and sexuality.

Theoretical Framework

The truism ‘context matters’ is pertinent to this systematic review. According to contextual social psychology, effects brought about at a microlevel are modified by the mesolevel and macrolevel, and vice versa (Pettigrew, 2021 ). In this review, microlevel variables include individual characteristics, including biology, beliefs, behaviours, values, and emotions, such as empathy and resentment. Mesolevel contextual factors include interpersonal interactions in family, work, and school etc. (e.g. gender segregation), and macrolevel context includes broader social and cultural norms, including religion and politics. Social norms in this context are “rules of action shared by people in a given society or group; they define what is considered normal and acceptable behaviour for the members of that group” (Cislaghi & Heise, 2020 , p. 409). In this sense, social norms exist within the mind, while gender norms exist outside it, and both are produced and reproduced through social interaction. In contextual social psychology, beliefs are embedded in institutions that affect our relational behaviours. While there are psychological causes of macrophenomena (Pettigrew, 2021 ), these phenomena (such as patriarchy) also influence individual affect. For example, affirmative action laws (macro) should increase contact between genders (meso), which in turn should reduce individual prejudice (micro). While this is a top down example, it also works from the bottom up, whereby micro behaviours can affect macrophenomena. In this context, prejudice against women and girls is a “multilevel syndrome” (Pettigrew, 2021 , p. 74).

“Systems thinking” also recognises the intersection between problems and processes from local to global levels (Arnold & Wade, 2015 ). Systems thinking is a complex interplay of a multitude of constantly evolving factors (Banerjee & Lowalekar, 2021 ). According to systems thinking, gender equality will be realised when interventions at the micro, meso and macrolevel are configured holistically, rather than individualistically. Interventions at any level need to consider and accommodate the role of processes and factors that may support or hinder the effectiveness of the intervention to yield population benefits. The different contextual levels that impact on gender inequality may be successfully tackled by feminist movements, but integrating the interventions pluralistically rather than monistically remains elusive as feminist movements appear to continue to work in silos. In undertaking strategies across different contexts, however, we are more likely to achieve substantive equality. But we need to address this complexity in the three contextual levels (micro, meso, macro) in order to predict, modify and eliminate discrimination against women and girls. These theoretical frameworks are used throughout this review to aid the synthesis of the evidence and identification of implications for practice.

Review Design

The Sample, Phenomena of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type (SPIDER) tool was used to design the review (Cooke et al., 2012 ). SPIDER is appropriate for systematic reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and multi-methods research. We use the term multi method rather than mixed method because mixed method studies could be considered to have used multiple methods of data collection/analysis, but not all multi-methods studies follow “mixed methods” procedures as they do not always provide an integrated synthesis of findings across the methods used (Creswell, 2009 ). The search terms are documented in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2. The review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Page et al., 2021 ). Rapid review methods were used for citation screening and data extraction (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ). Papers were eligible according to the criteria defined below.

The sample could include people of any age, race, or gender in local, global, or transboundary intervention contexts. The phenomena of interest included any social justice, cognitive or behaviour-change interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women, with any mode of delivery and duration. Interventions could be any type of program (e.g. behaviour change), policy (e.g. gender mainstreaming), process (e.g. awareness raising) or experimental condition that aimed to influence gender-focused outcomes. An intervention was categorised as achieving its aim (e.g., having a beneficial effect on gender equality or reducing discrimination), partially achieving its aim, not achieving its aim according to the assessment in the paper (i.e. if the analyses in the respective paper found that the intervention did not work), or having a harmful effect (i.e. resulting in increased discrimination or inequality).

The intervention being investigated could have been administered by any party, including expert advocates, government or non-government organisations (NGOs), social justice enterprises, or academic researchers. The research design did not need to include a comparator or control group, but must have incorporated a between-groups or pre-post comparison, or retrospective assessment of the impact, feasibility or acceptability of the intervention or program. The primary outcome for evaluation was any measure of actual or perceived level of, or change in, gender (in)equality, gender bias, or discrimination against women or girls. Secondary outcomes were the perceived level of inclusion, solidarity, awareness, empowerment, or equity. The research methods could include qualitative, quantitative, and mixed- or multi-methods. Eligible papers were published in peer-reviewed journals in English from 1990 to 2022. Whilst CEDAW was adopted in 1979, this timeframe was selected to ensure contemporaneity. A protocol for the review was developed a priori, but not registered.

Search Strategy and Eligibility Screening

As this was a review of research across multiple disciplines, three databases were used: Scopus, ProQuest, and psycINFO, in addition to reviewing reference lists and recommendations by experts. Search terms were adapted to each database. After screening the first search results it was evident that the terms were not broad enough, so a second search including additional terms was undertaken (see Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 for terms of both search strategies). All search results were uploaded to Covidence for eligibility screening and duplicate removal by reviewer one. Using Abstrackr, a second author screened a minimum of 10 percent of citations, consistent with rapid review methods (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ), or until < 50 percent of citations were predicted to be relevant. Abstrackr is a machine-learning program that generates predictions of the likely relevance of records based on judgements made by the reviewer (Wallace et al., 2012 ), which has been found to have excellent sensitivity and to generate significant workload savings (Giummarra et al., 2020 ). After titles and abstracts were screened, full text articles were assessed against the eligibility criteria, noting reasons for exclusion. Both reviewers met to discuss any conflicts; if consensus could not be reached a third author was consulted. The authors included experts in gender equality who provided significant input into the search strategy, identification of relevant literature, and synthesis.

Quality Assessment

The quality of research was assessed by the first author using a standard method (Kmet et al., 2004 ) with the added criterion of whether papers reported approval by a formally constituted human research ethics committee. Supplementary Tables 3–5 specify the quality criteria. Overall quality was classified as poor (studies meeting < 0.50 criteria), adequate (0.50–0.69), good (0.70–0.80), or strong (> 0.80) consistent with previous studies (Parsons et al., 2017 ).

Data Extraction and Synthesis

Data were extracted in three categories: The authors and publication year of the paper ; research aims, theoretical approach, methods, sample size, eligibility criteria, and sample characteristics; and, the intervention , aim, type, sector, geographic region, description, duration, targeted outcomes, effects, and short- and long-term impacts. Figures to summarise the proportion of studies from different geographic regions were generated using www.sankeymatic.com/build/ . Ten percent of the full-text articles were randomly selected, stratified by research method, for independent data extraction by a second author, consistent with rapid review methods (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ). The data extracted from both reviewers was cross-checked for accuracy and completeness. Sources of heterogeneity were noted, particularly variation in study samples, settings, contexts and intervention designs or aims. Given the heterogeneity of the interventions and the research, meta-analysis and meta-synthesis were not appropriate. Therefore, the findings were thematically synthesised according to intervention sector (e.g. education, employment etc.) and context (i.e., micro, meso and macro levels).

A total of 7,832 records were screened for eligibility with the last search conducted on 18 July 2022 (Fig.  1 ). Seventy-eight papers, each reporting a single intervention and using qualitative (n = 36), multi (19), or quantitative (23) methods, met the inclusion criteria. The characteristics of qualitative, quantitative, and multi-methods studies are summarised in Supplementary Tables 6, 7, and 8, respectively. The intervention effects for each study are summarised in Supplementary Tables 9 and 10.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA) Flow Diagram

Five interventions were at the microlevel, 37 were at the mesolevel, and 17 were at the macrolevel. The final 19 interventions straddled micro-meso, meso-macro, or micro–macro. No intervention covered all three levels or took a systems thinking approach.

The overall quality of each paper is detailed in Supplementary Tables 6–8, and ratings for each quality domain are in Supplementary Tables 3–5. Studies using quantitative methods (range 0.58–1.00; median = 0.92, Q1 = 0.82, Q3 = 1.00) had significantly higher quality than qualitative (range 0.41–0.91; median = 0.73, Q1 = 0.67, Q3 = 0.79; χ2(1) = 13.71, p  < 0.001) and multi-method studies (range 0.48–0.94; median = 0.76, Q1 = 0.63, Q3 = 0.82; χ2(1) = 21.96, p  < 0.001). There was no difference in the quality of qualitative and multi-methods studies ( p  = 0.97).

All quantitative studies articulated the research question and reported the results adequately. Randomisation and blinding were used in most studies. While estimates of variance and controlling for confounding were not consistently reported, 18 studies using quantitative methods were considered to be strong quality, and seven had a perfect score.

In reports of qualitative studies, the study design, context, and conclusion were generally addressed well. However, only six studies used verification processes (see Table 1 for definition). No qualitative study received a perfect score; 20 studies were considered to be good quality.

For multi-method studies, the objective, context, data collection, analysis, and conclusion were generally reported well. Blinding was not applicable, and estimates of variance and control of confounding were generally not reported. No multi-method study received a perfect score although the quality of six of multi-methods papers was assessed as good.

Corresponding authors were contacted to confirm ethics approval; authors of two papers confirmed that the study did not receive ethics approval, and authors from 16 studies did not respond or confirm whether they had ethics approval. The omission of evidence of ethical approval is concerning and should be addressed in all future research with humans. The 18 studies with respect to which we either could not confirm ethics approval or did not receive ethics approval were all published in highly ranked journals. Furthermore, it was not, in general, clear in the majority of papers which agency or organisation conducted the intervention or undertook the study (e.g. government agency, NGO, academic researchers) making it difficult to assess reflexivity, and the prospect of future implementation.

Included Interventions

Intervention sectors.

Interventions were implemented and evaluated in various sectors: education (26 interventions); politics (10); employment (8); information, communications, and technology (6); legal (5); economics (6); health (3); sustainable development and land rights (3); sport (3); and women’s and girls’ rights (2). Interventions in the areas of conflict and of water, sanitation, and hygiene were reported in one paper each.

Intervention Settings

Interventions were set evenly throughout the Global South (35 papers) and the Global North (39 papers). Interventions were evaluated in Africa (15), Europe (12), North America (19), Asia (10), Latin America (6), the Middle East and North Africa (4), the United Kingdom (6), and the Pacific (4). Just under half of the Global South interventions were conducted in rural settings (16/35), whereas Global North interventions tended to be urban (22/39) (Fig.  2 ).

Settings for interventions in Global North and South Countries

Research Participant Characteristics

Twenty-seven interventions included both women and men as participants, 30 included only women, and one intervention included only men. Thirteen studies did not report the gender of the sample, and in seven studies gender of the sample or population was not applicable (e.g. intervention sought to affect a broad population approach irrespective of gender, such as a new law that applied to the whole population in order to improve gender equality, or a collective political party that sought to influence gender issues in parliament). Thirty papers did not report other participant demographic characteristics. Where sample characteristics were reported, participants were 10–80 years of age, with education level ranging from none to post-graduate.

Study Characteristics

All papers but one (Devasia, 1998 ) were published after 2005. Most papers reported data gathered across years, with twelve interventions taking place over hours or weeks. The timeframe did not appear to be associated with whether or not the intervention had a significant beneficial effect on the aims of the intervention. For example, McGregor and Davies’ ( 2019 ) two year study of the effects of a pay equity campaign achieved its aim (legislation was enacted), but Hayhurst’s ( 2014 ) girls’ entrepreneurship study that ran for several years had harmful effects (girls income was taken by men). Similarly, Zawadzki et al., ( 2012 ) board game intervention that takes 60–90 min achieved its aims but Krishnan et al. ( 2014 ) conditional cash transfer study over a month had no effect on social change.

In the qualitative and multi-method studies, theoretical frameworks were rarely reported. The few papers that did report theoretical frameworks used feminist standpoint theory, post-structuralist feminist theory, or social constructivist theory. Qualitative data collection methods were diverse: interviews (41 studies), focus groups (19), document analysis (18), observations (15), case studies (2), and visual techniques (e.g. PhotoVoice) (2). Quantitative and multi-method studies predominantly used surveys and questionnaires (22), with one study each using of the following tools: Gender Equitable Men’s Scale (Gottert et al., 2016 ), the Knowledge of Gender Equity Scale, the Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng et al., 2009 ), the Feminist Identity Scale (Rickard, 1989 ), and the Gender Related System Justification scale (Jost & Kay, 2003 ).

Few interventions aimed to achieve gender equality per se. Rather, they aimed to achieve components of gender equality (see Table 1 for definition), which ranged from gender neutrality through to striving towards a feminist revolution. Overall aims included greater awareness, inclusion, empowerment, parity, equity, and substantive equality (Supplementary Tables 6–8, column 3). The evaluation of whether interventions achieved their aims was usually assessed through surveying participants. The most common aim was to enhance “empowerment” (n = 18), which was generally not clearly defined. The interventions had various levels of effectiveness, with 37 studies having a significant beneficial effect on the aim of the intervention (i.e., they achieved their aims); 31 having a partial beneficial impact on the aim of the intervention; four studies having no beneficial or harmful impact on the aim of the intervention; and six studies having a harmful effect on the aim of the intervention (e.g., the intervention led to increased discrimination, inequality, or abuse). Examples of harmful effects include the ‘Girl Effect’ program in Uganda which resulted in participants being abused or robbed of the money they had earned (Hayhurst, 2014 ), and a girls’ resiliency program in the USA that resulted in increased abuse from male peers (Brinkman et al., 2011 ).

Intervention Design and Effectiveness by Sector

Education and training interventions.

Evaluations of education and training interventions were reported in 18 papers (6 qualitative, 6 quantitative, 6 multi-methods). Education interventions covered a range contexts (3 micro-meso, 11 meso, 3 meso-macro, 1 macro). Most interventions (14) used awareness-raising workshops targeting individual change, and reported only partially achieving the aim of the interventions. Five workshops were assessed in randomised controlled trials. Two qualitative studies targeted increasing girls’ enrolment in formal education in Morocco (Eger et al., 2018 ) and India (Jain & Singh, 2017 ), both of which achieved the aims of the interventions. One qualitative study in the Democratic Republic of Congo targeted behaviour change in men only (Pierotti et al., 2018 ), which had a partial beneficial effect because men increased their willingness to contribute to household chores but maintained control over the broader gender system. This intervention was an eight-week long mesolevel men’s discussion group focused on “undoing gender” through social interaction (e.g. promoting a more equal division of labour in the household, improving intra-household relationship quality, and questioning existing gender norms).

Gender parity in schools did not signal an end to, or transformation of, gender inequities in the schools or communities studied (Ralfe, 2009 ). To bring about education policy reform, Palmén et al. ( 2020 ) found that top-down institutional commitment to gender equality was essential to create change. However, bottom-up strategies were also needed as teachers had to foster cooperative learning that encouraged working together and valuing different abilities across genders (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ). Sufficient resources, in addition to monitoring and evaluation of education initiatives, were found to be a key to intervention success (Palmén et al., 2020 ). Ultimately, social norms did not change beyond the school environment (Chisamya et al., 2012 ; Jain & Singh, 2017 ).

While interventions in traditional education contexts only partially achieved their aims, experiential learning was found to be a powerful process to deliver knowledge about gender equity in a nonthreatening way (Zawadzki et al., 2012a ). Zawadzki’s study was a mesolevel intervention that used a board game to teach participants the cumulative effect of subtle, nonconscious bias, to discuss how bias hinders women’s promotion in the workplace, and to find solutions for what can be done to reduce that bias. They found that the delivery of information was less effective when new knowledge did not promote self-efficacy or lead participants to resist perceived attempts to influence their beliefs or behaviours. Furthermore, they established that learning about gender inequity was not sufficient for knowledge retention. Rather, participants had to link the knowledge to their own experiences and be empowered to feel that they could act on that knowledge.

Awareness-raising interventions in education and training generally only partially achieved the aims of the interventions, and did not necessarily translate into behaviour change (Ralfe, 2009 ). In the strong quality (0.93) quantitative mesolevel study by Moss-Racusin et al. ( 2018 ), the Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS) intervention was found to achieve significantly greater awareness of bias in participants compared to the non-intervention control condition; however, effects on behaviour were not assessed. This intervention presented participants with short videos about findings from gender bias research in one of three conditions. One condition illustrated findings using narratives (compelling stories), the second presented the same results using expert interviews (straightforward facts), and a hybrid condition included both narrative and expert interview videos.

A lack of awareness, knowledge, or understanding of women’s human rights was found to be a key barrier to the achievement of gender equality in education-based interventions (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Gervais ( 2010 ) reported that awareness-raising can have direct effects on participants by giving them confidence to speak up against violations of their rights, although they noted that this might anger violators. Similarly, education was found in some cases to enable women to negotiate power-sharing with their husbands, while other women were verbally abused and threatened because their husbands disapproved of the education program (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Similar to the study by Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ), Murphy-Graham ( 2009 ) sought to “undo gender” by encouraging students to rethink gender relations in their everyday lives (mesolevel). Including men together with women in education programs enabled women to gauge men’s reactions to social change in a safe environment (Cislaghi et al., 2019 ). Potential harmful effects of interventions are further summarised under the ‘The problem of hostile affect’ header below.

STEM Education

Among education interventions were a subset of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) education interventions. These specifically targeted secondary school girls as a pathway to tertiary STEM education, and were reported in eight papers (1 qualitative, 3 quantitative, 4 multi methods). The design of interventions varied from science clubs, outreach programs, after school sessions, residential camps and immersion days. Archer et al. ( 2014 ), however, took a multipronged approach. Their intervention included school excursions, visits from STEM Ambassadors and a researcher-in-residence, a STEM ‘speed networking’ event, and participation in a series of teacher-led sessions for girls aged 13–14 years. Despite this significant investment, the intervention did not significantly change students’ aspirations of studying science, although it did appear to have a beneficial effect on broadening students’ understanding of the range of science jobs.

All STEM education interventions were aimed at the mesolevel and were located in the urban Global North. While the long-term impact (e.g. increased enrolment of women into tertiary STEM education) were inconsistent among studies. Gorbacheva et al. ( 2014 ) found that secondary same-sex education had no influence on this objective. Alternatively, Hughes et al. ( 2013 ) found having role models was more critical than sex segregation. Finally, Lackey et al. ( 2007 ), Lang et al. ( 2015 ) and Watermeyer ( 2012 ) all established that a network of support (e.g. family, school, industry) made a positive difference to girls equality in STEM education.

Employment Interventions

Eight interventions focused on women’s employment: 4 qualitative, 2 quantitative, 2 multi-methods studies. They covered a range of contexts (1 micro/meso, 5 meso, 2 meso/macro). Three interventions addressed women’s promotion (Eriksson‐Zetterquist & Styhre, 2008 ; Grada et al., 2015 ; Smith et al., 2015 ). Two interventions evaluated microenterprise; one produced harmful effects (Hayhurst, 2014 ), and the other only partially achieved its aim (Strier, 2010 ). Hayhurst ( 2014 ) evaluated an intervention auspiced by the Nike Foundation and concluded that it had an unfair and deleterious effect by placing the burden of social change on girls. In this intervention, focusing on the mesolevel, girls were taught to be entrepreneurs to enable them to escape abuse, buy land, grow food, and work. In practice, this economic empowerment strategy led to increased abuse by men who wanted to take the girls’ money to pay their own taxes and fines. This study was good quality (0.73). Participants in the study by Strier ( 2010 ) thought that microenterprise promised self-realisation and escape from the slavery of the labour market, but they found it to be a false promise, characterising the informal sector as both a disappointment and a fraud. Overall, employment interventions led to unreliable and inconsistent outcomes.

Economic Interventions

Six interventions (1 qualitative, 2 quantitative, 3 multi-methods studies) addressed various contexts (1 micro, 1 micro/macro, 2 meso/macro, 2 macro interventions) that targeted economic empowerment. Overall, the interventions partially achieved their aims. For microfinance interventions, women benefited less than men because they were given smaller loans for less lucrative businesses (Haase, 2012 ). Krishnan et al. ( 2014 ) conducted a good quality (0.79) multi-method study of a micro–macro level intervention that provided conditional cash transfers in India, and found minimal positive effects from the implementation of this scheme to address social behaviours related to valuing girls. In this study, parents had to register the birth of their daughter in order to receive financial benefit, but this did not transform the social mindset that daughters are a burden. In another study, the size and frequency of cash transfers directly influenced outcomes: large but infrequent payments enabled investment that could facilitate economic transformation (Morton, 2019 ). Lump-sum payments also challenged stereotypes about what women could invest in, and could transform the gender asset gap. Institution of a social protection floor (e.g. welfare benefits) enhanced women’s power and control over household decision-making in financial matters and household spending in South Africa (Patel et al., 2013 ). While a social protection floor had benefits for women’s empowerment at the microlevel, it did not transform unequal and unjust gendered social relations of power at the macrolevel.

Legal Interventions

Five interventions (3 qualitative, 2 quantitative studies) in two contexts (1 meso/macro, 4 macro) reported on legal interventions. In Zartaloudis’s ( 2015 ) qualitative macrolevel study of an employment strategy in Greece and Portugal, legislation was found to have an important but not transformative effect on gender equality in employment. Three other studies found that changes in law must be accompanied by incentives and penalties in order to be effective (Kim & Kang, 2016 ; Palmén et al., 2020 ; Singh & Peng, 2010 ). While the decline in levels of discrimination was at first sharp after enacting anti-discrimination legislation, its implementation plateaued over time, calling into question the long-term sustainable effects of law reform without adequate enforcement mechanisms. In this macrolevel study by Singh and Peng ( 2010 ), the Ontario Pay Equity Act was effective because it was proactive in persuing pay equity, rather than being complaint based.

Legal opportunity and litigation were strategic choices in campaign strategies in one study, playing an important role in effecting change to prevent discriminatory pay for work typically performed by women (McGregor & Davies, 2019 ). The strong quality (0.92) macrolevel study by Mueller et al. ( 2019 ) increased access to legal services in order to improve legal knowledge in rural Tanzania. It found that, despite increased access to legal services, women still had moderate to low knowledge of marital laws, and only 2.7 percent of women would refer someone to a paralegal for problems with a widow’s assets, divorce, or marital disputes. Mueller et al. ( 2019 ) concluded that an increased investment in access to justice needed to be made through informal channels (mesolevel change) in addition to the macrolevel law reform.

Political Interventions

Ten papers (4 qualitative, 3 quantitative, 3 multi-methods studies) that covered a variety of contexts (1 micro/meso, 2 meso, 2 meso/macro, 5 macro) reported assessments of political interventions. Electing women to council increased other women’s access to councillors because women had greater heterosocial networks (i.e., comprising women and men), but did not affect men’s access to councillors (Benstead, 2019 ; Levy & Sakaiya, 2020 ). However, increasing the number of women in public office did not necessarily improve equality (McLean & Maalsen, 2017 ). For example, an evaluation of gendered outcomes of Hon. Julia Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister of Australia saw increased gender-based denigration and vilification of her leadership (McLean & Maalsen, 2017 ).

A qualitative macro study using interviews and ethnography to explore the impact of political gender quotas in Mali (Johnson, 2019 ) found that savings groups, together with political gender quotas, were important for catalysing the first steps towards social and political transformation. In Mali, gender quota laws required political parties to field a minimum of 30 percent women candidates, and to include a woman within the first three places on a party’s candidate list. In this context, savings and credit associations developed women’s self-efficacy and increased their confidence to become political candidates (Johnson, 2019 ).

An example of discursive change based on political activism was found by Cowell-Meyers’ ( 2017 ) multi-method study examining the impact of a new feminist political party in Sweden. Near consensus by political parties that gender equality needed to be tackled through government intervention was achieved through the efforts of the small women’s rights party. However, another multi-method mesolevel study examining the effects of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) in Europe found that they either ignored or subverted gender mainstreaming language (S. Lang, 2009 ). Gender mainstreaming policy interventions were found to have only partially achieved their aims, but were successful when law and policy detailed specific roles and responsibilities for action (Kim & Kang, 2016 ). Policymakers in two other studies were found to avoid the responsibility of implementation not because they opposed gender mainstreaming itself, but because they objected to being forced into it (Hwang & Wu, 2019 ; Kim & Kang, 2016 ). Therefore, the attitude of bureaucrats (microlevel) was considered to be an important factor in implementing gender equality initiatives at the macrolevel.

The strong (perfect quality score) quantitative study by Saguy and Szekeres ( 2018 ) reported on the effect on gender-based attitudes (microlevel) following exposure to the 2017 Women’s March across the US and worldwide in response to Donald Trump’s inauguration. The research found that large-scale collective action had a polarising effect on those exposed to it. Over time, men who identified more closely with their own gender increased the degree to which they justified gender inequality after exposure to the protests, suggesting a backlash reaction (mesolevel). People who were found to be positively affected by collective action were already in favour of the protesters’ cause. The backlash found for high-identifying men was explained by reactance theory (Brehm, 1966 ) whereby people become motivationally aroused by a threat to or elimination of a behavioral freedom (Brehm, 1989 ).

Barriers to Achieving Gender Equality: The Problem of Hostile Affect

No study accounted for men’s and boys’ emotions (microlevel change) as part of the aim and design of the intervention, but their significance became apparent in the results of several studies. Men and boys reported feeling hostility, resentment, fear and jealousy when social norms were challenged. Attempts at addressing gender inequality were found to threaten men’s sense of entitlement, and it was theorised that boys expected to be the centre of attention (Brinkman et al., 2011 ). In the meso study by MacPhail et al. ( 2019 ) that evaluated a men’s participation program in South Africa, participants reported equality as a zero-sum game that meant respecting women equated to disrespecting men. In that intervention, activities included intensive small group workshops, informal community dialogue through home visits, mural painting to stimulate discussions of key messages, informal theatre, soccer tournaments, and film screenings. In another study, women’s oppression was maintained by men because they feared losing control of ‘their’ women (Devasia, 1998 ). In several studies, men shared their fear of being perceived as weak or feminine in front of their peers or community (Bigler et al., 2019 ; McCarthy & Moon, 2018 ; Murphy-Graham, 2009 ; Pierotti et al., 2018 ; Singhal & Rattine-Flaherty, 2006 ). Male participants in the study by Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ) believed that allowing women to be leaders in households would disintegrate society. They believed that upholding men’s lack of accountability and position as ‘boss’ was important to maintaining the fabric of society.

In contrast, Cislaghi ( 2018 ) found that men in Senegal did not resist increased political participation of women. And a radio program in Afghanistan that addressed gender equality was found not to offend men’s cultural or religious beliefs, and ultimately succeeded in changing attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). The outcome included changes in the community, such as giving permission to women to leave their home alone, to vote, to go to school, and to reject child marriage. While participants expressed increased empowerment (micro), they also acknowledged that they may have their rights, but can never make decisions pertaining to their rights (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). For example, women may have the right to vote (macro), but they cannot go to vote or decide who to vote for without male guardianship (meso). In that study, 15 h of civic education material was promoted by radio, focusing on peace, democracy, and women’s rights. At the community level, interviews and focus groups with participants revealed that there was no resistance to listening to the radio program from men or families. However, the Sengupta et al. study was not longitudinal and had a relatively small sample of 115 people (72.2% women), and the women in the study may not have been in a position that allowed them to admonish the men in their community.

It was found in one study that resistance and backlash can be ameliorated by including men and boys in the development and delivery of interventions (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). Behaviour change in men required an increase in empathy to achieve the aim of gender equality (Becker & Swim, 2011 ). Hadjipavlou ( 2006 ) and Vachhani and Pullen (2019) found that empathy was a viable alternative feminist strategy. In their qualitative study, Hwang and Wu ( 2019 ) in Taiwan found that trust-building between civil servants and advocates reduced resistance and hostility. Activists in this intervention used four strategies: (1) Giving praise and encouragement instead of criticism and blame; (2) Engaging civil servants on a personal level to create bonding; (3) Appeasing fears about being blamed by offering assistance; (4) Attempting to invoke their identification with the values of gender mainstreaming through informal educational efforts, all of which are mesolevel strategies.

Promoting Social Change to Reduce Gender Inequality

There was a wide array of types of change in different aspects of gender equality, with interventions varying in their success across settings and contexts. Table 2 summarises the types of change (e.g. legal, financial, behaviour, social) and the context (i.e., micro, meso, macro) that were identified and whether interventions aims were fully or partially achieved, or were not achieved, or had a harmful effect. Physical change, such as increased physical presence of women through inclusion or solidarity (meso) was the most consistently achieved beneficial outcome. Interventions targeting macrolevel social change, however, predominantly failed to achieve their aims or had harmful effects, reflecting how hard it is to realise social change, especially from a single, usually localised, intervention. Quotas could perhaps achieve their aim, although this finding was derived mostly from one good quality study (Johnson, 2019 ). The largest group of interventions were those implemented in education-based contexts, but these generally only partially achieved their aims, and focused mostly on physical changes (e.g., inclusion, solidarity). Most gender mainstreaming interventions did not achieved their aims.

Altogether, the findings confirm that social transformation is not automatic, easy, nor necessarily sustainable (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Furthermore, economic transformation is constrained if it is not supported by concurrent social transformation (Haase, 2012 ). One researcher, reporting a good quality meso-macro multi-method educational study in rural Bangladesh, claimed to have achieved social transformation (Sperandio, 2011 ). The appointment of women into roles that are traditionally occupied by men (in this case, teaching) led to widespread acceptance and normalisation of women in other non-traditional roles in a conservative village. Because the researcher did not interview or survey members of the community in which the intervention was evaluated, it is not clear whether broader social change was achieved.

It was found in several studies that dialogue was key to creating change in gender norms (Hwang & Wu, 2019 ; MacPhail et al., 2019 ; McGregor & Davies, 2019 ; Murphy-Graham, 2009 ; Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ). However, Matich et al.’s ( 2019 ) qualitative study of the #freethenipple campaign and Boling’s ( 2020 ) study of the #ShePersisted campaign found that small steps bring about only small changes. For instance, in the #freethenipple campaign, women took control of how they were represented (microlevel) in order to challenge patriarchal gender norms (macrolevel). The authors noted that, despite good intentions, a hashtag cannot erase stereotyping. Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ) also found that small changes (micro) in quotidian tasks (e.g., participation in household chores) did not lead to substantive social change (macrolevel change). That is, while changes in tasks occurred with relative ease, social transformation through the cumulative effect of small steps towards egalitarianism did not occur.

In comparison, the qualitative study by McCarthy and Moon ( 2018 ) examined a women’s program in Ghana and found that changing everyday practices did matter, but becoming cognisant of the need for revolution led people to become overwhelmed and immune to change efforts. The researchers found that a key challenge in achieving social transformation was the need to bring about changes in daily interactions. For instance, one participant stated that if a person is not empowered at home, no matter how much money you give them, they are going to need more (McCarthy & Moon, 2018 ).

All genders need to participate to achieve a re-socialisation (Brinkman et al., 2011 ). Sengupta et al. ( 2007 ) concluded that their radio program would have alienated men if it had targeted only women. By including all genders, potential resistance to change can be neutralised (Devasia, 1998 ). In summary, social transformation is possible, but transformation is not likely to be universal or successful across all contexts (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ), particularly from any single monistic intervention. Holistic responses that take account of system thinking may create the change needed.

Overall, despite concerted effort, it seems that in the past thirty years we have not uncovered the keys to social change in order to enhance gender equality and non-discrimination against girls and women. Perhaps the reviewed interventions did not achieve macrolevel change because they did not simultaneously and explicitly address meso and micro change. Whilst CEDAW seeks the ‘elimination of all forms of discrimination’, achievement of that aim is far from complete, although it is not surprising that no single intervention could catalyse social change that achieves CEDAW’s objective. This review demonstrates that it will take time and a variety of endeavours to achieve gender equality.

To summarise the substantive lessons from this systematic review, we offer the following distillation as a summary of the findings to date. This distillation includes definitive statements that should be viewed only in the context of this review and may not generalise across all efforts towards gender equality in all societies.

What is Ineffective in Promoting Gender Equality

Small changes do not lead to big changes. Small concessions are granted to maintain peace, while big changes are often denied to maintain power.

Men and boys can feel the micro effects of fear, hostility, resentment, and jealousy when meso-macro gendered social norms are challenged.

Increased confidence, agency, empowerment, or individual leadership (micro) is not sufficient to promote the structural changes required to increase gender equality (macro).

A lack of change in mindsets (micro) and poor enforcement can mean that laws (macro) are not realised or have little effect at the community level (meso).

The overall focus on women ignores the real problem, and the need to engage with all members of society.

Education and awareness-raising may establish the right to education but do not necessarily create gender equality.

Raising awareness alone does not translate into behaviour change (meso to micro).

Transnational advocacy networks are not effective.

Protests in western democracies can have a polarising and backlash effect.

Gender mainstreaming efforts generally fail to achieve positive outcomes.

Economic transformation does not automatically lead to social transformation.

What is Effective in Promoting Gender Equality

Eliciting positive affect in interventions garners positive outcomes.

Empathy is a viable feminist strategy, although evidence is limited.

All genders need to participate in re-socialisation of gender norms.

Dialogue is a key to success.

A large number of women must behave differently for new behaviours to be accepted (micro to meso).

Experiential learning is a powerful way to embed knowledge about gender equity in a nonthreatening, lasting way.

Investment in access to justice must include informal channels of the justice system.

Social transformation can be achieved in households through daily interactions (meso to macro).

Enabling environments (macro) are more effective than individual empowerment (micro), but should include top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Quotas are effective.

Laws must be proactive as well as reactive or complaint based.

The contextual levels of analysis developed by Pettigrew ( 2021 ) has also been adapted from these lists into Fig. 3 . These distillations challenge our thinking about how to achieve gender equality and therefore require greater discussion amongst feminist activists, advocates, and the general population for ecological validation. The key findings of this review have implications for policy and practice because they call into question the type of change sought by feminist movements, the type of intervention used to achieve that change, and whether that intervention is likely to be effective in practice. Overall, this review gives pause for thought. We hope it will inform future decisions about how to achieve gender equality.

Contextual levels of analysis for this review, adapted from Pettigrew ( 2021 )

Strengths and Limitations

Our broad inclusion criteria identified relevant interventions across a range of political, economic, social and cultural contexts, published over a thirty year period. Consistent with the recommendations by Garritty et al. ( 2021 ) we used rapid review methods; this may have led to the omission of some eligible studies. However, the use of a machine learning approach by reviewer two to rapidly screen a sample of the records predicted to be most relevant helped to limit the omission of relevant studies. Moreover, our restriction of literature to 1990 onwards may have omitted some studies conducted since the adoption of CEDAW in 1979. Given that only one study was published from 1990–2000, however, it is unlikely that this restricted timeframe had a significant impact on the review. Excluding papers not published in English is a limitation, and may have led to the omission of studies in some settings. We urge those who have non-peer-reviewed evaluations to submit them to peer-reviewed journals for future inclusion in reviews like the present one. The results of the large number of studies included in the review are difficult to generalise given the heterogenous study methods, intervention designs, populations, and settings. Because of a lack of reflexivity in most qualitative and multi-method studies, it is impossible to discern (for example) whether research undertaken in the Global South was conducted by Global North researchers. Moreover, there was no evidence of the ethical conduct of 16 studies and two studies did not have ethics approval. Together, these limitations may indicate potential problems with informed consent and implicit racial or other biases, although none were explicitly identifiable. There was insufficient evidence to assess whether and how culture played a part in attempts to achieve gender equality. Furthermore, while 86 percent of interventions predominantly or partially achieved their aims, this may inflate the effectiveness of such interventions because of reporting biases that favour publication of positive results (Sengupta et al., 2007 ; Sperandio, 2011 ).

This review has taken stock of successes and failures in seeking to promote gender equality. The findings reveal that undue reliance has been placed on the presumed efficacy of awareness raising, and that the race to achieve gender parity has not yet catalysed the desired social transformation. Entrepreneur programs can be exploitative, and legal actions have had limited effects, potentially failing because of men’s feelings about change. This review has shown that men can be fearful, resentful, jealous, and angry towards acts that disrupt the status quo . Until we adequately address these emotions and biases, the change that women (and potentially all genders) want, and the equality we all need will not be realised. Social context and systems thinking have shown us the importance of holism when tackling systemic discrimination. In this context, to be fully human is to be emotionally fulfilled. Ergo , human rights will be realised when there is dignity, humanity and positive emotionality among genders. Only then is the promise of CEDAW likely to be fulfilled.

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143 Unique Gender Inequality Essay Titles & Examples

Here, you will find 85 thought-provoking topics relating to gender, equality, and discrimination. Browse through our list to find inspiration for your paper – and don’t forget to read the gender inequality essay samples written by other students.

👩 Top 10 Gender Equality Title Ideas

🏆 best gender bias essay topics, 💡 interesting topics to write about gender inequality, 📌 simple & easy gender inequality essay titles, 👍 good gender equality research title ideas, ❓ gender inequality research questions.

• Globalization, gender, and development.
• The Pink Tax.
• Women and unpaid labor.
• Gender stereotypes in media.
• Emma Watson’s speech on gender equality.
• A critique of HeForShe campaign.
• Education for girls in Ghana.
• The suffrage movement.
• Crimes against girls and women.
• Female empowerment in STEM fields.
• Gender Inequality in the Story of Ama Aidoo “In the Cutting of a Drink” The story of Ama Aidoo In the Cutting of a Drink tells about gender inequality, which is expressed in the clash between the typical values of rural residents and the values of people living in […]
• Gender Inequality in Workplace Gender is the main reason for inequalities in the workplace; this is because nowadays there is a steady increase in the number of women in workplaces in the world.
• Sociological perspectives of Gender Inequality The events taking place in the modern world and the occurrence of the feminist movements during the past few decades can be used to offer a deeper understanding on the subject of gender inequality and […]
• Gender Inequality: The Role of Media The media plays a major role in gender socialization because of the ways it chooses to portray women. Shows such as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Snow White are famous because they usher children […]
• Gender Inequality as a Global Societal Problem For eliminating the gender wage gap, nationwide legislation shows to increase the hiring and promotion of women in the workplace. Unfortunately, there is a gap in scholarly research in regards to reflecting the success of […]
• Gender Inequality as a Global Issue This essay will examine some of the causes that affect the gap in the treatment of men and women, and its ramifications, particularly regarding developing countries.
• Gender Inequality in the Field of Working Wright and Yaeger state that it is the deep intersection of the life and work fields in the current working paradigm that creates daily and long-term problems, limits the available time for male and female […]
• Gender Inequality and Female Leaders in the Hospitality Industry The current literature regarding the challenges and issues facing women in leadership positions in the hospitality industry in France is inadequate.
• Gender Inequality in Afghanistan Thirdly, there is social gender inequality, which is demonstrated by women being the victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, inequalities in education attainment, lack of freedom to marry and divorce, and unequal access to […]
• Gender Inequality and the Glass Ceiling The significant societal barriers that keep women from achieving the highest levels of their careers include, but are not limited to, organizational barriers, societal barriers, and Personal barriers.
• Gender Inequality in Social Media Research shows that teenagers from the age of thirteen use social media to discuss the physical appearances of girls and exchange images with sexual content.
• Combating Gender Inequality It is thanks to this approach that humanity will be able to successfully cope with the problem of gender inequality, sexism, and discrimination.
• Gender Inequality in Family Business One of the problems that every woman faces in a family business is that of succession. In the model of Royal Families, the right to lead the business belongs to the oldest son.
• Social, Cultural and Gender Inequality From a Global Perspective It is the duty of the tutor to craft a lecture-room environment that serves to enhance meaningful discussions concerning gender. This is due to the fact that students learn best in various ways.
• Gender Inequality in Relation to the Military Service In his article, Soutik Biswas refers to the intention of India’s Supreme Court to influence the government and give women commanding roles in the army.
• Gender Inequality and Socio-Economic Development Gender inequality in the US determines who is to be in the kitchen and who is to sit in the White House.
• Gender Inequality in the Video Games Industry The portrayal of males and females in video games is a subject of study in gender studies and is discussed in the context of sexism in the industry.
• Women’s Rights and Gender Inequality in Saudi Arabia Indeed, it is crucial to understand the importance of women’s rights, see the connections between the past, the present, the local, and the global, and realize how political and media discourse represents the social issue […]
• The Issue of Gender Inequality Reflection Unfortunately, in the opinion of many, inequality in their treatment is even more pronounced, forming a third group from such persons in addition to binary people and positioning them at the end of the list.
• Femicide in Mexico and the Problem of Gender Inequality Femicide remains one of the most devastating issues in Mexico, and it is vital to address the gender oppression and inequality that women face.
• Gender Inequality in Mass Media However, as a part of society, media organizations are influenced by the same social aspects and biased conclusions as the rest of the community. As a result, the owners and managers of media are mainly […]
• Gender Inequality in American Stories and Plays There are disputes about the sexual desire of men and women and how it is applied, and the use of physical strength of men on women.
• Gender Inequality and Female Empowerment Promotion Therefore, it is crucial to continue celebrating women’s accomplishments and encourage a positive change within the current perception of women as a social and biological class.
• Gender Inequality in Interdisciplinary Lenses Both sociologists and legal experts concur that a gender bias ingrained in society is the primary factor contributing to the issue of women in the workforce.
• Gender Inequality at Work in Developed Countries In France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain, men are disadvantaged throughout the employment process for professions where women predominate. These are the conclusions of a study conducted by the University of Amsterdam, the University […]
• Gender Inequality and Its Causes Analysis It is evident that the difference is so insignificant to the point where some women can be athletically stronger than men, and there is a vast difference in strength among men themselves.
• Human Objectification as a Tool of Gender Inequality Objectification and culture of suppressed emotions of the male gender lead to the further sexual objectification of the females resulting in unequal social positions.
• The Issue of Gender Inequality After Covid-19 To date, the role of women in society has increased many times over, both in the economic, social, and political spheres of public life.
• Gender Inequality in the Construction Field It is important that the main actors in the sector understand that gender equality can help reduce the issue of shortage of skill that exists in that field.
• Social Enterprises and Gender Inequality in Dubai In the context of UAE demographics, the population of Dubai has been rightfully considered the most diverse in terms of age, income, and socio-ethnic background, as this city is a conglomerate for tourists, business visitors, […]
• The Relationship Between Gender Inequality and Women’s Economic Independence In a scenario where the wife is employed, either of the parents has the means of supporting themselves as well as other dependents, and this is the most remarkable benefit of emancipation.
• Gender Inequality: On the Influence of Culture and Religion Therefore, to understand more about the topic, it is essential to study the issues from various perspectives and find the connection of the discourse to other gender-related problems and theories.
• Gender Inequality and Its Implications on American Society It is not just the fight for the women’s rights, elimination of the gender pay gap or the harassment phenomenon. The voices of those who disagree with the fact that the resolution of one case […]
• Women From the Downtown Eastside: Gender Inequality One of the main questions that bother many people around the whole world is the identification of the conditions under which the citizens of the Downtown Eastside disappeared.
• Issues Surrounding Gender Inequality in the Workplace The main objective of the constructionist point of view is that it is aimed at uncovering how the individuals and the groups tend to participate in the creation of their perceptions of gender and women […]
• Public Policy Analysis on Gender Inequality in Education in South Sudan The major challenges related to the development of the educational system are the ongoing violent attacks and natural disasters. The General Education Strategic Plan, 2017-2022 is the government’s response to the most burning issues in […]
• Gender Inequality, Violence Against Women, and Fear in The Sopranos Thus, the major research question will be “Does The Sopranos endorse or criticize VaW through the frequent depiction of the scenes of cruelty?” The hypothesis of the research paper will be “The portrayal of VaW […]
• Race & Gender Inequality and Economic Empowerment This means that the study will analyze the problem of race and gender inequality and examine how it is related to poverty.
• Gender Inequality: “Caliban and the Witch” by Federici Federici shows the fall of female ability for autonomy and the rise of patriarchal societies as a result of an emerging emphasis on global trade and the perceived notion that the wealth of the country […]
• Gender Inequality Index 2013 in the Gulf Countries However, the ratio of women in the parliament is noticeably lower, and that explains why the GII of Kuwait is slightly higher than the one of the UEA.
• Gender Inequality: Reginald Murphy College To establish the accuracy of the allegations raised as a group, the factors to ensuring the retrieval of the correct information about the issue in question are the involvement of all members of the administration […]
• Gender Inequality at the China’s Workplaces Although researchers have quantified the extent of gender pay inequality in the workplace, they hold different opinions regarding the best strategies to use in addressing the problem.
• Gender Inequality and Its Historical Origin Seeing that the effects of the two factors are reciprocal, it can be assumed that, though both have had a tangible impact on the contemporary representation of women in the society, traditions have a significantly […]
• Gender Inequality in Europe, America, Asia, Africa The laws and customs of the countries located in Africa and the Middle East are shaped by many factors. Some of the laws in the Middle East are clearly unfair towards women.
• Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality I examine the idea of work-and-life balance that is proposed as a solution to the problem of having a family and career at the same time and point out the fact that it is typically […]
• Bill Myers’ Leadership and Gender Inequality In this case, the bartenders, wait staff and the busboys all possess the required skills and knowledge for the job, and thus ought to be treated equally.
• Gender Inequality in the Labor Force The aim of this article is to assess the assertion that gender inequality exists in the labor force. The table below shows global adult employment-to-population by gender for 1998 and 2008.
• How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World? According Ridgeway, it may not be correct per se to say that its only women who are aggrieved by the gender imbalance but majority of the cases that depict gender inequalities involve women on the […]
• Gender Inequality in America This event highlighted the extent to which women were vulnerable to the prejudices of the society. This particular event is important because it lead to the exclusion of women from the political life of the […]
• Gender inequality in Algeria The fact that women helped to build back the ruins of society and the heroism they showed in the war efforts, was forgotten by their husbands and the government.
• Gender inequality in Canada According to, although it is certain that men and women have actual differences particularly physically, most of the social indifference perception are not because of the biological connotation but because of the over time cultural […]
• Gender Inequality in the US Of more importance in the enhancement of gender inequality is the role of the media. The natural constrains described above and the multiplier effects from the historical insubordination of women still play to men’s favor […]
• Observations on the Gender Inequality This is the best way to preserve the stability and order in a gendered society, although the young woman in the street cannot accept this order of things.
• The Effects of International Trade on Gender Inequality: Women Carpet Weavers of Iran
• The Prevailing Gender Inequality in USA
• Perspectives On Gender Inequality And The Barrier Of Culture On Education
• Race, Ethnicity and Gender Inequality in the Rwanda Genocide
• The Scarcity Of Water And Its Effect On Gender Inequality
• Unequal Division Of Economic Growth And Gender Inequality
• The Measurement of Multidimensional Gender Inequality
• The Growing Issue of Gender Inequality in the Workplace
• Understanding Gender Inequality in Employment and Retirement
• The Violation of Women and the Practice of Gender Inequality Through Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
• The Different Elements That Affect Gender Inequality in Society
• How Gender Inequality Is Defined As The Unequal Treatment
• The Controversial Issue of Gender Inequality in the Twentieth Century
• The Correlation between Poverty and Gender Inequality
• The Problem of Gender Inequality in the United States and Its Negative Impact on American Society
• National Culture, Gender Inequality and Women’s Success in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises
• The Institutional Basis of Gender Inequality: The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI)
• The Issue of Gender Stereotypes and Its Contribution to Gender Inequality in the Second Presidential Debate
• Women´s Right Movement: Gender Inequality
• International Relations: Gender Inequality Issues
• Problems of Gender Inequality for Women in India and Other
• The Role of Women Discrimination and Gender Inequality in Development: The Cross-Section Analysis by Different Income Groups
• The Effect of Gender Inequality on Economic Development: Case of African Countries
• The Role of Historical Resource Constraints in Modern Gender Inequality: A Cross-Country Analysis
• The Influence of Gender Budgeting in Indian States on Gender Inequality and Fiscal Spending
• Identity, Society, and Gender Inequality of Women in North West India
• How Debates of Gender Inequality and Gender Roles are Conflicted With Family Structures
• The Features of the Problem of Gender Inequality in the World
• Untapped Potential in the Study of Negotiation and Gender Inequality in Organizations
• The Impact of the Sectoral Allocation of Foreign aid on Gender Inequality
• The Impact Of Gender Inequality On Employee Satisfaction
• The Issue of Gender Inequality Between the North and South in the United States
• The Problem of Gender Inequality in South Asia and Its Effects on Girls and Women in Society
• Whether Patriarchy Is The Leading Cause Of Gender Inequality
• The Issues of Gender Inequality in the Book a Woman on the Edge
• Women Deserve For A Girl : A Real Issue Of Gender Inequality
• The Main Causes And Consequences Of Gender Inequality
• The Experience of Gender Inequality in The Awakening, a Novel by Kate Chopin
• The Issues of Gender Inequality in the Political Landscape Despite the Legal and Theoretical Attempts to Overcome the Gender Gap
• Measuring Key Disparities in Human Development: The Gender Inequality Index
• The Relationship of the Cultural and Historical Specificity of Gender Inequality in Mitchell’s Not Enough of the Past
• Stange Journeys and Gender Inequality in Pullman and Dangarembga
• Help or Hindrance? Religion’s Impact on Gender Inequality in Attitudes and Outcomes
• Should Women Continue Fighting Against Gender Inequality
• Women ‘s Gender Inequality By Chinua Achebe ‘s Things Fall Apart
• Legislation and Labour Market Gender Inequality: An Analysis of OECD Countries
• What Are the Types of Gender Inequality?
• Does Gender Inequality Hinder Development and Economic Growth?
• What Does Gender Inequality Mean?
• Does Trade Liberalization Help to Reduce Gender Inequality?
• What are the main issues of gender inequality?
• How Has Gender Inequality Impacted Contemporary Catholicism?
• What Determines Gender Inequality in Household Food Security in Kenya?
• Who Is Affected by Gender Inequality?
• What Causes Gender Inequality?
• Where Is Gender Inequality Most Common?
• What Are the Effects of Gender Equality?
• How Can We Stop Gender Inequality?
• What Is an Example of Gender Equality?
• Does Gender Inequality Still Exist Today?
• What Is the Impact of Gender Inequality in the Society?
• When Did Gender Inequality Become an Issue?
• What Are the Three Main Areas of Gender Inequality in the World?
• How Does Gender Inequality Affect Development?
• What Is the Difference Between Gender Equity, Gender Equality, and Women’s Empowerment?
• Why Is Gender Equality Important?
• Is Gender Equality a Concern for Men?
• What Are the Manifestations of Gender Inequality in the Modern Society?
• Is Gender Inequality Still a Pending and Pressing Issue in the Modern World?
• What Are the Causes and Effects of Gender Inequality in the European Society?
• Can Gender Inequality Issues Be a Boost for Women’s Progress, Development, and Improvement in the Workplace?
• What Are the Future Consequences and Outcomes of the Present-Day Gender Inequality?
• Where Does Gender Inequality Step From?
• Is It Possible at All to Achieve Gender Equality?
• What Is Gender Blindness and How Does It Impact the Overall Concept of Gender Inequality?
• Is Education a Solution to Solve Inequality Between the Sexes?
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How do we measure gender discrimination? Proposing a construct of gender discrimination through a systematic scoping review

Laura de la torre-pérez.

1 Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology Department, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, C/ Villarroel 170, 08036 Barcelona, Spain

Alba Oliver-Parra

2 Consorci Sanitari de Barcelona, Carrer d’Esteve Terradas, 08023 Barcelona, Spain

Xavier Torres

3 Clinical Health Psychology Section of the Institute Clinic of Neuroscience, Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, C/ Villarroel 170, 08036 Barcelona, Spain

Maria Jesús Bertran

Associated data.

Qualitative data collected regarding abstract screening and variables collection was made through Microsoft Access and exported in excel sheets.

Gender discrimination (GD) has been frequently linked to mental health. The heterogeneity of how GD is defined has led to variation around the analysis of GD. This might affect the study of the association between GD and health outcomes. The main goal of this systematic scoping review is to operationalize the definition of the GD construct.

Three search strategies were set in Pubmed, CINAHL and PsycINFO. The first strategy obtained results mainly about women, while the second focused on men. The third strategy focused on the identification of GD questionnaires. The prevalence of GD, factors and consequences associated with GD perception, and forms of discrimination were the principal variables collected. Risk of bias was assessed (PROSPERO:CRD42019120719).

Of the 925 studies obtained, 84 were finally included. 60 GD questionnaires were identified. GD prevalence varied between 3.4 and 67 %. Female gender and a younger age were the factors most frequently related to GD. Poorer mental health was the most frequent consequence. Two components of the GD construct were identified: undervaluation (different recognition, opportunities in access, evaluation standards and expectations) and different treatment (verbal abuse and behaviour).

Conclusions

Two-component GD definition can add order and precision to the measurement, increase response rates and reported GD.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12939-021-01581-5.

Introduction

Gender discrimination (GD) is a form of discrimination based on perceptions of gender and it has been evaluated through different perspectives. Overall, discrimination is considered to influence health. Thus, the heterogeneity in the analysis of GD can affect the study of its health consequences [ 1 – 4 ]. Reported health consequences have been mainly related to mental health, for example, occupational stress [ 5 ], feelings of vulnerability, and discomfort in women [ 4 ]. Other authors have found an association between discrimination and fatigue, depression, anxiety, rage, and alienation [ 6 , 7 ].

Differences in GD analysis rely on the different approaches used. Questionnaires that measure reported GD [ 2 ] leave the responsibility for knowing what discrimination is to the subject filling in the questionnaire, and an individual’s concept of discrimination might vary in different cultural contexts. The other main approach is based on querying situations that are thought of as discriminatory [ 8 , 9 ]. The forms of discrimination addressed differ between studies and usually lacked exhaustive characterization. Few studies clarify whether GD is referred to the experience of being discriminated against because of one’s gender, or the holding of attitudes/prejudices indicative of gender bias, commonly mixing these dimensions or not specifying them. The disparity leads to difficulties in the comparison of results. Moreover, the correspondence between these two approaches has not been evaluated.

This situation not only reflects the possibility of measurement of potentially different concepts under the umbrella of GD, but also a lack of consensus as to what GD operatively means. To our knowledge, unlike other related concepts, such as racial discrimination [ 10 , 11 ], GD has not been operatively characterized from a behavioral and a psychological point of view.

Previous conceptualizations of sexism [ 12 ] accounted for discriminatory attitudes mostly towards women, despite gender being a key aspect in men’s health [ 13 – 16 ]. However, the nature of gender is considered to be performative rather than essential or possessive [ 17 ], meaning that it depends more on individuals’ attitudes or actions than on their sex. Thus, GD can be defined as a gender role prejudice directed towards men and women. Conversely, the intricate connections between the concept of sex and gender and different theorizations of the latter can explain why GD is mostly studied in women. Moreover, as socio-cultural contexts shape gender roles, the analysis of its influence is a cornerstone in GD’s conceptualization and interpretation [ 18 ]. This adds complexity to the definition of GD and has led to different conceptions of GD across the literature.

Constructs are defined based on different methodologies (see [ 19 ]) and its validation is complex, usually based on the analysis of its association with external factors. Scoping reviews are normally used to clarify definitions and the conceptual boundaries of a topic [ 20 ]. Through this methodology, it is possible to compile information that could be useful for external validations of the construct. Moreover, systematic scoping reviews facilitate understanding of the research processes undertaken to achieve the conclusions of a particular study. Therefore, this methodology can be used to summarize the concept of GD and clarify its operative definition while assessing studies’ risk of bias, and identifying future lines of research [ 21 ].

To develop an operative GD construct could contribute to increasing the homogeneity of the GD and the analysis of its different dimensions as health determinants. Furthermore, it could also help to understand how GD association with health works and which dimensions have more impact on health.

In order to frame how GD is currently being studied and its association to health, this systematic scoping review aims to identify GD questionnaires and their psychometric properties and, with this information, to propose the dimensions of the GD construct. Moreover, to contextualize the proposal and facilitate future external validations of the GD construct, a secondary objective is to collect the associated factors related to the perception of discrimination and to describe the mental health consequences associated with experiences of GD.

Materials and methods

This systematic review has been registered at the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO, https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/ ) with the registration number CRD42019120719.

Search strategy

The online databases Pubmed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO were included. The initial search was performed in May 2018 and was updated in April 2019.

The search strategy (SS) was performed using the following terms: “Sexism”, “Gender discriminat*”, “Social perception”, “Self-concept”, “Hypermasculinity”, “Masculinity”, “Gender Identity”, “Survey*”, “Questionnaire*”, “Self-report*”, “Perception*” (See S1_File for the detailed search strategies). Although gender definition and gender-based power structures are out of the scope of this review, three different SS were defined to explore all potential aspects of GD. The first SS focused on the identification of the components of GD. It included general terms related to GD (“Sexism”[MeSH] and “Gender Discrimination”) and was narrowed (by the Boolean operator [AND]) with the terms “self-concept” and “social perception” to allow a number of results assumable by the research group. As the results with this SS were mainly related to GD towards women, the second SS was aimed at exploring different dimensions of GD towards men. The second SS included the terms “Hypermasculinity” and “Masculinity”, which are modified terms related to discrimination, and it was narrowed (by the Boolean operator [AND]) with the term “Gender Identity” [Mesh major topic] to find GD and gender role prejudice in relation to men. The third SS was defined to identify discrimination scales. The scales reflect what is understood as discrimination on different axes (gender, race, sexual orientation, or other), which are considered to be related [ 22 ]. It included general terms related to GD (“Sexism” and “Gender Discrimination”) in the title or abstract and “self-report*” and “perception*”. The SS was adapted for the CINAHL and PsycINFO databases. An additional file shows the different search strategies in more detail [see Additional file 1 ].

In order to ensure the collection of different approaches to GD, no specific study designs were excluded. Only adult populations were included and there was no limitation on the publication date. The publication state was defined as published and available online, and the language used could be Spanish, English, French, or Portuguese, which reflected the language background of the reviewers. Studies were also identified through bibliographic references.

Analysis strategy

Two different analysis strategies (AS1 and AS2) with different inclusion criteria were defined. In the analysis strategy number 1 (AS1) all the defined variables were collected (variables in detail in the S1 and S2 Table [see Additional file 2 ]). On the one hand, the main study results were information on forms of discrimination and potential triggers of discrimination, in order to identify GD dimensions. On the other hand, information about factors associated with greater or lower GD perception and potential consequences of GD reporting were collected, to facilitate future GD construct validation. Additionally, other results such as the main study result or perceived discrimination prevalence were collected to contextualize the findings. Studies were included if their focus was either the analysis or the perception of discrimination. Also, studies analyzing the effects of discrimination and the factors associated with the perception of discrimination were included. The final inclusion in AS1 was linked to the presence of information of any of the result-study variables (Table S2 [see Additional file 2 ]). AS2 collected data about questionnaires on discrimination.

Articles not fitting AS1 inclusion criteria were included in the AS2 if their main focus was the analysis of the perception of discrimination. Final inclusion in AS2 was tied to the use of a questionnaire on discrimination. The exclusion criteria were the same for the two analysis plans. The exclusion criteria were (1) the inclusion of biological effects/measurements in the objectives of the study (i.e. hormonal levels, image tests); (2) the analysis of discriminatory practices, as they did not analyze GD perception; (3) descriptive analysis of the effects of gender role, as was out of the scope of the review; (4) measurement of health effects not related to mental health. As the effects of GD on physical health can be both direct and indirect, the measurement of health effects not related to mental health is conceptually more complex; (5) the descriptive analysis of GD time trends and (6) the analysis of experiences associated with cancer treatments, as the complexities of  gender and GD perceptions are out of the scope of this review.

The two screening phases (first by titles, second by abstracts) were performed independently by two reviewers. A conservative strategy was defined in which studies not naming discrimination itself were excluded from the review in order to avoid misinterpretations of the concept. The concordance in the screening and eligibility was registered and the reasons for exclusion were registered in a free-text field.

The process of gathering all data (variables in detail in the S1 and S2 Table [see Additional file 2 ]) was performed twice, by two reviewers independently. The process was overseen by the other two reviewers, who verified the optimal data collection procedure. The principal objective was prioritized - for the construct definition, the articles with information about forms of discrimination, triggers, and scale items listed were analyzed. The analysis consisted of inspecting data for shared properties of different forms of discrimination or triggers to define categories from which theoretical ideas could be generated. To allow this process data was broken down, compared and categorized using both inductive and reductive processing. Inductive reasoning refers to the process of making broad generalizations, that were afterwards grouped (or reduced) to similar themes, allowing the identification of categories. Identified categories defined the operative components of the construct. The process was completed through consensus of the different reviewers, considering categories frequency.

The risk of bias in individual studies was assessed only in the articles where forms of discrimination and triggers were collected to estimate the methodological adequacy of the articles included in the construct proposal, as this was the main goal of the scoping review. It was performed with different scales depending on the study design using Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal Tools [ 23 ]. In the case of mixed studies, the “Assessment of the mixed methods design of studies in HSR” tool was used [ 24 ].

Systematic review process

A total of 925 studies were included in the review through the search strategies used. Fifty-six duplicates were identified. Additionally, 26 references were included in the analysis. Six hundred and sixty-five references were excluded during the screening. One hundred and eighty-one articles were available in full text to the research group. Of those, a total of 97 articles were excluded from the review; exclusion reasons are shown in Fig.  1 . A total of 84 papers were included with more than 96 % agreement among reviewers, 71 from the AS1 and 13 from AS2.

Flow Diagram. SS1, Search Strategy (1) SS2, Search Strategy (2) SS3, Search Strategy (3) GD, Gender discrimination

Study characteristics

General characteristics of the studies included are available in S3 Table (Additional file 2 ). Forty of the 71 studies (AS1) were exclusively focused on GD and 17 on gender-based discrimination in addition to other discrimination axes (57 GD related articles). Among those studies which focused only on GD, most of them (n=29) assessed discrimination in relation to women. S4 Table shows other study characteristics in more detail [see Additional file 2 ].

Thirty-eight of the 71 studies (AS1) described different forms of discrimination - these studies were addressing either GD (n=27), GD and other discriminations (n=3), or other discriminations only (n=8). The settings were mainly work-related (n=23) or on a daily basis (n=8). No triggers in GD studies were described, and there were only three studies where these could be identified [ 25 – 27 ].

Gender discrimination questionnaires

Of the 57 studies addressing GD in the AS1, 47 used at least one questionnaire to assess discrimination. The review identified a total of 75 studies using questionnaires, 62 by the AS1 and 13 through the AS2. Thirty-five surveys addressed only GD, 24 GD and multiple axes, and 16 other kinds of discrimination.

Less than half of studies assessing GD (n=23) used a questionnaire customized by the research group, among them, internal consistency was assessed in 12, and one study of these performed a factor analysis [ 28 ]. The rest of the studies (n=36) used already constructed questionnaires, Krieger et al. [ 29 ] being the most used (n=8), followed by Schedule of Sexist Events [ 30 ] (n=4). From the 59 GD studies (47, AS1 and 12, AS2), 26 addressed the declaration of the perception of discrimination with a Yes/No question, whereas 32 asked for specific forms of what was considered discrimination, and one study did not provide data about the questionnaire’s items.

Approaches to discrimination

Most approaches in GD analysis differed only in the kind of questionnaire used. However, two relevant approaches varied between studies: the differentiation between observed and experienced discrimination and the conceptual framework used.

The differentiation between observed and experienced discrimination

Perception of discrimination was inconsistently assessed in observers and victims. Five studies addressed this difference by asking specifically about this aspect [ 31 – 35 ]. However, of the 20 studies assessing gender group discrimination, ten did it in mixed populations: five asked for perceived GD towards their in-group (women were asked about GD towards women and men towards men), four studies asked for perceived gender bias only towards women and one had an unclear approach.

Conceptual frameworks

Some of the included studies had different comprehensions of GD and gender-prejudice related concepts. The distinction between GD and other forms of gender-based prejudice is referred to by Berg [ 37 ]; Hang-yue et al. [ 38 ] and Nye et al. [ 36 ]. Through a confirmatory factor analysis, Nye et al. [ 36 ] refer to sexist behavior as a different concept from GD. Sexist behavior would be considered a form of hostile sexism and part of a broad hostile sexism construct but separated from GD. Sexist behavior would include those acts that are clearly gender-related and are usually linked to colleagues or peers, whereas GD would be inherently less explicit and refer to motivations behind behaviors. Other studies allude to “gender-related stressors” [ 37 ] and “gender bias” [ 38 ] as different forms of gender-based prejudice. Berg [ 37 ] used “gender stressors” to refer to the stress related to the cultural expectations and role burden of women (thus, related to the gender role). Meanwhile, gender bias was considered by Hang-yue et al. [ 38 ] as discrimination towards a group of women within the workplace or society, defining GD as an individual experience. Moreover, some researchers consider diverse situations or events (such as, sexual objectification and sexual harassment) as GD [ 37 , 39 – 41 ] while the same group of situations is thought to be part of different constructs or dimensions of gender-related prejudice by others [ 36 ].

Frameworks also refer to how GD is interpreted, contextualized and how it relates to other variables. Gomez [ 42 ], states that cross-group discrimination implies inferiorizing and thus, the group used an inferiorization scale to assess discrimination. Reid [ 40 ] introduced the discrepancy fact measure scale to assess the tendency to minimize or maximize measurable information from the social context about GD as a possible variable affecting GD perception. Also, recently, Kira et al. proposed a trauma-based framework for GD [ 43 ] developed on different subscales that comprised perceptions of, and attitudes towards women in a familiar environment.

Study outcomes

Gd perception.

Only one study [ 37 ] reported that all women in the sample had perceived some kind of GD throughout their lives. Perceived discrimination among the rest of the studies assessing GD (n=56/57 in AS1) was between 3.4 % and 67 %. Thirty-two studies assessing GD reported associated factors with it. Female gender was the most frequent factor associated with GD in mixed populations (n=7). S5 Table shows other associated factors in more detail [see Additional file 2 ].

Variables affecting GD perception

Fewer studies focused on how different variables could affect the perception of GD. Seven studies [ 33 – 35 , 41 , 44 – 46 ] contemplated the role of the person who discriminates in the perception of discrimination. Flippen and Parrado [ 47 ] addressed the relevance of the kind and origin of the discriminatory behavior, finding that the relationship between the person who discriminates and the kind of behavior, modifies the perception of GD. In this study, more women reported discrimination when it was through comments made by their boss or a stranger in comparison to their boyfriend. Another example is the study of the interactions between different axes of discrimination. Harnois [ 48 ] studied the relationship between age, gender, and ethnic-based discrimination and found that reporting discrimination on one axis of inequality was also a risk factor for the perception of discrimination on others [ 48 ].

Ten studies reported factors associated with lower GD perception. Three studies reported different ethnicities as a factor (Caucasic, Black, Latin, or Asian) [ 49 – 51 ]. Other studies referred to patriarchal society [ 8 , 52 ], beliefs about gender roles, conservative political ideas, working in basic science or as staff in academic environments, age (older) and gender (men), and gender expression among women (more masculine women tended to perceive less discrimination). Hinze et al. [ 53 ] reported that when exposed to sexual harassment, less personal forms of harassment were associated with lower discrimination perception. Also, the group addressed that fears of being sensitive or rejecting victimhood positions were also associated with lower GD perception [ 53 ].

Associations with GD

Twenty-one of 57 studies reported possible effects associated with GD, and 17 of these articles only assessed GD among women. They could be divided into either personal or professional. Among men and women, personal consequences were mostly related to health (consequences can be seen in detail in the S6 Table [see Additional file 2 ] ) . The most frequent was poor mental health, and it was measured with a validated scale of anxiety or depression in four of the studies[ 2 , 3 , 54 , 55 ].

Regarding studies of other axes of discrimination (n=14), in approaches used, one study measured sexual identity discrimination [ 25 ] as two dimensions; environmental and interpersonal microaggressions. As in the study of GD, associated factors with reporting were younger age, gender female [ 56 , 57 ] and higher education [ 47 ], but these were not consistent in all of the studies. Meanwhile, all the studies reporting the possible consequences of GD (n=7) [ 25 , 26 , 35 , 58 – 61 ] described higher psychological distress in those who perceived discrimination.

Gender discrimination as a construct

Two major dimensions of the construct of GD were identified: undervaluation (1) and different treatment (2). The graphic representation can be seen in Fig.  2 .

Gender Discrimination construct map. GD: Gender Discrimination U: Undervaluation. T: Different Treatment. SO: Sexual Objectification. SH: Sexual Harassment. GR: Gender Role

First, Undervaluation refers to the expressed lower value of a person’s capacity as a consequence of their gender. It is a subtle act over actions or performance of a person and includes four subdimensions: differences in recognition, in opportunities, in evaluation standards and in expectations. Different recognition refers to the attribution of varying merit to similar performed activities (such as different salaries), whereas opportunities are referred to the differences in access to higher social status or to resources (such as being hired for specific jobs; access to scholarships, or other resources). Differences in evaluation standards refer to biased evaluation based on gender roles; for example, to assume that some skills might not have been acquired, because of the gender role. Different expectations encompass expected attitudes, skills, or levels of proficiency in gender role segregated areas. For example, to expect that a woman will not understand a car engine or that a man will be uncomfortable around displays of emotions. This would also include work-related expectations that could determine work assignments.

Second, Different Treatment is related to evident and obvious actions towards a person due to their gender. This dimension is manifested in a more direct way than Undervaluation. It includes Different Behavior towards a person (less respect, more isolation and lack of support) and verbal abuse or comments directed towards people because of their gender. Comments could be divided into different groups: derogatory comments towards one’s gender (including offensive jokes), incentives of gender conformity and discouragement of non-classical gender role activities, behaviors or attitudes.

Lack of decision-making power was an aspect identified through two studies in women. It would reflect the lack of independence in the family environment as a form of disadvantage experienced by women. It could be part of the dimension of Undervaluation or a dimension by itself (see Fig.  2 ). However, no saturation with other studies was identified and this was not finally included in the construct proposed.

Sexual objectification and sexual harassment were identified in questionnaires and interviews, but these aspects were not included in the construct proposal. Data included in non-GD studies were used only to support identified dimensions. Data related to reactions to discrimination, self-stigma, or gender violence were excluded from the construct. S7 table in an additional file shows the studies linked with the main dimensions identified [see Additional file 2 ].

Risk of bias assessment

The risk of bias was assessed in the 33 studies that reported either forms or triggers of discrimination. No specific scale was identified to assess biases for validation studies (n=4) and literature review (n=1). The risk of bias assessment can be seen in S8 Table [see Additional file 2 ].

GD is measured in a wide variety of contexts and with several methodologies. Different measures regarding the target audience (men, women or both), and the type of discrimination assessed (individual, group) hindered comparison of the results.

The different scales used, and the various study contexts (settings and populations) could explain the wide range of declared discrimination and the plethora of factors associated with it. Moreover, conceptual frameworks changed across the studies. Some research groups clearly state different concepts of gender prejudice [ 36 – 38 ] and diversely define what GD is. Meanwhile, others include GD concepts such as sexual harassment or sexual objectification [ 37 , 39 – 41 ], which have been studied separately from GD [ 62 , 63 ]. Also, some studies approached the perception of GD in the same way as observed GD, which may be different constructs or dimensions.

Further heterogeneity can be observed in the variety of factors associated with reported GD. The factors associated with GD could indicate that either in some settings, gender discriminatory attitudes are more present than in others or that specific contexts or characteristics can increase the perception of GD. However these differences are not clarified in the studies identified through this review. The generalization of this data could be misleading if the social context is not considered. More in-depth mixed-method studies comparing settings and social contexts could help understand these nuances. Besides, few studies in the review contemplated the importance of interactions and intersectionality in their study design. As it was not the focus of the review, this could be explained by the search strategy used. However, the effect of other discriminations should always be taken into account [ 48 , 64 ].

More homogeneity has been found in the consequences of discrimination, and the differences identified may be more related to the measuring tools. Psychological distress and lower self-concept seem to appear consistently due to either GD or other types of discrimination. Outside the focus of this review, some studies [ 37 , 65 ] identified factors that would modify discrimination effects which could be useful to approaching GD as a determinant of health.

GD was summarized in two dimensions; Undervaluation (1) and Different Treatment (2). Both dimensions were present in most of the studies assessed. Undervaluation is a more subtle aspect of GD whereas Different Treatment refers to evident actions. In one study [ 8 ], the lack of decision-making power or independence in the family environment is identified as a form of disadvantage among women and a way of undermining female capacities. The lack of decision-making power was also introduced by Kira et al. [ 43 ] through several items in the Gender Discrimination Inventory, also referring to the familiar environment. This aspect could be extrapolated to a lack of decision-making power in a specific role setting (which could be different from culture to culture depending on gender roles). So, conceptually, it could be either included in the Undervaluation dimension or considered as an entity in its own right. However, due to the lack of reiteration of this possible factor, it could not be included in the construct proposed.

The different frameworks identified were considered in the analysis of questionnaire items for the construct proposal. Forms of activity such as sexist behavior (as described by Nye et al. [ 36 ]) or gender bias (as defined by Hang-yue et al. [ 38 ]) were considered to be GD as they were in other studies. However, as sexual objectification has been studied separately [ 62 , 63 ], and sexual harassment and gender violence have legal implications, these elements were identified but separated from the analysis.

The proposed construct presents a clear distinction between subtle and explicit ways of discrimination. The first dimension, Undervaluation , even if it can be systematically present in institutions, can be both culturally invisible and difficult to objectify. Whereas Different Treatment , especially in forms of verbal abuse, is more explicit and can be noticed by both the person to whom it is directed and by other external observers. So, even if the experience of discrimination is highly subjective and recall bias might influence responses, some GD forms could be more easily reported even in settings where GD is culturally embodied. On the other hand, perceptions of more subtle forms of discrimination, as Undervaluation subdimensions, specify mediums through which embedded GD can occur. The recognition in the construct of these specific forms of submerged GD make them more tangible and can help overcome biased perceptions and promote individual agency over the influence of social contexts in a person’s core beliefs.

Previous GD definitions identified in the review are mostly related to the work environment [ 36 ], and others were developed grounded on the assumption that GD prejudice could only be directed towards women [ 38 , 43 ]. The proposed construct could be applicable in every setting because it is based on studies developed in different environments with a representation of public settings and personal relationships. Also, it is thought to be directed towards both genders. However, given the few studies included addressing GD towards men, there is little evidence supporting the applicability of this construct to both genders, and further research is needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Fewer studies addressed discrimination in gender-mixed populations, reporting gender differences in perceived discrimination. However, most of these studies assessed perceived discrimination with a Yes/No question of declared discrimination. This approach implies that men can easily identify gender prejudice in different contexts, which would seem unlikely given the differences in gender roles and privileges.

During the screening of relevant studies for this review, studies dealing with the deleterious effects of masculinities by focusing on the study of self-worth and self-stigma [ 27 , 66 ] were identified but not included. Others addressed masculinity threats [ 67 , 68 ] or approached gender prejudice by focusing on anti-effeminacy attitudes [ 27 , 69 ]. These attitudes are also present in homosexual self-discrimination [ 27 , 58 , 70 ] and as a determinant of homophobic attitudes [ 71 , 72 ]. All these directly or indirectly refer to how men limit their behavior and value their self-worth according to how they fit their gender role.

Given these lines of research, it is possible that GD in men may involve a specific dimension of self-stigma that modifies how men perceive GD. Men would control their behavior in order to be less feminine and value themselves according to the level of control [ 67 ]. This dimension would manifest not only when they are in situations outside their gender role, but also for the fact of being men. The lack of help-seeking [ 58 ], or the absence of the display of emotion in men [ 73 ] could not only be related to the role, but also to the self-stigma [ 58 ]. However, multiple concepts related to this possible dimension can be identified and further studies are needed to explain and characterize how these multiple concepts can be encompassed and if these dimensions exist or could relate to gender stressors in women. These forms of gender-based prejudice might not only modify perceptions of discrimination but also determine the definition of further dimensions of GD. A deeper analysis of the proposed dimensions, considering gender conceptions, the relationship between gender, sex and power structures is needed to further clarify the construct.

When assessing the risk of bias, the studies included followed an adequate methodology. However, it is worth mentioning that the most crucial part of the studies’ potential biases, which are the characteristics of the measurement tools used, could not be fairly assessed. The development of a specific assessment scale could be useful in addressing this gap in the future.

There are several aspects of this study that may limit the generalizability of the results. First, given the analyzed data, the proposed construct might be over-influenced by North American culture. Thus, it should be interpreted carefully in different social contexts and settings, as aspects like GD perception, factors associated with GD perceptions or GD forms themselves might manifest in different ways. Additionally, interactions between forms of discrimination, self-stigma dimensions, and effect modifiers of perceived discrimination were not assessed in the conceptual framework of the review, and they might play a key role in GD and its relationship to health. Elements such as gender identity or past experience could play a determinant role in GD perception, and these were not considered in the proposed construct. Second, regarding the methodology, only published articles were included, so there is a possible publication bias in the results of this review [ 74 ]. Besides, bias assessment lacks qualitative evaluation, which is usually recommended. Third, the results regarding reported discrimination and associated factors are based on the results of different questionnaires, which have different items, scale punctuation and interpretations, so this limits the comparability of the results. Moreover, collected data for external validation was limited (for example, only collecting associations with mental health outcomes) and further data collection on different factors associated with GD should be performed to fully contextualize the GD construct validation. Finally, the narrowed search strategy may have led to the missing of relevant studies in GD. However, given the amount of studies focused on GD and related issues and the technical complexity of the review, the use of a limited and feasible search strategy was the cornerstone for making this study possible. Also, the defined search limited by Mesh terms and key concepts has led to the inclusion of recent research.

Even with the mentioned limitations, this systematic scoping review offers a rigorous methodology to deepen the understanding of GD, how its perception can be measured and the importance of properly identifying the factors that can be leading to a biased perception of GD within the methods used to measure it. Even in different cultural contexts, the homogeneity of a definition could be a helpful tool for later social-context based interpretations. Moreover, the methodology facilitates the identification of gaps of information or future research lines [ 20 ].

The construct proposal gathers the different forms of GD identified in the studies included in this review. Different GD measurement tools can be validated for measuring one or more dimensions, adding precision to the questionnaires used. Moreover, the specification of which dimensions of GD are measured, can help to understand GD prevalence results. As to how questions are asked can influence a subject’s responses [ 75 ], this construct may increase response rates and refine the perceptions of discrimination. By identifying the two main dimensions and subdimensions whereby GD may be held, a conceptual map is outlined to help navigate GD research through social contexts and individual core beliefs. As such, GD construct can be a tool to help identify more specific approaches to study GD, going beyond asking about reported GD (by Yes/No response) and avoiding recall bias in those who did not experience GD events as traumatic. This deeper insight into how GD takes place, gives a more comprehensive approach to its presence in society and its repercussions on individuals, and possibly, its role as a determinant of health. Nonetheless, further studies should be performed in order to validate and put this construct into practice.

Acknowledgements

Thank you, Sant Pau, for the training. Thanks Dani and Belén for the push.

Authors’ contributions

L. de la Torre-Pérez and A. Oliver-Parra performed the duplicate screening, data collection and initial construct proposal. MJ Bertran, and X.Torres verified the screening & data collection and discussed the construct proposal. L. de la Torre-Pérez drafted the first version of the original article and A. Oliver-Parra, MJ Bertran, and X.Torres reviewed and contributed to the final version. The authors read and approved the final manuscript.

No funding was available for this research.

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Laura de la Torre-Pérez, Email: [email protected] .

Alba Oliver-Parra, Email: moc.liamg@apiloabla .

Xavier Torres, Email: tac.cinilc@serrotx .

Maria Jesús Bertran, Email: tac.cinilc@nartreb .

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Research Article

Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicator

Contributed equally to this work with: Paola Belingheri, Filippo Chiarello, Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, Paola Rovelli

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Energia, dei Sistemi, del Territorio e delle Costruzioni, Università degli Studi di Pisa, Largo L. Lazzarino, Pisa, Italy

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy, Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Faculty of Economics and Management, Centre for Family Business Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

• Paola Belingheri, 
• Filippo Chiarello, 
• Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, 
• Paola Rovelli

• Published: September 21, 2021
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474
• Reader Comments

9 Nov 2021: The PLOS ONE Staff (2021) Correction: Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicator. PLOS ONE 16(11): e0259930. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259930 View correction

Gender equality is a major problem that places women at a disadvantage thereby stymieing economic growth and societal advancement. In the last two decades, extensive research has been conducted on gender related issues, studying both their antecedents and consequences. However, existing literature reviews fail to provide a comprehensive and clear picture of what has been studied so far, which could guide scholars in their future research. Our paper offers a scoping review of a large portion of the research that has been published over the last 22 years, on gender equality and related issues, with a specific focus on business and economics studies. Combining innovative methods drawn from both network analysis and text mining, we provide a synthesis of 15,465 scientific articles. We identify 27 main research topics, we measure their relevance from a semantic point of view and the relationships among them, highlighting the importance of each topic in the overall gender discourse. We find that prominent research topics mostly relate to women in the workforce–e.g., concerning compensation, role, education, decision-making and career progression. However, some of them are losing momentum, and some other research trends–for example related to female entrepreneurship, leadership and participation in the board of directors–are on the rise. Besides introducing a novel methodology to review broad literature streams, our paper offers a map of the main gender-research trends and presents the most popular and the emerging themes, as well as their intersections, outlining important avenues for future research.

Citation: Belingheri P, Chiarello F, Fronzetti Colladon A, Rovelli P (2021) Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicator. PLoS ONE 16(9): e0256474. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474

Editor: Elisa Ughetto, Politecnico di Torino, ITALY

Received: June 25, 2021; Accepted: August 6, 2021; Published: September 21, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Belingheri et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its supporting information files. The only exception is the text of the abstracts (over 15,000) that we have downloaded from Scopus. These abstracts can be retrieved from Scopus, but we do not have permission to redistribute them.

Funding: P.B and F.C.: Grant of the Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction of the University of Pisa (DESTEC) for the project “Measuring Gender Bias with Semantic Analysis: The Development of an Assessment Tool and its Application in the European Space Industry. P.B., F.C., A.F.C., P.R.: Grant of the Italian Association of Management Engineering (AiIG), “Misure di sostegno ai soci giovani AiIG” 2020, for the project “Gender Equality Through Data Intelligence (GEDI)”. F.C.: EU project ASSETs+ Project (Alliance for Strategic Skills addressing Emerging Technologies in Defence) EAC/A03/2018 - Erasmus+ programme, Sector Skills Alliances, Lot 3: Sector Skills Alliance for implementing a new strategic approach (Blueprint) to sectoral cooperation on skills G.A. NUMBER: 612678-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPKA2-SSA-B.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The persistent gender inequalities that currently exist across the developed and developing world are receiving increasing attention from economists, policymakers, and the general public [e.g., 1 – 3 ]. Economic studies have indicated that women’s education and entry into the workforce contributes to social and economic well-being [e.g., 4 , 5 ], while their exclusion from the labor market and from managerial positions has an impact on overall labor productivity and income per capita [ 6 , 7 ]. The United Nations selected gender equality, with an emphasis on female education, as part of the Millennium Development Goals [ 8 ], and gender equality at-large as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030 [ 9 ]. These latter objectives involve not only developing nations, but rather all countries, to achieve economic, social and environmental well-being.

As is the case with many SDGs, gender equality is still far from being achieved and persists across education, access to opportunities, or presence in decision-making positions [ 7 , 10 , 11 ]. As we enter the last decade for the SDGs’ implementation, and while we are battling a global health pandemic, effective and efficient action becomes paramount to reach this ambitious goal.

Scholars have dedicated a massive effort towards understanding gender equality, its determinants, its consequences for women and society, and the appropriate actions and policies to advance women’s equality. Many topics have been covered, ranging from women’s education and human capital [ 12 , 13 ] and their role in society [e.g., 14 , 15 ], to their appointment in firms’ top ranked positions [e.g., 16 , 17 ] and performance implications [e.g., 18 , 19 ]. Despite some attempts, extant literature reviews provide a narrow view on these issues, restricted to specific topics–e.g., female students’ presence in STEM fields [ 20 ], educational gender inequality [ 5 ], the gender pay gap [ 21 ], the glass ceiling effect [ 22 ], leadership [ 23 ], entrepreneurship [ 24 ], women’s presence on the board of directors [ 25 , 26 ], diversity management [ 27 ], gender stereotypes in advertisement [ 28 ], or specific professions [ 29 ]. A comprehensive view on gender-related research, taking stock of key findings and under-studied topics is thus lacking.

Extant literature has also highlighted that gender issues, and their economic and social ramifications, are complex topics that involve a large number of possible antecedents and outcomes [ 7 ]. Indeed, gender equality actions are most effective when implemented in unison with other SDGs (e.g., with SDG 8, see [ 30 ]) in a synergetic perspective [ 10 ]. Many bodies of literature (e.g., business, economics, development studies, sociology and psychology) approach the problem of achieving gender equality from different perspectives–often addressing specific and narrow aspects. This sometimes leads to a lack of clarity about how different issues, circumstances, and solutions may be related in precipitating or mitigating gender inequality or its effects. As the number of papers grows at an increasing pace, this issue is exacerbated and there is a need to step back and survey the body of gender equality literature as a whole. There is also a need to examine synergies between different topics and approaches, as well as gaps in our understanding of how different problems and solutions work together. Considering the important topic of women’s economic and social empowerment, this paper aims to fill this gap by answering the following research question: what are the most relevant findings in the literature on gender equality and how do they relate to each other ?

To do so, we conduct a scoping review [ 31 ], providing a synthesis of 15,465 articles dealing with gender equity related issues published in the last twenty-two years, covering both the periods of the MDGs and the SDGs (i.e., 2000 to mid 2021) in all the journals indexed in the Academic Journal Guide’s 2018 ranking of business and economics journals. Given the huge amount of research conducted on the topic, we adopt an innovative methodology, which relies on social network analysis and text mining. These techniques are increasingly adopted when surveying large bodies of text. Recently, they were applied to perform analysis of online gender communication differences [ 32 ] and gender behaviors in online technology communities [ 33 ], to identify and classify sexual harassment instances in academia [ 34 ], and to evaluate the gender inclusivity of disaster management policies [ 35 ].

Applied to the title, abstracts and keywords of the articles in our sample, this methodology allows us to identify a set of 27 recurrent topics within which we automatically classify the papers. Introducing additional novelty, by means of the Semantic Brand Score (SBS) indicator [ 36 ] and the SBS BI app [ 37 ], we assess the importance of each topic in the overall gender equality discourse and its relationships with the other topics, as well as trends over time, with a more accurate description than that offered by traditional literature reviews relying solely on the number of papers presented in each topic.

This methodology, applied to gender equality research spanning the past twenty-two years, enables two key contributions. First, we extract the main message that each document is conveying and how this is connected to other themes in literature, providing a rich picture of the topics that are at the center of the discourse, as well as of the emerging topics. Second, by examining the semantic relationship between topics and how tightly their discourses are linked, we can identify the key relationships and connections between different topics. This semi-automatic methodology is also highly reproducible with minimum effort.

This literature review is organized as follows. In the next section, we present how we selected relevant papers and how we analyzed them through text mining and social network analysis. We then illustrate the importance of 27 selected research topics, measured by means of the SBS indicator. In the results section, we present an overview of the literature based on the SBS results–followed by an in-depth narrative analysis of the top 10 topics (i.e., those with the highest SBS) and their connections. Subsequently, we highlight a series of under-studied connections between the topics where there is potential for future research. Through this analysis, we build a map of the main gender-research trends in the last twenty-two years–presenting the most popular themes. We conclude by highlighting key areas on which research should focused in the future.

Our aim is to map a broad topic, gender equality research, that has been approached through a host of different angles and through different disciplines. Scoping reviews are the most appropriate as they provide the freedom to map different themes and identify literature gaps, thereby guiding the recommendation of new research agendas [ 38 ].

Several practical approaches have been proposed to identify and assess the underlying topics of a specific field using big data [ 39 – 41 ], but many of them fail without proper paper retrieval and text preprocessing. This is specifically true for a research field such as the gender-related one, which comprises the work of scholars from different backgrounds. In this section, we illustrate a novel approach for the analysis of scientific (gender-related) papers that relies on methods and tools of social network analysis and text mining. Our procedure has four main steps: (1) data collection, (2) text preprocessing, (3) keywords extraction and classification, and (4) evaluation of semantic importance and image.

Data collection

In this study, we analyze 22 years of literature on gender-related research. Following established practice for scoping reviews [ 42 ], our data collection consisted of two main steps, which we summarize here below.

Firstly, we retrieved from the Scopus database all the articles written in English that contained the term “gender” in their title, abstract or keywords and were published in a journal listed in the Academic Journal Guide 2018 ranking of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) ( https://charteredabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/AJG2018-Methodology.pdf ), considering the time period from Jan 2000 to May 2021. We used this information considering that abstracts, titles and keywords represent the most informative part of a paper, while using the full-text would increase the signal-to-noise ratio for information extraction. Indeed, these textual elements already demonstrated to be reliable sources of information for the task of domain lexicon extraction [ 43 , 44 ]. We chose Scopus as source of literature because of its popularity, its update rate, and because it offers an API to ease the querying process. Indeed, while it does not allow to retrieve the full text of scientific articles, the Scopus API offers access to titles, abstracts, citation information and metadata for all its indexed scholarly journals. Moreover, we decided to focus on the journals listed in the AJG 2018 ranking because we were interested in reviewing business and economics related gender studies only. The AJG is indeed widely used by universities and business schools as a reference point for journal and research rigor and quality. This first step, executed in June 2021, returned more than 55,000 papers.

In the second step–because a look at the papers showed very sparse results, many of which were not in line with the topic of this literature review (e.g., papers dealing with health care or medical issues, where the word gender indicates the gender of the patients)–we applied further inclusion criteria to make the sample more focused on the topic of this literature review (i.e., women’s gender equality issues). Specifically, we only retained those papers mentioning, in their title and/or abstract, both gender-related keywords (e.g., daughter, female, mother) and keywords referring to bias and equality issues (e.g., equality, bias, diversity, inclusion). After text pre-processing (see next section), keywords were first identified from a frequency-weighted list of words found in the titles, abstracts and keywords in the initial list of papers, extracted through text mining (following the same approach as [ 43 ]). They were selected by two of the co-authors independently, following respectively a bottom up and a top-down approach. The bottom-up approach consisted of examining the words found in the frequency-weighted list and classifying those related to gender and equality. The top-down approach consisted in searching in the word list for notable gender and equality-related words. Table 1 reports the sets of keywords we considered, together with some examples of words that were used to search for their presence in the dataset (a full list is provided in the S1 Text ). At end of this second step, we obtained a final sample of 15,465 relevant papers.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t001

Text processing and keyword extraction

Text preprocessing aims at structuring text into a form that can be analyzed by statistical models. In the present section, we describe the preprocessing steps we applied to paper titles and abstracts, which, as explained below, partially follow a standard text preprocessing pipeline [ 45 ]. These activities have been performed using the R package udpipe [ 46 ].

The first step is n-gram extraction (i.e., a sequence of words from a given text sample) to identify which n-grams are important in the analysis, since domain-specific lexicons are often composed by bi-grams and tri-grams [ 47 ]. Multi-word extraction is usually implemented with statistics and linguistic rules, thus using the statistical properties of n-grams or machine learning approaches [ 48 ]. However, for the present paper, we used Scopus metadata in order to have a more effective and efficient n-grams collection approach [ 49 ]. We used the keywords of each paper in order to tag n-grams with their associated keywords automatically. Using this greedy approach, it was possible to collect all the keywords listed by the authors of the papers. From this list, we extracted only keywords composed by two, three and four words, we removed all the acronyms and rare keywords (i.e., appearing in less than 1% of papers), and we clustered keywords showing a high orthographic similarity–measured using a Levenshtein distance [ 50 ] lower than 2, considering these groups of keywords as representing same concepts, but expressed with different spelling. After tagging the n-grams in the abstracts, we followed a common data preparation pipeline that consists of the following steps: (i) tokenization, that splits the text into tokens (i.e., single words and previously tagged multi-words); (ii) removal of stop-words (i.e. those words that add little meaning to the text, usually being very common and short functional words–such as “and”, “or”, or “of”); (iii) parts-of-speech tagging, that is providing information concerning the morphological role of a word and its morphosyntactic context (e.g., if the token is a determiner, the next token is a noun or an adjective with very high confidence, [ 51 ]); and (iv) lemmatization, which consists in substituting each word with its dictionary form (or lemma). The output of the latter step allows grouping together the inflected forms of a word. For example, the verbs “am”, “are”, and “is” have the shared lemma “be”, or the nouns “cat” and “cats” both share the lemma “cat”. We preferred lemmatization over stemming [ 52 ] in order to obtain more interpretable results.

In addition, we identified a further set of keywords (with respect to those listed in the “keywords” field) by applying a series of automatic words unification and removal steps, as suggested in past research [ 53 , 54 ]. We removed: sparse terms (i.e., occurring in less than 0.1% of all documents), common terms (i.e., occurring in more than 10% of all documents) and retained only nouns and adjectives. It is relevant to notice that no document was lost due to these steps. We then used the TF-IDF function [ 55 ] to produce a new list of keywords. We additionally tested other approaches for the identification and clustering of keywords–such as TextRank [ 56 ] or Latent Dirichlet Allocation [ 57 ]–without obtaining more informative results.

Classification of research topics

To guide the literature analysis, two experts met regularly to examine the sample of collected papers and to identify the main topics and trends in gender research. Initially, they conducted brainstorming sessions on the topics they expected to find, due to their knowledge of the literature. This led to an initial list of topics. Subsequently, the experts worked independently, also supported by the keywords in paper titles and abstracts extracted with the procedure described above.

Considering all this information, each expert identified and clustered relevant keywords into topics. At the end of the process, the two assignments were compared and exhibited a 92% agreement. Another meeting was held to discuss discordant cases and reach a consensus. This resulted in a list of 27 topics, briefly introduced in Table 2 and subsequently detailed in the following sections.

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Evaluation of semantic importance

Working on the lemmatized corpus of the 15,465 papers included in our sample, we proceeded with the evaluation of semantic importance trends for each topic and with the analysis of their connections and prevalent textual associations. To this aim, we used the Semantic Brand Score indicator [ 36 ], calculated through the SBS BI webapp [ 37 ] that also produced a brand image report for each topic. For this study we relied on the computing resources of the ENEA/CRESCO infrastructure [ 58 ].

The Semantic Brand Score (SBS) is a measure of semantic importance that combines methods of social network analysis and text mining. It is usually applied for the analysis of (big) textual data to evaluate the importance of one or more brands, names, words, or sets of keywords [ 36 ]. Indeed, the concept of “brand” is intended in a flexible way and goes beyond products or commercial brands. In this study, we evaluate the SBS time-trends of the keywords defining the research topics discussed in the previous section. Semantic importance comprises the three dimensions of topic prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Prevalence measures how frequently a research topic is used in the discourse. The more a topic is mentioned by scientific articles, the more the research community will be aware of it, with possible increase of future studies; this construct is partly related to that of brand awareness [ 59 ]. This effect is even stronger, considering that we are analyzing the title, abstract and keywords of the papers, i.e. the parts that have the highest visibility. A very important characteristic of the SBS is that it considers the relationships among words in a text. Topic importance is not just a matter of how frequently a topic is mentioned, but also of the associations a topic has in the text. Specifically, texts are transformed into networks of co-occurring words, and relationships are studied through social network analysis [ 60 ]. This step is necessary to calculate the other two dimensions of our semantic importance indicator. Accordingly, a social network of words is generated for each time period considered in the analysis–i.e., a graph made of n nodes (words) and E edges weighted by co-occurrence frequency, with W being the set of edge weights. The keywords representing each topic were clustered into single nodes.

The construct of diversity relates to that of brand image [ 59 ], in the sense that it considers the richness and distinctiveness of textual (topic) associations. Considering the above-mentioned networks, we calculated diversity using the distinctiveness centrality metric–as in the formula presented by Fronzetti Colladon and Naldi [ 61 ].

Lastly, connectivity was measured as the weighted betweenness centrality [ 62 , 63 ] of each research topic node. We used the formula presented by Wasserman and Faust [ 60 ]. The dimension of connectivity represents the “brokerage power” of each research topic–i.e., how much it can serve as a bridge to connect other terms (and ultimately topics) in the discourse [ 36 ].

The SBS is the final composite indicator obtained by summing the standardized scores of prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Standardization was carried out considering all the words in the corpus, for each specific timeframe.

This methodology, applied to a large and heterogeneous body of text, enables to automatically identify two important sets of information that add value to the literature review. Firstly, the relevance of each topic in literature is measured through a composite indicator of semantic importance, rather than simply looking at word frequencies. This provides a much richer picture of the topics that are at the center of the discourse, as well as of the topics that are emerging in the literature. Secondly, it enables to examine the extent of the semantic relationship between topics, looking at how tightly their discourses are linked. In a field such as gender equality, where many topics are closely linked to each other and present overlaps in issues and solutions, this methodology offers a novel perspective with respect to traditional literature reviews. In addition, it ensures reproducibility over time and the possibility to semi-automatically update the analysis, as new papers become available.

Overview of main topics

In terms of descriptive textual statistics, our corpus is made of 15,465 text documents, consisting of a total of 2,685,893 lemmatized tokens (words) and 32,279 types. As a result, the type-token ratio is 1.2%. The number of hapaxes is 12,141, with a hapax-token ratio of 37.61%.

Fig 1 shows the list of 27 topics by decreasing SBS. The most researched topic is compensation , exceeding all others in prevalence, diversity, and connectivity. This means it is not only mentioned more often than other topics, but it is also connected to a greater number of other topics and is central to the discourse on gender equality. The next four topics are, in order of SBS, role , education , decision-making , and career progression . These topics, except for education , all concern women in the workforce. Between these first five topics and the following ones there is a clear drop in SBS scores. In particular, the topics that follow have a lower connectivity than the first five. They are hiring , performance , behavior , organization , and human capital . Again, except for behavior and human capital , the other three topics are purely related to women in the workforce. After another drop-off, the following topics deal prevalently with women in society. This trend highlights that research on gender in business journals has so far mainly paid attention to the conditions that women experience in business contexts, while also devoting some attention to women in society.

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Fig 2 shows the SBS time series of the top 10 topics. While there has been a general increase in the number of Scopus-indexed publications in the last decade, we notice that some SBS trends remain steady, or even decrease. In particular, we observe that the main topic of the last twenty-two years, compensation , is losing momentum. Since 2016, it has been surpassed by decision-making , education and role , which may indicate that literature is increasingly attempting to identify root causes of compensation inequalities. Moreover, in the last two years, the topics of hiring , performance , and organization are experiencing the largest importance increase.

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Fig 3 shows the SBS time trends of the remaining 17 topics (i.e., those not in the top 10). As we can see from the graph, there are some that maintain a steady trend–such as reputation , management , networks and governance , which also seem to have little importance. More relevant topics with average stationary trends (except for the last two years) are culture , family , and parenting . The feminine topic is among the most important here, and one of those that exhibit the larger variations over time (similarly to leadership ). On the other hand, the are some topics that, even if not among the most important, show increasing SBS trends; therefore, they could be considered as emerging topics and could become popular in the near future. These are entrepreneurship , leadership , board of directors , and sustainability . These emerging topics are also interesting to anticipate future trends in gender equality research that are conducive to overall equality in society.

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In addition to the SBS score of the different topics, the network of terms they are associated to enables to gauge the extent to which their images (textual associations) overlap or differ ( Fig 4 ).

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There is a central cluster of topics with high similarity, which are all connected with women in the workforce. The cluster includes topics such as organization , decision-making , performance , hiring , human capital , education and compensation . In addition, the topic of well-being is found within this cluster, suggesting that women’s equality in the workforce is associated to well-being considerations. The emerging topics of entrepreneurship and leadership are also closely connected with each other, possibly implying that leadership is a much-researched quality in female entrepreneurship. Topics that are relatively more distant include personality , politics , feminine , empowerment , management , board of directors , reputation , governance , parenting , masculine and network .

The following sections describe the top 10 topics and their main associations in literature (see Table 3 ), while providing a brief overview of the emerging topics.

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Compensation.

The topic of compensation is related to the topics of role , hiring , education and career progression , however, also sees a very high association with the words gap and inequality . Indeed, a well-known debate in degrowth economics centers around whether and how to adequately compensate women for their childbearing, childrearing, caregiver and household work [e.g., 30 ].

Even in paid work, women continue being offered lower compensations than their male counterparts who have the same job or cover the same role [ 64 – 67 ]. This severe inequality has been widely studied by scholars over the last twenty-two years. Dealing with this topic, some specific roles have been addressed. Specifically, research highlighted differences in compensation between female and male CEOs [e.g., 68 ], top executives [e.g., 69 ], and boards’ directors [e.g., 70 ]. Scholars investigated the determinants of these gaps, such as the gender composition of the board [e.g., 71 – 73 ] or women’s individual characteristics [e.g., 71 , 74 ].

Among these individual characteristics, education plays a relevant role [ 75 ]. Education is indeed presented as the solution for women, not only to achieve top executive roles, but also to reduce wage inequality [e.g., 76 , 77 ]. Past research has highlighted education influences on gender wage gaps, specifically referring to gender differences in skills [e.g., 78 ], college majors [e.g., 79 ], and college selectivity [e.g., 80 ].

Finally, the wage gap issue is strictly interrelated with hiring –e.g., looking at whether being a mother affects hiring and compensation [e.g., 65 , 81 ] or relating compensation to unemployment [e.g., 82 ]–and career progression –for instance looking at meritocracy [ 83 , 84 ] or the characteristics of the boss for whom women work [e.g., 85 ].

The roles covered by women have been deeply investigated. Scholars have focused on the role of women in their families and the society as a whole [e.g., 14 , 15 ], and, more widely, in business contexts [e.g., 18 , 81 ]. Indeed, despite still lagging behind their male counterparts [e.g., 86 , 87 ], in the last decade there has been an increase in top ranked positions achieved by women [e.g., 88 , 89 ]. Following this phenomenon, scholars have posed greater attention towards the presence of women in the board of directors [e.g., 16 , 18 , 90 , 91 ], given the increasing pressure to appoint female directors that firms, especially listed ones, have experienced. Other scholars have focused on the presence of women covering the role of CEO [e.g., 17 , 92 ] or being part of the top management team [e.g., 93 ]. Irrespectively of the level of analysis, all these studies tried to uncover the antecedents of women’s presence among top managers [e.g., 92 , 94 ] and the consequences of having a them involved in the firm’s decision-making –e.g., on performance [e.g., 19 , 95 , 96 ], risk [e.g., 97 , 98 ], and corporate social responsibility [e.g., 99 , 100 ].

Besides studying the difficulties and discriminations faced by women in getting a job [ 81 , 101 ], and, more specifically in the hiring , appointment, or career progression to these apical roles [e.g., 70 , 83 ], the majority of research of women’s roles dealt with compensation issues. Specifically, scholars highlight the pay-gap that still exists between women and men, both in general [e.g., 64 , 65 ], as well as referring to boards’ directors [e.g., 70 , 102 ], CEOs and executives [e.g., 69 , 103 , 104 ].

Finally, other scholars focused on the behavior of women when dealing with business. In this sense, particular attention has been paid to leadership and entrepreneurial behaviors. The former quite overlaps with dealing with the roles mentioned above, but also includes aspects such as leaders being stereotyped as masculine [e.g., 105 ], the need for greater exposure to female leaders to reduce biases [e.g., 106 ], or female leaders acting as queen bees [e.g., 107 ]. Regarding entrepreneurship , scholars mainly investigated women’s entrepreneurial entry [e.g., 108 , 109 ], differences between female and male entrepreneurs in the evaluations and funding received from investors [e.g., 110 , 111 ], and their performance gap [e.g., 112 , 113 ].

Education has long been recognized as key to social advancement and economic stability [ 114 ], for job progression and also a barrier to gender equality, especially in STEM-related fields. Research on education and gender equality is mostly linked with the topics of compensation , human capital , career progression , hiring , parenting and decision-making .

Education contributes to a higher human capital [ 115 ] and constitutes an investment on the part of women towards their future. In this context, literature points to the gender gap in educational attainment, and the consequences for women from a social, economic, personal and professional standpoint. Women are found to have less access to formal education and information, especially in emerging countries, which in turn may cause them to lose social and economic opportunities [e.g., 12 , 116 – 119 ]. Education in local and rural communities is also paramount to communicate the benefits of female empowerment , contributing to overall societal well-being [e.g., 120 ].

Once women access education, the image they have of the world and their place in society (i.e., habitus) affects their education performance [ 13 ] and is passed on to their children. These situations reinforce gender stereotypes, which become self-fulfilling prophecies that may negatively affect female students’ performance by lowering their confidence and heightening their anxiety [ 121 , 122 ]. Besides formal education, also the information that women are exposed to on a daily basis contributes to their human capital . Digital inequalities, for instance, stems from men spending more time online and acquiring higher digital skills than women [ 123 ].

Education is also a factor that should boost employability of candidates and thus hiring , career progression and compensation , however the relationship between these factors is not straightforward [ 115 ]. First, educational choices ( decision-making ) are influenced by variables such as self-efficacy and the presence of barriers, irrespectively of the career opportunities they offer, especially in STEM [ 124 ]. This brings additional difficulties to women’s enrollment and persistence in scientific and technical fields of study due to stereotypes and biases [ 125 , 126 ]. Moreover, access to education does not automatically translate into job opportunities for women and minority groups [ 127 , 128 ] or into female access to managerial positions [ 129 ].

Finally, parenting is reported as an antecedent of education [e.g., 130 ], with much of the literature focusing on the role of parents’ education on the opportunities afforded to children to enroll in education [ 131 – 134 ] and the role of parenting in their offspring’s perception of study fields and attitudes towards learning [ 135 – 138 ]. Parental education is also a predictor of the other related topics, namely human capital and compensation [ 139 ].

Decision-making.

This literature mainly points to the fact that women are thought to make decisions differently than men. Women have indeed different priorities, such as they care more about people’s well-being, working with people or helping others, rather than maximizing their personal (or their firm’s) gain [ 140 ]. In other words, women typically present more communal than agentic behaviors, which are instead more frequent among men [ 141 ]. These different attitude, behavior and preferences in turn affect the decisions they make [e.g., 142 ] and the decision-making of the firm in which they work [e.g., 143 ].

At the individual level, gender affects, for instance, career aspirations [e.g., 144 ] and choices [e.g., 142 , 145 ], or the decision of creating a venture [e.g., 108 , 109 , 146 ]. Moreover, in everyday life, women and men make different decisions regarding partners [e.g., 147 ], childcare [e.g., 148 ], education [e.g., 149 ], attention to the environment [e.g., 150 ] and politics [e.g., 151 ].

At the firm level, scholars highlighted, for example, how the presence of women in the board affects corporate decisions [e.g., 152 , 153 ], that female CEOs are more conservative in accounting decisions [e.g., 154 ], or that female CFOs tend to make more conservative decisions regarding the firm’s financial reporting [e.g., 155 ]. Nevertheless, firm level research also investigated decisions that, influenced by gender bias, affect women, such as those pertaining hiring [e.g., 156 , 157 ], compensation [e.g., 73 , 158 ], or the empowerment of women once appointed [ 159 ].

Career progression.

Once women have entered the workforce, the key aspect to achieve gender equality becomes career progression , including efforts toward overcoming the glass ceiling. Indeed, according to the SBS analysis, career progression is highly related to words such as work, social issues and equality. The topic with which it has the highest semantic overlap is role , followed by decision-making , hiring , education , compensation , leadership , human capital , and family .

Career progression implies an advancement in the hierarchical ladder of the firm, assigning managerial roles to women. Coherently, much of the literature has focused on identifying rationales for a greater female participation in the top management team and board of directors [e.g., 95 ] as well as the best criteria to ensure that the decision-makers promote the most valuable employees irrespectively of their individual characteristics, such as gender [e.g., 84 ]. The link between career progression , role and compensation is often provided in practice by performance appraisal exercises, frequently rooted in a culture of meritocracy that guides bonuses, salary increases and promotions. However, performance appraisals can actually mask gender-biased decisions where women are held to higher standards than their male colleagues [e.g., 83 , 84 , 95 , 160 , 161 ]. Women often have less opportunities to gain leadership experience and are less visible than their male colleagues, which constitute barriers to career advancement [e.g., 162 ]. Therefore, transparency and accountability, together with procedures that discourage discretionary choices, are paramount to achieve a fair career progression [e.g., 84 ], together with the relaxation of strict job boundaries in favor of cross-functional and self-directed tasks [e.g., 163 ].

In addition, a series of stereotypes about the type of leadership characteristics that are required for top management positions, which fit better with typical male and agentic attributes, are another key barrier to career advancement for women [e.g., 92 , 160 ].

Hiring is the entrance gateway for women into the workforce. Therefore, it is related to other workforce topics such as compensation , role , career progression , decision-making , human capital , performance , organization and education .

A first stream of literature focuses on the process leading up to candidates’ job applications, demonstrating that bias exists before positions are even opened, and it is perpetuated both by men and women through networking and gatekeeping practices [e.g., 164 , 165 ].

The hiring process itself is also subject to biases [ 166 ], for example gender-congruity bias that leads to men being preferred candidates in male-dominated sectors [e.g., 167 ], women being hired in positions with higher risk of failure [e.g., 168 ] and limited transparency and accountability afforded by written processes and procedures [e.g., 164 ] that all contribute to ascriptive inequality. In addition, providing incentives for evaluators to hire women may actually work to this end; however, this is not the case when supporting female candidates endangers higher-ranking male ones [ 169 ].

Another interesting perspective, instead, looks at top management teams’ composition and the effects on hiring practices, indicating that firms with more women in top management are less likely to lay off staff [e.g., 152 ].

Performance.

Several scholars posed their attention towards women’s performance, its consequences [e.g., 170 , 171 ] and the implications of having women in decision-making positions [e.g., 18 , 19 ].

At the individual level, research focused on differences in educational and academic performance between women and men, especially referring to the gender gap in STEM fields [e.g., 171 ]. The presence of stereotype threats–that is the expectation that the members of a social group (e.g., women) “must deal with the possibility of being judged or treated stereotypically, or of doing something that would confirm the stereotype” [ 172 ]–affects women’s interested in STEM [e.g., 173 ], as well as their cognitive ability tests, penalizing them [e.g., 174 ]. A stronger gender identification enhances this gap [e.g., 175 ], whereas mentoring and role models can be used as solutions to this problem [e.g., 121 ]. Despite the negative effect of stereotype threats on girls’ performance [ 176 ], female and male students perform equally in mathematics and related subjects [e.g., 177 ]. Moreover, while individuals’ performance at school and university generally affects their achievements and the field in which they end up working, evidence reveals that performance in math or other scientific subjects does not explain why fewer women enter STEM working fields; rather this gap depends on other aspects, such as culture, past working experiences, or self-efficacy [e.g., 170 ]. Finally, scholars have highlighted the penalization that women face for their positive performance, for instance when they succeed in traditionally male areas [e.g., 178 ]. This penalization is explained by the violation of gender-stereotypic prescriptions [e.g., 179 , 180 ], that is having women well performing in agentic areas, which are typical associated to men. Performance penalization can thus be overcome by clearly conveying communal characteristics and behaviors [ 178 ].

Evidence has been provided on how the involvement of women in boards of directors and decision-making positions affects firms’ performance. Nevertheless, results are mixed, with some studies showing positive effects on financial [ 19 , 181 , 182 ] and corporate social performance [ 99 , 182 , 183 ]. Other studies maintain a negative association [e.g., 18 ], and other again mixed [e.g., 184 ] or non-significant association [e.g., 185 ]. Also with respect to the presence of a female CEO, mixed results emerged so far, with some researches demonstrating a positive effect on firm’s performance [e.g., 96 , 186 ], while other obtaining only a limited evidence of this relationship [e.g., 103 ] or a negative one [e.g., 187 ].

Finally, some studies have investigated whether and how women’s performance affects their hiring [e.g., 101 ] and career progression [e.g., 83 , 160 ]. For instance, academic performance leads to different returns in hiring for women and men. Specifically, high-achieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women, which are penalized when they have a major in mathematics; this result depends on employers’ gendered standards for applicants [e.g., 101 ]. Once appointed, performance ratings are more strongly related to promotions for women than men, and promoted women typically show higher past performance ratings than those of promoted men. This suggesting that women are subject to stricter standards for promotion [e.g., 160 ].

Behavioral aspects related to gender follow two main streams of literature. The first examines female personality and behavior in the workplace, and their alignment with cultural expectations or stereotypes [e.g., 188 ] as well as their impacts on equality. There is a common bias that depicts women as less agentic than males. Certain characteristics, such as those more congruent with male behaviors–e.g., self-promotion [e.g., 189 ], negotiation skills [e.g., 190 ] and general agentic behavior [e.g., 191 ]–, are less accepted in women. However, characteristics such as individualism in women have been found to promote greater gender equality in society [ 192 ]. In addition, behaviors such as display of emotions [e.g., 193 ], which are stereotypically female, work against women’s acceptance in the workplace, requiring women to carefully moderate their behavior to avoid exclusion. A counter-intuitive result is that women and minorities, which are more marginalized in the workplace, tend to be better problem-solvers in innovation competitions due to their different knowledge bases [ 194 ].

The other side of the coin is examined in a parallel literature stream on behavior towards women in the workplace. As a result of biases, prejudices and stereotypes, women may experience adverse behavior from their colleagues, such as incivility and harassment, which undermine their well-being [e.g., 195 , 196 ]. Biases that go beyond gender, such as for overweight people, are also more strongly applied to women [ 197 ].

Organization.

The role of women and gender bias in organizations has been studied from different perspectives, which mirror those presented in detail in the following sections. Specifically, most research highlighted the stereotypical view of leaders [e.g., 105 ] and the roles played by women within firms, for instance referring to presence in the board of directors [e.g., 18 , 90 , 91 ], appointment as CEOs [e.g., 16 ], or top executives [e.g., 93 ].

Scholars have investigated antecedents and consequences of the presence of women in these apical roles. On the one side they looked at hiring and career progression [e.g., 83 , 92 , 160 , 168 , 198 ], finding women typically disadvantaged with respect to their male counterparts. On the other side, they studied women’s leadership styles and influence on the firm’s decision-making [e.g., 152 , 154 , 155 , 199 ], with implications for performance [e.g., 18 , 19 , 96 ].

Human capital.

Human capital is a transverse topic that touches upon many different aspects of female gender equality. As such, it has the most associations with other topics, starting with education as mentioned above, with career-related topics such as role , decision-making , hiring , career progression , performance , compensation , leadership and organization . Another topic with which there is a close connection is behavior . In general, human capital is approached both from the education standpoint but also from the perspective of social capital.

The behavioral aspect in human capital comprises research related to gender differences for example in cultural and religious beliefs that influence women’s attitudes and perceptions towards STEM subjects [ 142 , 200 – 202 ], towards employment [ 203 ] or towards environmental issues [ 150 , 204 ]. These cultural differences also emerge in the context of globalization which may accelerate gender equality in the workforce [ 205 , 206 ]. Gender differences also appear in behaviors such as motivation [ 207 ], and in negotiation [ 190 ], and have repercussions on women’s decision-making related to their careers. The so-called gender equality paradox sees women in countries with lower gender equality more likely to pursue studies and careers in STEM fields, whereas the gap in STEM enrollment widens as countries achieve greater equality in society [ 171 ].

Career progression is modeled by literature as a choice-process where personal preferences, culture and decision-making affect the chosen path and the outcomes. Some literature highlights how women tend to self-select into different professions than men, often due to stereotypes rather than actual ability to perform in these professions [ 142 , 144 ]. These stereotypes also affect the perceptions of female performance or the amount of human capital required to equal male performance [ 110 , 193 , 208 ], particularly for mothers [ 81 ]. It is therefore often assumed that women are better suited to less visible and less leadership -oriented roles [ 209 ]. Women also express differing preferences towards work-family balance, which affect whether and how they pursue human capital gains [ 210 ], and ultimately their career progression and salary .

On the other hand, men are often unaware of gendered processes and behaviors that they carry forward in their interactions and decision-making [ 211 , 212 ]. Therefore, initiatives aimed at increasing managers’ human capital –by raising awareness of gender disparities in their organizations and engaging them in diversity promotion–are essential steps to counter gender bias and segregation [ 213 ].

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

Among the emerging topics, the most pervasive one is women reaching leadership positions in the workforce and in society. This is still a rare occurrence for two main types of factors, on the one hand, bias and discrimination make it harder for women to access leadership positions [e.g., 214 – 216 ], on the other hand, the competitive nature and high pressure associated with leadership positions, coupled with the lack of women currently represented, reduce women’s desire to achieve them [e.g., 209 , 217 ]. Women are more effective leaders when they have access to education, resources and a diverse environment with representation [e.g., 218 , 219 ].

One sector where there is potential for women to carve out a leadership role is entrepreneurship . Although at the start of the millennium the discourse on entrepreneurship was found to be “discriminatory, gender-biased, ethnocentrically determined and ideologically controlled” [ 220 ], an increasing body of literature is studying how to stimulate female entrepreneurship as an alternative pathway to wealth, leadership and empowerment [e.g., 221 ]. Many barriers exist for women to access entrepreneurship, including the institutional and legal environment, social and cultural factors, access to knowledge and resources, and individual behavior [e.g., 222 , 223 ]. Education has been found to raise women’s entrepreneurial intentions [e.g., 224 ], although this effect is smaller than for men [e.g., 109 ]. In addition, increasing self-efficacy and risk-taking behavior constitute important success factors [e.g., 225 ].

Finally, the topic of sustainability is worth mentioning, as it is the primary objective of the SDGs and is closely associated with societal well-being. As society grapples with the effects of climate change and increasing depletion of natural resources, a narrative has emerged on women and their greater link to the environment [ 226 ]. Studies in developed countries have found some support for women leaders’ attention to sustainability issues in firms [e.g., 227 – 229 ], and smaller resource consumption by women [ 230 ]. At the same time, women will likely be more affected by the consequences of climate change [e.g., 230 ] but often lack the decision-making power to influence local decision-making on resource management and environmental policies [e.g., 231 ].

Research gaps and conclusions

Research on gender equality has advanced rapidly in the past decades, with a steady increase in publications, both in mainstream topics related to women in education and the workforce, and in emerging topics. Through a novel approach combining methods of text mining and social network analysis, we examined a comprehensive body of literature comprising 15,465 papers published between 2000 and mid 2021 on topics related to gender equality. We identified a set of 27 topics addressed by the literature and examined their connections.

At the highest level of abstraction, it is worth noting that papers abound on the identification of issues related to gender inequalities and imbalances in the workforce and in society. Literature has thoroughly examined the (unconscious) biases, barriers, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors that women are facing as a result of their gender. Instead, there are much fewer papers that discuss or demonstrate effective solutions to overcome gender bias [e.g., 121 , 143 , 145 , 163 , 194 , 213 , 232 ]. This is partly due to the relative ease in studying the status quo, as opposed to studying changes in the status quo. However, we observed a shift in the more recent years towards solution seeking in this domain, which we strongly encourage future researchers to focus on. In the future, we may focus on collecting and mapping pro-active contributions to gender studies, using additional Natural Language Processing techniques, able to measure the sentiment of scientific papers [ 43 ].

All of the mainstream topics identified in our literature review are closely related, and there is a wealth of insights looking at the intersection between issues such as education and career progression or human capital and role . However, emerging topics are worthy of being furtherly explored. It would be interesting to see more work on the topic of female entrepreneurship , exploring aspects such as education , personality , governance , management and leadership . For instance, how can education support female entrepreneurship? How can self-efficacy and risk-taking behaviors be taught or enhanced? What are the differences in managerial and governance styles of female entrepreneurs? Which personality traits are associated with successful entrepreneurs? Which traits are preferred by venture capitalists and funding bodies?

The emerging topic of sustainability also deserves further attention, as our society struggles with climate change and its consequences. It would be interesting to see more research on the intersection between sustainability and entrepreneurship , looking at how female entrepreneurs are tackling sustainability issues, examining both their business models and their company governance . In addition, scholars are suggested to dig deeper into the relationship between family values and behaviors.

Moreover, it would be relevant to understand how women’s networks (social capital), or the composition and structure of social networks involving both women and men, enable them to increase their remuneration and reach top corporate positions, participate in key decision-making bodies, and have a voice in communities. Furthermore, the achievement of gender equality might significantly change firm networks and ecosystems, with important implications for their performance and survival.

Similarly, research at the nexus of (corporate) governance , career progression , compensation and female empowerment could yield useful insights–for example discussing how enterprises, institutions and countries are managed and the impact for women and other minorities. Are there specific governance structures that favor diversity and inclusion?

Lastly, we foresee an emerging stream of research pertaining how the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged women, especially in the workforce, by making gender biases more evident.

For our analysis, we considered a set of 15,465 articles downloaded from the Scopus database (which is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature). As we were interested in reviewing business and economics related gender studies, we only considered those papers published in journals listed in the Academic Journal Guide (AJG) 2018 ranking of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS). All the journals listed in this ranking are also indexed by Scopus. Therefore, looking at a single database (i.e., Scopus) should not be considered a limitation of our study. However, future research could consider different databases and inclusion criteria.

With our literature review, we offer researchers a comprehensive map of major gender-related research trends over the past twenty-two years. This can serve as a lens to look to the future, contributing to the achievement of SDG5. Researchers may use our study as a starting point to identify key themes addressed in the literature. In addition, our methodological approach–based on the use of the Semantic Brand Score and its webapp–could support scholars interested in reviewing other areas of research.

Supporting information

S1 text. keywords used for paper selection..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.s001

Acknowledgments

The computing resources and the related technical support used for this work have been provided by CRESCO/ENEAGRID High Performance Computing infrastructure and its staff. CRESCO/ENEAGRID High Performance Computing infrastructure is funded by ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and by Italian and European research programmes (see http://www.cresco.enea.it/english for information).

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Gender Stereotypes and Discrimination: How Sexism Impacts Development

Affiliations.

• 1 University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, United States. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 2 University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, United States.
• PMID: 26956071
• DOI: 10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.11.001

In this chapter, we summarize and integrate some of the latest developmental science research on gender stereotypes and discrimination in childhood and adolescence. We focus on five forms of sexism: (a) stereotypes and discrimination against boys regarding their school behaviors and disciplinary actions; (b) stereotypes and discrimination against girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains; (c) stereotypes and discrimination in sports; (d) peer gendered harassment, including sexual harassment and teasing because of gender atypicality or nonconformity; and (e) sexualized gender stereotypes that sexually objectify girls and assume boys are sexually voracious. First, we document each type of sexism and examine children's awareness and perceptions of that bias, including their own self-reports and attributions. We examine the implications of this sexism for children and adolescents' developmental health (i.e., social, academic, and psychological well-being). We then draw connections between these various areas of research, focusing on how these different forms of sexism interact to reduce equity and justice among children and negatively impact positive developmental outcomes. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

Keywords: Discrimination; Gender stereotypes; STEM; Sexual harassment; Sexualization.

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Mind the Backlash: Gender Discrimination and Sexism in Contemporary Societies

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Decades of campaigns and policy efforts have brought significant progress in women's economic and political status and pushed gender equality up the global policy agenda. The goal of gender equality, however, still remains largely out of reach, as illustrated by the recent wave of women's protests against ...

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• Addressing the Issue of Gender Equality Gender equality is one of the core problems of the current century. It means providing equal conditions for men and women
• Women: Gender Inequality and Discrimination This paper explains whether innate gender differences exist and how they determine the abilities, choices, and aptitudes that differentiate men from women.
• Themes of Feminism & Gender in A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen Ibsen is considered one of the most successful play writers of the 19th century. He has a large body of work in various genres of literature.
• Factors Contributing to the Gender Pay Gap in the UK The gender pay gap still exists; this essay will discuss what causes the gap and human resource strategies to eliminate the inequalities in remunerations.
• Social Learning and Gender Schema Theories The paper states that social learning theory and gender schema theory, studying the same subject, provide their perceptions of gender-role development.
• What About Gender Is Most Interesting to Sociologists? Before the emergence of the discipline of gender studies, there was an understanding that the social is biologically determined.
• Does Gender Affect the Type of Law Violation? One of the most predominant and consistent observations in the criminal justice system is that the type of law violation is often dependent on gender.
• Sexism and Gender Inequality in Sport The paper reviews an example of sexism and gender inequality and academic scholarship on the topic. Women athletes have faced gender inequality and sexism.
• Gender in The Great Gatsby & The Yellow Wallpaper The complexities of men and women in the texts were examined and evaluated on the basis of sexuality and relationship and the inferences would be supported by the text itself.
• Gender and Sexual activity: Literature Review This literature review focus on various perspectives of gender and sexuality in the context of different arenas of social groups.
• “Lanval”: Summary & Analysis of Gender Roles and Courtly Love “Lanval” is one of Marie de France’s lais in which the idea of love is discussed from the specific perspective according to which women and men are equal in their love.
• Susan Glaspell’s ‘Trifles’ – Gender Oppression and Justice The drama Trifles by Susan Glaspell revolves around the murder of John Wright, a farmer described by his peers as an honest and hard-working man.
• Role of Gender in Society In today’s society, equality is an issue that has not been fully achieved and integrated in the society, and hence gender roles are very distinguishable
• Gender Inequality and Feminism in a TV Series Gender inequality indicators measure quantifiable aspects of biases against women or men. It is the women who suffer the most from gender discrimination.
• The Problem of Gender Identity in Sports Allowing athletes to compete regardless of their gender may effectively address gender segregation often shown in sports.
• Cinderella and Girl: Feminist and Gender Critique Anne Sexton, in her poem Cinderella focuses on the position of women in society on the material of the well-known fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
• Gender Bias in Sports Commentary Observations The analysis of the ESPN coverage of sporting events shows that, although women are portrayed mostly equally, they generally receive less media attention than men.
• Gender Is a Culturally Prescribed Role, Rather Than a Biological Sex The debates concerning the notions of “sex” and “gender” have been going on over the years.
• Gender Relations in Roman Society The aspect of gender relations in Rome involves some peculiarities which help to perceive the whole essence of the Roman culture.
• Women and Gender Roles in “Antigone” by Sophocles Sophocles’ “Antigone” tells a story of a woman who disobeys the order of the ruler of Thebes who decided to leave the body of her brother unburied on the battlefield.
• Role of Mass Media in Gender Issues This paper discusses the role of mass media in the presentation of gender and examines standards from various media sources to demonstrate how some news stories develop.
• Gender Stereotypes and Misunderstanding Stereotypes predetermine a human life and a female life, in particular, explaining the approaches that can change the situation, and defining the power of stereotypes.
• Modern Issues of Gender Studies The study of gender entails consideration of men and women in the society. The subject defines the notion of gender and how society has been shaping the concept over the time.
• Gender Dynamics in Development This essay opens with the indication of how serious gender dynamics affect life. Gender issues must be understood if development goals are to be realized.
• Gender Roles and Inequalities in Advertisement The perfume for men, Dior Sauvage, was released in 2019, and an advertising campaign supported it with Johnny Depp.
• Gender Roles in “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Atwood Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a novel illustrating a dystopian system in which fertile women become the maids of couples who cannot conceive.
• Futurama Series Speaks Against Gender Stereotypes Although Futurama may seem to be a sexist series, at first sight, a closer examination reveals several directions in which this work speaks against gender stereotypes.
• “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment” by Kabeer Gender inequality is an issue that has led to endless debates with different people proposing diverse solutions to ensure equality is exercised.
• Gender Inequality in French Hospitality Industry The study scrutinizes the French hotel and tourism sector and the concerns and challenges women encounter in management roles and compares them to the trends.
• Shifting Gender Norms in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits The questions of gender equality and the role of women in family and society are central for Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits that was first published in 1982.
• Sexuality in “Love Beyond Gender” by Alysia Abbott The question of sexuality has always been an ongoing issue for human society. Sexual interest impacts the life of an individual and predetermines the choice of a partner.
• Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers: Gender Roles The domination of the female gender in the cartoon Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers is presented with the expression of the males’ agreement to subject to that domination.
• Gender and Sexuality and Their Role in Life The importance of studying the subjects of gender and sexuality should be discussed concerning their role in different aspects of people’s lives.
• Understanding Different Gender Roles and the Impact on Marketing There are traditional and nontraditional gender roles that determine how male and female models are used in commercials.
• Gender Differences in Development of Schizophrenia Schizophrenia has varied effects on men’s and women’s sexual life. These effects could be due to variances in the start of schizophrenia at different ages.
• Intersectionality of Race and Gender The paper states that considering the scope of the stigma that overwhelms the lives of women of different races, intersectionality continues to impose a moral struggle on women.
• How Society Influences the Gender Roles Society should reconsider some of the gender roles to close the gap and give people equal opportunities to thrive and explore.
• Gender Roles in Married at First Sight and Other Media Sources Every society and culture have different gender role expectations. This paper focuses on the comparison of the media sources’ assumptions about genders.
• Influence of Culture and Gender on Personality Disorders Diagnosis The ongoing polemics is believed to have a positive influence on the functioning and finding new approaches while treating personality disorders.
• Analyzing the Relationship Between Gender and Victimization Women generally do not perform criminal activities as often as men. What is more, they are clearly underrepresented in the criminal justice system.
• Single Parenthood Households and Gender-Related Issues In contemporary society, single parenthood has become common. Marriages between two couples are no longer popular.
• Marriage and Inequalities With Gender The issue of bridging gender equality has been the center of debate in the 21 century. The role of women in society could no longer be underestimated.
• Gender Issues in the Leadership of the Organization Traditional stereotypes of women as being less suited for leadership roles is also one of the reasons why gender has been linked to leadership.
• Gender Mainstreaming For Effective Development Of Our Company Gender mainstreaming entails assessing the effects to both men and women of any planed undertaking be it legislative, a program or policies covering all levels of development.
• The Concept of Gender Socialization and Ageism As they grow older, children are expected to soak up the information about social norms as a sponge and learn to demonstrate the appropriate reactions to other people’s actions.
• Gender Bias Issues: Types of Gender Bias in the Workplace and Their Impact on Productivity Issues of gender bias have been identified as critical in organizational theory and behavior. Today there are more calls for equal treatment of both men and women in organizations.
• Gender Equality and Women’s Rights The issue of gender equality in society has gained popularity in the course of the precedent century with the rise of the feminist movement and women’s struggle for equal rights.
• The Color of Sex: Postwar Histories of Race and Gender The article “The Color of Sex: Postwar Photogenic Histories of Race and Gender in National Geographic Magazines” disclosed how the images of people of color are formed by the popular culture.
• The Role of Gender in Interactions via Social Media Females tend to focus on development of certain relationships and creating a community while males tend to use social media to get information, have fun and so on.
• Is Gender Natural or Acquired? Gender may be categorized as both natural and acquired since one has the ability to transform from one gender to another.
• Unveiling the Gender Gap: Feminist Theory in Sociology Feminist theory in sociology shifts the emphasis from men to women and from social structure to the lived experiences of individuals.
• Gender Pay Gap From Feminist Perspective Feminists are in the best position to comprehend and articulate the causes of the problems women face in society, which include the gender pay gap.
• Gender and Racial Equality Barriers in the Workplace Gender and racial bias still exist in many fields, resulting in significant turnover rates among female and black workers.
• Gender in Traditional Superhero Costumes The traditional superhero costumes reinforce gender and sexuality by emphasizing the need for men to be well-built and the women to reveal their upper body and legs.
• Gender Inequality at Google Inc. Some percentage of women employed in Google shows that it is possible and both genders should work hard to get a job there.
• Gender Bias During the Hiring Process Gender bias in hiring has been a problem that many organizations have dealt with, as many employers prefer to hire men because of the notion that they are more committed.
• Role of Gender Stereotypes in Advertising The paper states that it is of great significance to understand the reasons behind the advertisers’ attachment to socially constructed gender differences.
• Sally Haslanger’s “Gender and Race” Review In Sally Haslanger’s philosophical essay ‘Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?’ the author utilizes an analytical approach to gender and race.
• Gender Bias in the Aviation Industry The findings of the court of appeal in the case of Cello Diaz versus Pan American World Airways, was significant towards employment equity.
• Nursing Attitudes toward Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Pediatric Patients The PICO question of the paper: Does nursing knowledge and attitudes toward trans and gender-nonconforming pediatric patients improve cultural competence and healthcare disparities?
• Gender Stereotyping in Audi’s Used Car Ad Audi’s Used Car Ad was chosen because it sparked outrage on Chinese social media and worldwide because of the severe misogyny and stereotyping.
• Gender, Social Structure and Division of Labor In every community, there is a gender structure that provides bodies with inequality through the sex category.
• Societal and Gender Construction Affecting Incidents of Domestic Violence The paper intends to explore how societal and gender construction can affect the incidences of domestic violence.
• Impact of Gender and Sexuality on Advertisement Sex, gender, and sexuality often appear in advertisements for various products. It is so because these phenomena have a robust impact on people.
• Gender Non-Conforming or Transgender Children Care The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges to be aware of when working with gender non-conforming or transgender children and adolescents.
• Gender Gap in Financial Literacy The presented paper studies the topic of the differences in financial knowledge between male and female undergraduate psychology students.
• Gender Studies: Feminine Men and Masculine Women Women have a vital role in society: they bring up children and ensure the comfort and psychological well-being of all the family members.
• Rethinking Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination The paper focuses on the theory of egoism and when to apply the theory in the work environment to avoid sexual discrimination.
• Gender Differences in Mate Selection Gender differences influences who men and women seek to be their mates. Social, cultural and biological factors in individuals affect what they choose to be of importance, while selecting a person of interest.
• Gender Roles: “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen” by Piercy “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen” by Marge Piercy is a poem that speaks against gender-stereotyped roles in society. It considers as a feminist literary piece of the 20th century.
• Gender Discrimination in Society and Social Media: Solutions The paper finds out to what extent discriminatory attitudes are present in different societies and how much social media induce them.
• Gender Expectations in the Disney Film “The Little Mermaid” This article will show that the Disney’s work magnifies the evolving roles of women in society, and despite the existing tensions and backlash, women are integrating successfully into the society.
• Gender Display in TV Shows, Movies and News From the television to the movies going to the news, men have always been at the forefront, eventually overshadowing women in the media industry.
• Income Inequality Based on Gender Income inequality based on gender is the dissimilarity between male and female earnings usually expressed in part by male earnings.
• Gender Changes in the Film “Far from Heaven” by Todd Haynes The movie “Far from Heaven” by Todd Haynes examines how and why gender has changed since the 1950s in the US. The story describes the traditional family of Whitakers living in 1957.
• Gender in the 21st Century: Fighting Dangerous Stereotypes Women happen to be the victims of gender stereotyping, men also suffer from the clichés concerning masculinity, which authors address in essays.
• Impact of Globalization on Norms and Experiences around Gender Inequality is one of the most prolonged global debates that have refused to go away despite the great strides made through globalization
• Gender Equality in Britain in the 20th Century In Britain, the media through the television systems operated discussions and seminars on issues concerning gender in society.
• Untraditional Gender Roles Distribution The experiences of different cultures and family institution patterns show that gender role distribution can have various forms.
• Children and Gender: Growing Up Trans by Frontline PBS Review The documentary “Growing Up Trans” by Frontline PBS becomes a valuable source of information about what it is like to realize at an early age that one identifies.
• Career-Related Decision-Making and Gender Differences The paper focuses on career-related decision-making differences between men and women in general and the incidence of depression in the context of career advancement in particular.
• Gender and Race in Langston Hughes’ Poetry of the Spanish Civil War Langston Hughes was a crucial figure in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, which blossomed black intellectual, literary, and creative life in several American cities, particularly Harlem.
• Stereotypes of Gender Roles The paper details the scientific justification, impacts, development, prevention strategies, and how gender role stereotypes can be addressed.
• Contemporary Gender Equality Challenge This essay investigates the issues associated with gender equality on both individual and community levels and identifies the possible responses to those challenges.
• Gender, Generations, and Communications The discussion focused on developing different approaches to bridging socio-cultural discrepancies associated with different generations in the workplace.
• The Gender Pay Gap in Australia The existence of a gender gap is a severe problem for economic equality in a democratic society. This paper tests the idea that a gender pay gap exists using Australian workers.
• The Issue of Gender Discrimination Related to Business and Society In this paper, the issue of gender discrimination will be analyzed based on how the deteriorated relationships taking root from societal issues affect all sides of the conflict.
• Economic Inequality Between Genders Discussions on the problems of gender inequality have been going on for decades that’s why the difference in the earnings between men and women is called the gender pay gap.
• Gender Roles in the Buddhist Culture In the Buddhist culture, women are considered weak beings and require men to provide them with protection. Furthermore, men are considered to be the strong and family breadwinners.
• Gender Inequality in Security Sector The assumption of gender composition in the security sector has been linked with the apparent norm that women cannot work in the military.
• Gender, Philosophy, and Religion in the Axial Age The philosophers of the axial age were primarily involved in the discussion of justice as the principal condition of citizens’ wellbeing.
• Absurd of Predetermined Gender Roles in Literature This essay aims to analyze “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Blood Relations,” and “Essay” to argue for the absurdity of predetermined gender roles in society.
• Gender Quotas in Saudi Arabia: Unpacking the Political Conditions Talking about gender quotas and their sociology, it is interesting to take a look at the example of Saudi Arabia. It is the seemingly most unexpected place to introduce a policy.
• Perkin-Gilman’s Feminist Theory and View on Gender Discrimination In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman depicts in novel structure how the house turns into a women’s jail and how being shut in could lead to mental distress in women.
• Discussion of Gender and Society Themes in Films The paper discusses gender and society themes in “The Power of Categories”, “How to Survive a Plague”, “Intersexion” and “The Edge Of Gender”.
• Gender-Oriented Products: Branding and Marketing Marketing of gender-oriented products should be more gender-neutral oriented because to be efficient in the market, the brand needs to meet the changing social requirements.
• Gender and Entrepreneurship Relations This paper analyzes how different factors affect both men and women in deciding to become entrepreneurs. Marital status is a significant factor for entrepreneurial women.
• Sexism & Gender Wage Gap: Deconstructing the Myths A recent Harvard study reveals that the gender earnings gap is primarily associated with the amount of time one works.
• Gender Discrimination as an Ethical Issue Society is related to discrimination, inequality, and ethical injustice due to the increasing rates of incompetence incidence based on racial, gender, or ethnic affiliation.
• Sexual Agency: The Gender Politics of Campus Sex Sexual agency is the ability to make decisions freely in situations that involve a sexual context. It is the choice of whether one wants to engage in sexual activity.
• Gender-Related Barriers to E-commerce Adoption in the UAE The work diagnoses the problem of low E-Commerce adoption among Emirati women by identifying barriers and proposing possible strategies and tactics for removing them.
• Representing Islam: Racial and Gender Identities For African women, racial and ethnic identities are potentially viewed as their sources of discrimination, which have had a detrimental influence on social interactions.
• Gender, Race, and Trade Unions It can be noted that there are particular strategies, which can be applied when gender or racial discrimination happens.
• Comparison of Gender Differences in Communication Considering a number of biological, evolutionary, social, and historical aspects, men and women tend to prove different psychological and behavioral patterns.
• Gender Gaps in Student Academic Achievement The following research paper will focus on the issue discussed by Tsai et al. in “Gender gaps in student academic achievement and inequality.”
• Gender Roles Within Greek Society Gender roles in Greek society were determined by social and cultural traditions, position of women in society and their significance as citizens.
• Advertising and Gender Roles Mass media, especially television imposes certain stereotypes on our consciousness and the most interesting thing is that we take these stereotypes as examples.
• Gender Roles and Psychological Health The emergence of traditional gender roles and the images of masculinity and femininity can be regarded as an attempt to organize society and create stable social structures.
• Chapter 12 of Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies by Gills & Jacobs Chapter 12 of “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” by Gills & Jacobs made me think that feminism is often misunderstood due to the diversity of opinion.
• Gender Discrimination Topic for Research Gender discrimination is a social phenomenon based on cultural practices that set a glass ceiling to women in many aspects of life.
• Male Gender Role in the Chinese Workplace The expectations placed on males are very high, given that a man is viewed as both the protector and the provider in the Chinese culture.
• Sex and Gender as a Social Phenomenon The paper establishes the differences between sex and gender; defines the term of gender identity; interprets gender from the viewpoint of every sociological angle.
• The Five-Factor Theory, Personality, and Gender Freud developed the psychosocial stages of human development. It begins at childhood to adulthood. The primary concern in his study was that people grow through various stages.
• Behavioral Learning Approach and Gender-Role Behavior Individuals learn particular behaviors when influenced by various environmental factors associated with specific macro- and micro-social contexts.
• Gender-Neutral Upbringing: Reasonable and Possible? The gender-neutral upbringing gains popularity. The paper finds out if it is reasonable to set the goal of gender-neutrality and if it can ever be accomplished.
• Gender Roles in Cartoons Most people believe that children can use the portrayals of gender in cartoons arrangement to establish their roles of their gender and to understand their roles in their culture.
• Gender is a Role, not a Biological Sex, and it is Cultural Gender identity differs from person’s sexual orientation or biological sex, it is rather a social role which an individual links himself/herself to.
• How Gender Norms and Stereotypes Contribute to Inequality in Society Over the years, the United States and other countries around the world have faced inequality issues. They arise from different factors.
• A Critical Analysis of Gender Dynamics in Glaspell’s ‘Trifles’
• Gender Dynamics in American Slavery
• Plato vs. Wollstonecraft on Education and Gender Relations
• Gender: Navigating State, Religion and Gender
• The Role of Gender in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Chapter 5 “Gender” of “The Family” by Cohen
• Examples of Employment Discrimination: Gender, Age, Race, & Others
• Gender Roles in Dual-Income Families
• Racial Formation and Gender Performance in “13th”
• Gender: The Social Roles of Men and Women
• The Autism-Gender Relationship Analysis
• Sexual and Gender-Based Violence
• How Societies Construct Gender Identities, Sexual Practices, and Gendered Bodies
• The Gender-Based Pay Inequality Factors
• Gender Inequality in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, “A Rose for Emily”, and “Trifels”
• Gender Differences in the Prevalence and Characteristics of Pain in Spain
• Gender in Sophocles’ Tragedy Antigone
• Gender and Students’ Performance
• Gender Intersectionality: Fighting Discrimination
• The Gender Pay Gap and Coping Strategies
• Gender Socialization During the First 12 Years of Life
• Heart Disease Risk Profiles and Gender Differences
• “Gender Disparity in Students’ Choices…” by Zhang et al.
• Gender Diversity Within and Beyond School Contexts
• Analyzing Gender Bias in the Fire Department
• Forum: Gender and Gender Roles
• The Role of Gender in Social and Moral Development
• Embracing Gender Identity: Pursuing a Fulfilling and Authentic Life
• Smoking and Gender Factors of Lung Cancer
• Discussion: Race, Gender, and Science
• Gender Identity and Correctional Institutions
• Global Gender Inequality and Its Main Trends
• Gender and Sexuality in the United States History
• Gender Differences in Schizophrenia
• Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry by Jane L. Collins
• Shifting Gender Politics in Fashion and Textiles
• The Influence of Gender and Power Disparities on the Workplace
• Gender Equality: Language and Literature
• Gender Norms’ Impact on Men and Women
• Sociology of Race, Gender, Identity, and Sexuality
• The Relationship Between Gender and GPA
• Gender Inequality for Men and Women
• Critical Areas in Women and Gender Studies
• The Types of Law Violations: Gender Effects
• Race, Sex, and Gender in Cultural Anthropology
• Gender as a Social Construct and Related Issues
• Gender Equality in Daily Life: Fictional Works Analysis
• The Gender Concept and Its Impact on Health and Wellness
• The US History, Markets, Geography, and Gender Politics
• Gender Inequality Among Women in Canada
• Gender Equality Cannot Be a Universal Concept
• The Gender-Based Marketing and Its Negative Sides
• Importance of Gender Reveal Ultrasound
• The Gender Pay Gap Problem: Why Women Earn Less
• Age and Gender Stratification in Older Adults
• Gender Role Differences and Immigration
• Sexuality and Gender-Related Behavior During Adolescence
• Society’s Conception of Gender Roles in Media
• Health Care Disparities: Race and Gender
• Gender Differences and Self-Esteem in Exact Sciences
• Issues Associated With Gender and Incarceration
• The Gender Influence on the Language of Communication
• The Issue of Gender Inequality in Kenya
• Gender Stereotypes in Academic and Family Settings
• Gender Stereotype in Advertisement
• What Will Happen When AI Picks Up Social Biases About Gender?
• Gender Roles in the Boys Don’t Cry Movie
• Gender Stereotypes Have Changed by Eagly et al.
• Housing Discrimination Across Race, Gender, and Felony History
• Racial and Gender Macroaggression in the White College Campus
• Aspects of Society in Relation to Gender and Sex
• Gender Identity Development
• Race and Gender in 17th-18th Century American Colonies
• “Glass Ceiling” in the Theory of Gender Studies
• Historical Review of Gender Inequality in the USA
• Gender, Sexuality, Power Relations, and Social Expectations
• Disability: Social Origin and the Role of Aging, Gender, and Race
• Ethics: Discourses of Love and Gender
• Toxic Masculinity and Gender Equality in the US
• Aspects of Parenting and Gender Roles
• Gender Diversity in Organizations
• Telephone Culture and Role of Gender Differences
• Social Work Assignment: Gender, Money, and the Charity Organization Society
• Gender Roles in a Modern Society
• Issues of Female Gender in Modern World
• Gender Roles in Advertisements
• Discussion of Race and Gender Identity
• Ethnicity, Race, and Gender as Social Constructs
• Gender in Workplace and Induction Case Study
• Gender Ideology in the 1930s by Alice Kessler-Harris
• Women in Business and Gender Diversity Policy
• Gender and Sexual Scripts in the American Culture
• Gender Identity Evolution and Its Results
• Gender Disparity in Citations in High-Impact Journal Articles
• Social Constructs of Race and Gender
• Data, Technology, Gender, and Society
• Gender Roles in Trifles Play by Susan Glaspell
• Gender and Sexuality in Modern Society
• Gil’s Idea of the Paradoxical Body and Gender Constitution and Concerning Black Identity
• The Labels Adolescents Use to Describe Their Gender Identity
• Discussion of Sex, Gender, and Culture
• Gender Differences in Aggression
• Gender Inequality in Social Inequality
• Fair Treatment of Both Genders and John Rawls’ Theory of Justice
• Intersection of Disability Justice, Race, and Gender
• Gender Differences in the Dream Content of Children and Adolescents
• Gender Equality Strategies in Education
• Issues of Sex and Gender in Society Today
• Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Citizenship
• Discussion of Gender Roles in Modern World
• Gender, Emotional Labor, Harm, and Safety
• Gender and Ethnic Diversity in Leadership
• Gender Equality: Do Women Have Equal Rights?
• The Inclusivity of Language: Gender Issues
• Gender Diversity: Impact on the Organizational Performance
• Gender Equality in the Media Workforce
• Nature-Nurture Debate of Gender Identity
• Intersectionality in Gender and Sexual Differences
• Gender Stereotypes and Their Role in Advertising
• Gender Education: Sociological Review
• The Gender-Neutral Conceptualization of Parenting
• Global Misunderstanding of the Idea of Feminism and Gender Equality
• How Gender, Race, and Class Impact Criminality Levels
• Sex and Gender Equality in a Personal Worldview
• Gender Pay Gap for Women: The Main Causes
• Gender Stereotyping at Workplaces
• Researching of Gender and Work-Life Balance
• The Problem of Gender Stereotypes
• The Politics of Gender and Race in the Ilbert Bill Controversy
• Gender Norms and Contemporary Culture
• Gender Pay Gap Problem Overview
• Gender and Ethnic Diversity in Healthcare
• Gender Pay Gap in the Modern Society
• Expanding Reach: Addressing Gender Barriers in COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout
• Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents
• Gender, Power, Privilege, and Feminism in the USA
• Gender Impact on Societies Worldwide
• Occupational Gender Segregation and Its Causes
• Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ Policy Agenda
• Marketing and Interaction Through Social Media Platforms and Gender Inequalities
• Social Construction of Race and Gender in the United States and Brazil
• Discussion of Gender Bias in Research
• Social Construction of Gender. Sociology in Modules
• “Women’s Assessments of Gender Equality Critique” by Kurzman
• Gender Messages From Social Institutions: Family, School, and Mass Media
• Gender-Role Attitudes: Society Values & Standards
• Role of Ideology and Institutions in Gender Inequality
• Gender and Communication in “Modern Family” by Lloyd
• Discusses of the Role of Gender in the Employment
• Culture, Gender, and Price in Consumer Behavior
• Doing Genders: Social Constructs of Gender
• Vision of Gender Stratification in an Advertisement
• Relationship Between Gender and Death Anxiety
• Families, Gender Relations and Social Change in Brazil
• The Problems of Gender Inequality
• Implications of Current Gender Expectations
• Racial and Gender Disparities Among Evicted Americans
• What Makes an Ideal Society? Revolutionary Ideas for Gender Equality
• Gender Differences in Public Health
• Integration of Gender Equality in Organizational Management
• “Gender Gap in Academic Seminar Questions” by Pells
• Gender Representation in American Pop Culture
• Gender Inequality Articles by Beaumont vs. Eigenberg
• Age and Gender Discrimination in the Workplace
• Evolution, Not Revolution: Gender Law and Women Rights in Saudi Arabia
• Qualitative Research on the Gender Perception of E-Commerce
• Gender and Racial Socialization
• “Gender Wage Gap”: The Pay Disparity Issue
• Factors that Contribute to the Housework Gender Gap
• Gender Inequality in Ohio’s Education and Labor Market
• Gender Differences in the Treatment and Outcomes of Patients With ACSs
• The Effects of Gender on Child Obesity
• Gender Pay Gap: Making Change With Civil Disobedience
• Intersectionality of Religion with Gender, Race, and Class
• Gender Identity in Life-Span Development
• Gender Norms, Roles, and Stereotypes: Act Analysis
• Embracing Equality: Gender in Medieval Europe
• Gender Effect on the Growth of Nursing as a Knowledge-Based Profession
• Oppressive Gender Norms and Roles
• Intersectionality of Gender With Race, Culture, and Politics
• Sex and Gender Beyond the Binaries
• Job Limitation and Gender Sensitivity
• Queer Representation of Gender and Sexual Non-Conformity
• Gender: Do People Choose Their Sexual Orientation?
• Gender Equality: Men as Daycare Professionals
• Gender and Sexual Labeling
• “Is Gender Equality the Silent Killer of Marriages?” Article Analysis
• Dominant Parenting Styles: Gender-Differentiated Parenting Revisited
• Trans Individuals’ Sexual and Gender Identities
• Household Composition and Gender Differences
• Factors of the Gender Pay Gap
• Woman and Gender Equality in Canada
• ‘Sex Under Pressure: Jerks, Boorish Behavior, and Gender Hierarchy’ by S. A. Anderson
• Challenging Gender Norms: Personal Experience
• Gender Norms in Different Cultures
• Racial and Gender Diversity in Hollywood
• Gender Issues in the Us Correctional System
• Gender Inequality in Modern Societies and Its Reasons
• Racial and Gender Issues in Modern Society
• Gender-Assigned Social Norms: Male Socialization Experiences
• Gender Identity in Athletics: “The Battle Over Title IX and Who Gets to Be a Woman in Sports”
• Hispanic Community: Alcohol & Substance Abuse Among the Female Gender Population
• Gender Stratification and Divorce Trends
• The Article About Gender Gap and Delinquency
• Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in the U.S.
• Gender Stigmas: From the Past to the Present
• The Impact of Gender on Pay and Their Gap
• Sociological Issues About Social Class and Poverty, Race and Ethnicity, Gender
• Ethical Dilemma of Worldwide Gender Equality
• Human Rights and Gender Issues: “The Love Suicides at Amijima” & “Tale of Kieu”
• Racial, Ethnic and Gender Categories in the U.S. Census
• “Gender and Education” by David, Ball, Davies, and Reay
• Childhood Gender Analysis: Factors Influencing Gender Perception
• Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults
• Gender Conflict in “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston
• Primetime TV Shows and Gender Portrayals
• Finding the Link Between Gender and Sexuality
• Gender in Perception of Barriers to E-commerce in UAE
• Gender as a Role, Cultural and Not Biological
• Images and Messages Patterns About Gender Given by Advertisers in Mass Media
• Gender and Cultural Factors in Risky Behavior Among Adolescents in the US and Asia
• Formation of Sexual Identity, Sexual Customs and Gender Bodies
• The Role of a Gender in the Media
• Influence of Gender and Race on Our Life Experiences
• Gender & Politics in Post- Modernist Society
• Gender Representation: Term Definition
• Identities, Gender & Sexuality: Linguistic Anthropology
• Gender Differences in Agressive Behavior
• What Ideas About Gender & Sexuality Are Communicated by Contemporary Fashion Images?
• Gender Ideology in the U.S. and Japan
• Transnationalism Issues: Migration and Gender
• Representation of Australian Indigenous Sex and Gender
• Gender Construction and Heterosexism
• Gender Socialization of Children
• The Issue of Gender Pay Discrimination in Canada
• Gender Differences in Depressive Symptoms
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: An Etiquette Without Gender Discrimination Terms
• Religious and Biological Approaches of Gender and Nature
• Interrelation of Gender and Contemporary Society: Madonna
• Gender and Cultures in Conflict Resolution
• Issues in Sports: Gender Equality
• Communicative Features of Gender-Neutral Language
• The Problem of Gender Identity Disorder
• Leadership and Gender Relations Analysis
• The Importance of Gender in Marketing
• Female Gender and Changes over the Last 150 Years
• Gender Hierarchy in English Language
• Gender Symbols Usage in International Family-Oriented Marketing
• Gender Inequality in Democratic Welfare States
• Misconceptions of Gender and Migration Issues
• Gender, Race and Class in American Television
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• Social Experiment: Informal Norms of Gender Issues
• Gender Studies: The Queer of Color Theory
• Narration and Gender: Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Burney’s Evelina, Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry
• Gender Stereotypes in Family and Academic Settings
• Diversity and Society: Race, Ethnicity and Gender
• Gender Identification in Coed Dormitories
• The Gender Stereotypes in the Workplace
• Gender Identities Within the Farm Family
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• Gender Differences in Managerial Behavior
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• Community Health Status: Development, Gender, Genetics
• Gender Stereotypes in Family: Research Methods
• Homonationalism and Gender Identity in Catholicism
• Global Sense: Female Leadership and Gender Equity
• Gender-Based Discrimination during Surgical Training
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• The Fifth Element: Gender and Sexuality in Cinema
• Gender Studies and Feminization in Education
• Gender Stereotyping in Athletic Management
• Gender Roles in “Herland” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Emotion Perception and Gender Factor in Stress
• Gender Stereotypes in Families: Parents’ Gender Roles and Children’s Aspirations
• Gender Stereotypes Formation in Children
• Parents’ Gender Roles and Children’s Aspirations
• ANOVA Research: Person’s Gender and Level of Education
• Gender Stereotypes Developed Within Families
• Gender Stereotypes in Families: Parental Influence on an Adolescent’s Career Choice
• Sexism and Gender: Culture and Conflict Reflection
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• Gender, Race and Sexuality Issues in Society
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• Gender Stereotyping Experiment: The Level of Gender Stereotyping in Society
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• Gender Inequality in India and Iran Politics
• Do Child Toys Restrict Criteria for Gender?
• Gender Studies: Same-Sex Marriage
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• Role of Gender in Cartoons and Commercials
• Articles on Gender, its Development, and Cultural Aspects
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• Gender Studies: Feminism Varieties
• Understanding Human Rights: Labor Rights in a Globalizing World and Gender Rights
• Gender Identity: Promotion of Equality for Sexual Orientation
• Global Inequality: Gender, Racial and Ethnic Inequality
• Gender Studies: Same Sex Marriages
• Are Females the Only Gender Discriminated Against?
• Are Gender Roles and Relationships More Equal in Modern Family Life?
• What Are Examples of Gender Issues?
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• What Are Examples of Gender Inequality?
• Are Gender Roles Damaging Society?
• Why Does Gender Stratification Exist?
• How Has the Representation of Gender Changed in Coca-Cola Adverts From the 1940s to the Present Day?
• How Gender Roles Has Changed Over the Last Centuries?
• How Can We Solve Gender Problems?
• How Is Gender a Development Issue?
• What Are the Issues and Concerns of Gender in Terms of Education?
• How Does Your Race, Religion, Nationality, Gender, Culture and Family Define You?
• What Are the Emerging Issues and Challenges Concerning Gender?
• What Are the Gender Issues in the Philippines?
• How Does Graham Greene Explore Gender Representation in Brighton Rock?
• What Is the Difference Between Sex and Gender?
• Does Men’s Fashion Reflect Changes in Male Gender Roles?
• Does Mulan Overthrow Oppressive Gender Norms?
• Is Gender Diversity Good for Business?
• What Does Gender Representation Mean?
• Did the First World War Represent an Irrevocable Crisis of Gender in the UK?
• How Is Gender Represented in Advertisements?
• What Are the Stages of Gender Transition?
• Can Additional Training Help Close the ADHD Gender Gap?
• Are Gender Stereotypes Perpetuated in Children’s Magazines?
• Are Gender Roles Defined by Society or by Genetics?
• What Are the Three Gender Identities?
• What Is Gender Identity and Why Is It Important?
• How Does Bullying Affect People Based on Gender or Race?
• Women’s Rights in Conflict Zones
• The Role of Women in STEM Fields
• Prevalence of Violence against Women in the US
• Strategies for Equality in Leadership and Politics
• How Can Women Achieve Work-Life Balance?
• Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development
• Gender-Related Factors Influencing Women’s Earnings
• Healthcare Access, Quality, and Reproductive Rights of Women
• Gender Stereotypes’ Impact on Women’s Opportunities
• The Overlapping Identities and Challenges of Diverse Women.
• Intersectionality and Experiences of Gender
• The Struggle for Equality and LGBTQ+ Rights
• Comparison of Gender-Specific Challenges and Stigmas
• Strategies for the Elimination of Gender Wage Gap
• How Access to Healthcare Relates to Reproductive Justice
• Why Are Women Underrepresented in Positions of Power?
• Toxic Masculinity and its Harmful Effects on Men and Society
• Gender Disparities and Promotion of Inclusivity in Schools
• The Influence of Culture and Media on Gender Roles and Socialization
• Gender Discrimination, Harassment, and Bias in the Workplace

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StudyCorgi. (2021, September 9). 569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/

"569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender." StudyCorgi , 9 Sept. 2021, studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/.

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StudyCorgi . "569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Gender were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 22, 2024 .

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100 Gender Research Topics For Academic Papers

Gender research topics are very popular across the world. Students in different academic disciplines are often asked to write papers and essays about these topics. Some of the disciplines that require learners to write about gender topics include:

Sociology Psychology Gender studies Business studies

When pursuing higher education in these disciplines, learners can choose what to write about from a wide range of gender issues topics. However, the wide range of issues that learners can research and write about when it comes to gender makes choosing what to write about difficult. Here is a list of the top 100 gender and sexuality topics that students can consider.

Controversial Gender Research Topics

Do you like the idea of writing about something controversial? If yes, this category has some of the best gender topics to write about. They touch on issues like gender stereotypes and issues that are generally associated with members of a specific gender. Here are some of the best controversial gender topics that you can write about.

• How human behavior is affected by gender misconceptions
• How are straight marriages influenced by gay marriages
• Explain the most common sex-role stereotypes
• What are the effects of workplace stereotypes?
• What issues affect modern feminism?
• How sexuality affects sex-role stereotyping
• How does the media break sex-role stereotypes
• Explain the dual approach to equality between women and men
• What are the most outdated sex-role stereotypes
• Are men better than women?
• How equal are men and women?
• How do politics and sexuality relate?
• How can films defy gender-based stereotypes
• What are the advantages of being a woman?
• What are the disadvantages of being a woman?
• What are the advantages of being a man?
• Discuss the disadvantages of being a woman
• Should governments legalize prostitution?
• Explain how sexual orientation came about?
• Women communicate better than men
• Women are the stronger sex
• Explain how the world can be made better for women
• Discuss the future gender norms
• How important are sex roles in society
• Discuss the transgender and feminism theory
• How does feminism help in the creation of alternative women’s culture?
• Gender stereotypes in education and science
• Discuss racial variations when it comes to gender-related attitudes
• Women are better leaders
• Men can’t survive without women

This category also has some of the best gender debate topics. However, learners should be keen to pick topics they are interested in. This will enable them to ensure that they enjoy the research and writing process.

Interesting Gender Inequality Topics

Gender-based inequality is witnessed almost every day. As such, most learners are conversant with gender inequality research paper topics. However, it’s crucial to pick topics that are devoid of discrimination of members of a specific gender. Here are examples of gender inequality essay topics.

• Sex discrimination aspects in schools
• How to identify inequality between sexes
• Sex discrimination causes
• The inferior role played by women in relationships
• Discuss sex differences in the education system
• How can gender discrimination be identified in sports?
• Can inequality issues between men and women be solved through education?
• Why are professional opportunities for women in sports limited?
• Why are there fewer women in leadership positions?
• Discuss gender inequality when it comes to work-family balance
• How does gender-based discrimination affect early childhood development?
• Can sex discrimination be reduced by technology?
• How can sex discrimination be identified in a marriage?
• Explain where sex discrimination originates from
• Discuss segregation and motherhood in labor markets
• Explain classroom sex discrimination
• How can inequality in American history be justified?
• Discuss different types of sex discrimination in modern society
• Discuss various factors that cause gender-based inequality
• Discuss inequality in human resource practices and processes
• Why is inequality between women and men so rampant in developing countries?
• How can governments bridge gender gaps between women and men?
• Work-home conflict is a sign of inequality between women and men
• Explain why women are less wealthy than men
• How can workplace gender-based inequality be addressed?

After choosing the gender inequality essay topics they like, students should research, brainstorm ideas, and come up with an outline before they start writing. This will ensure that their essays have engaging introductions and convincing bodies, as well as, strong conclusions.

Amazing Gender Roles Topics for Academic Papers and Essays

This category has ideas that slightly differ from gender equality topics. That’s because equality or lack of it can be measured by considering the representation of both genders in different roles. As such, some gender roles essay topics might not require tiresome and extensive research to write about. Nevertheless, learners should take time to gather the necessary information required to write about these topics. Here are some of the best gender topics for discussion when it comes to the roles played by men and women in society.

• Describe gender identity
• Describe how a women-dominated society would be
• Compare gender development theories
• How equally important are maternity and paternity levees for babies?
• How can gender-parity be achieved when it comes to parenting?
• Discuss the issues faced by modern feminism
• How do men differ from women emotionally?
• Discuss gender identity and sexual orientation
• Is investing in the education of girls beneficial?
• Explain the adoption of gender-role stereotyped behaviors
• Discuss games and toys for boys and girls
• Describe patriarchal attitudes in families
• Explain patriarchal stereotypes in family relationships
• What roles do women and men play in politics?
• Discuss sex equity and academic careers
• Compare military career opportunities for both genders
• Discuss the perception of women in the military
• Describe feminine traits
• Discus gender-related issues faced by women in gaming
• Men should play major roles in the welfare of their children
• Explain how the aging population affects the economic welfare of women?
• What has historically determined modern differences in gender roles?
• Does society need stereotyped gender roles?
• Does nature have a role to play in stereotyped gender roles?
• The development and adoption of gender roles

The list of gender essay topics that are based on the roles of each sex can be quite extensive. Nevertheless, students should be keen to pick interesting gender topics in this category.

Important Gender Issues Topics for Research Paper

If you want to write a paper or essay on an important gender issue, this category has the best ideas for you. Students can write about different issues that affect individuals of different genders. For instance, this category can include gender wage gap essay topics. Wage variation is a common issue that affects women in different countries. Some of the best gender research paper topics in this category include:

• Discuss gender mainstreaming purpose
• Discuss the issue of gender-based violence
• Why is the wage gap so common in most countries?
• How can society promote equality in opportunities for women and men in sports?
• Explain what it means to be transgender
• Discuss the best practices of gender-neutral management
• What is women’s empowerment?
• Discuss how human trafficking affects women
• How problematic is gender-blindness for women?
• What does the glass ceiling mean in management?
• Why are women at a higher risk of sexual exploitation and violence?
• Why is STEM uptake low among women?
• How does ideology affect the determination of relations between genders
• How are sporting women fighting for equality?
• Discuss sports, women, and media institutions
• How can cities be made safer for girls and women?
• Discuss international trends in the empowerment of women
• How do women contribute to the world economy?
• Explain how feminism on different social relations unites men and women as groups
• Explain how gender diversity influence scientific discovery and innovation

This category has some of the most interesting women’s and gender studies paper topics. However, most of them require extensive research to come up with hard facts and figures that will make academic papers or essays more interesting.

Students in high schools and colleges can pick what to write about from a wide range of gender studies research topics. However, some gender studies topics might not be ideal for some learners based on the given essay prompt. Therefore, make sure that you have understood what the educator wants you to write about before you pick a topic. Our experts can help you choose a good thesis topic . Choosing the right gender studies topics enables learners to answer the asked questions properly. This impresses educators to award them top grades.

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TOP 100 Gender Equality Essay Topics

Table of Contents

Need ideas for argumentative essay on gender inequality? We’ve got a bunch!

… But let’s start off with a brief intro.

What is gender equality?

Equality between the sexes is a huge part of basic human rights. It means that men and women have the same opportunities to fulfil their potential in all spheres of life.

Today, we still face inequality issues as there is a persistent gap in access to opportunities for men and women.

Women have less access to decision-making and higher education. They constantly face obstacles at the workplace and have greater safety risks. Maintaining equal rights for both sexes is critical for meeting a wide range of goals in global development.

Inequality between the sexes is an interesting area to study so high school, college, and university students are often assigned to write essays on gender topics.

In this article, we are going to discuss the key peculiarities of gender equality essay. Besides, we have created a list of the best essay topic ideas.

What is the specifics of gender equality essay?

Equality and inequality between the sexes are important historical and current social issues which impact the way students and their families live. They are common topics for college papers in psychology, sociology, gender studies.

When writing an essay on equality between the sexes, you need to argue for a strong point of view and support your argument with relevant evidence gathered from multiple sources.

But first, you’d need to choose a good topic which is neither too broad nor too narrow to research.

Research is crucial for the success of your essay because you should develop a strong argument based on an in-depth study of various scholarly sources.

Equality between sexes is a complex problem. You have to consider different aspects and controversial points of view on specific issues, show your ability to think critically, develop a strong thesis statement, and build a logical argument, which can make a great impression on your audience.

If you are looking for interesting gender equality essay topics, here you will find a great list of 100 topic ideas for writing essays and research papers on gender issues in contemporary society.

Should you find that some topics are too broad, feel free to narrow them down.

Powerful gender equality essay topics

Here are the top 25 hottest topics for your argumentative opinion paper on gender issues.

Whether you are searching for original creative ideas for gender equality in sports essay or need inspiration for gender equality in education essay, we’ve got you covered.

Use imagination and creativity to demonstrate your approach.

• Analyze gender-based violence in different countries
• Compare wage gap between the sexes in different countries
• Explain the purpose of gender mainstreaming
• Implications of sex differences in the human brain
• How can we teach boys and girls that they have equal rights?
• Discuss gender-neutral management practices
• Promotion of equal opportunities for men and women in sports
• What does it mean to be transgender?
• Discuss the empowerment of women
• Why is gender-blindness a problem for women?
• Why are girls at greater risk of sexual violence and exploitation?
• Women as victims of human trafficking
• Analyze the glass ceiling in management
• Impact of ideology in determining relations between sexes
• Obstacles that prevent girls from getting quality education in African countries
• Why are so few women in STEM?
• Major challenges women face at the workplace
• How do women in sport fight for equality?
• Women, sports, and media institutions
• Contribution of women in the development of the world economy
• Role of gender diversity in innovation and scientific discovery
• What can be done to make cities safer for women and girls?
• International trends in women’s empowerment
• Role of schools in teaching children behaviours considered appropriate for their sex
• Feminism on social relations uniting women and men as groups

Gender roles essay topics

We can measure the equality of men and women by looking at how both sexes are represented in a range of different roles. You don’t have to do extensive and tiresome research to come up with gender roles essay topics, as we have already done it for you.

Have a look at this short list of top-notch topic ideas .

• Are paternity and maternity leaves equally important for babies?
• Imagine women-dominated society and describe it
• Sex roles in contemporary western societies
• Compare theories of gender development
• Adoption of sex-role stereotyped behaviours
• What steps should be taken to achieve gender-parity in parenting?
• What is gender identity?
• Emotional differences between men and women
• Issues modern feminism faces
• Sexual orientation and gender identity
• Benefits of investing in girls’ education
• Patriarchal attitudes and stereotypes in family relationships
• Toys and games of girls and boys
• Roles of men and women in politics
• Compare career opportunities for both sexes in the military
• Women in the US military
• Academic careers and sex equity
• Should men play larger roles in childcare?
• Impact of an ageing population on women’s economic welfare
• Historical determinants of contemporary differences in sex roles
• Gender-related issues in gaming
• Culture and sex-role stereotypes in advertisements
• What are feminine traits?
• Sex role theory in sociology
• Causes of sex differences and similarities in behaviour

Gender inequality research paper topics

Examples of inequality can be found in the everyday life of different women in many countries across the globe. Our gender inequality research paper topics are devoted to different issues that display discrimination of women throughout the world.

Choose any topic you like, research it, brainstorm ideas, and create a detailed gender inequality essay outline before you start working on your first draft.

Start off with making a debatable thesis, then write an engaging introduction, convincing main body, and strong conclusion for gender inequality essay .

• Aspects of sex discrimination
• Main indications of inequality between the sexes
• Causes of sex discrimination
• Inferior role of women in the relationships
• Sex differences in education
• Can education solve issues of inequality between the sexes?
• Impact of discrimination on early childhood development
• Why do women have limited professional opportunities in sports?
• Gender discrimination in sports
• Lack of women having leadership roles
• Inequality between the sexes in work-family balance
• Top factors that impact inequality at a workplace
• What can governments do to close the gender gap at work?
• Sex discrimination in human resource processes and practices
• Gender inequality in work organizations
• Factors causing inequality between men and women in developing countries
• Work-home conflict as a symptom of inequality between men and women
• Why are mothers less wealthy than women without children?
• Forms of sex discrimination in a contemporary society
• Sex discrimination in the classroom
• Justification of inequality in American history
• Origins of sex discrimination
• Motherhood and segregation in labour markets
• Sex discrimination in marriage
• Can technology reduce sex discrimination?

Most controversial gender topics

Need a good controversial topic for gender stereotypes essay? Here are some popular debatable topics concerning various gender problems people face nowadays.

They are discussed in scientific studies, newspaper articles, and social media posts. If you choose any of them, you will need to perform in-depth research to prepare an impressive piece of writing.

• How do gender misconceptions impact behaviour?
• Most common outdated sex-role stereotypes
• How does gay marriage influence straight marriage?
• Explain the role of sexuality in sex-role stereotyping
• Role of media in breaking sex-role stereotypes
• Discuss the dual approach to equality between men and women
• Are women better than men or are they equal?
• Sex-role stereotypes at a workplace
• Racial variations in gender-related attitudes
• Role of feminism in creating the alternative culture for women
• Feminism and transgender theory
• Gender stereotypes in science and education
• Are sex roles important for society?
• Future of gender norms
• How can we make a better world for women?
• Are men the weaker sex?
• Beauty pageants and women’s empowerment
• Are women better communicators?
• What are the origins of sexual orientation?
• Should prostitution be legal?
• Pros and cons of being a feminist
• Advantages and disadvantages of being a woman
• Can movies defy gender stereotypes?
• Sexuality and politics

Feel free to use these powerful topic ideas for writing a good college-level gender equality essay or as a starting point for your study.

No time to do decent research and write your top-notch paper? No big deal! Choose any topic from our list and let a pro write the essay for you!

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More From Forbes

Only one-fifth of women who experience gender-based discrimination at work report it. that’s a problem.

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As Women’s Equality Day approaches, we are reminded that women have made great progress in many areas yet still face gender-based discrimination in the workplace.

Workplace discrimination based on race, gender, age and sexuality disproportionally affects women. Forty four percent of women according to a recent survey by Deloitte state they have experienced harassment, microaggressions or both in the workplace, yet only about one fifth of the women who experience this behavior report it.

The lack of reporting contributes to the status quo of unsafe and toxic work cultures and hinders the ability of organizations to address any necessary changes that would challenge inequity in the workplace. It keeps systemic inequity deeply entrenched within many workplaces.

Reasons for lack of reporting

The primary reasons given by women for the hesitancy to report incidents are retaliation, including punishment and potential damage to their careers, as well as the lack of anonymity and trust. In fact, 74% of all employees expressed they would be more willing to report issues if they could do so anonymously.

Retaliation is very common. One study found that 68% of sexual harassment allegations and 42% of LGBTQ+ discrimination allegations made to the EEOC also include charges of employer retaliation.

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Survey research points to four problems. “First, women distrust grievance procedures and rarely file complaints. Second, formal complaints rarely lead to the transfer or removal of the harasser. Third, women who do file complaints face retaliation—66% of them, according to one survey of federal workers. Finally, the adversarial grievance process itself can harm victims; studies comparing women who file complaints to women who keep quiet show worse career, mental health, and health outcomes for those who file. “

According to the EEOC, there is an “urgent need for companies to foster an environment where all employees feel safe, valued, and heard. Establishing robust anonymous communication channels, comprehensive training, and a zero-tolerance policy for harassment and retaliation can pave the way for a more inclusive and respectful workplace culture. Anonymity removes the fear of retaliation, which is no doubt a huge barrier to reporting.”

Toxic company cultures also play a role in low rates of reporting, with 53% of employees in one study citing hostile work environment as a reason for not reporting.

If we are to achieve gender equity, there needs to be a safe environment and an improvement in the process of how employees report incidents that they experience and witness.

I recently spoke with Jennifer Pope, co-founder of WorkShield, to better understand the challenges that both the employee and employer face in reporting incidents of harassment and discrimination as well as possible solutions. Work Shield offers a comprehensive approach to reporting that includes 24/7 access to reporting via phone, online, or app.

Jennifer Pope, Co-founder and CEO of Workshield

One issue with the filing of complaints is that it may not be a top priority for those taxed with the responsibility, and this leads to delays in investigation and resolution. Pope comments that “These delays can allow misconduct to continue unchecked or frustrate the employee who reported the issue, increasing the risk of them taking additional action.”

According to Pope, confidence in reporting is crucial. Their collective data demonstrates that “when employers offer a solution that includes safe reporting to an impartial third party, employees are more likely to self-identify.” Pope continued, “over 85% of our total incident reports come from employees who are unafraid to disclose their identities. Among these, 56% are women, indicating that women feel empowered to put their names to their reports when they have confidence in the reporting system. She went on the say, “among the 15% who choose to report anonymously, approximately 53% are women.”

Benefit of increased reporting

When employees feel safe and heard, they are more likely to feel valued and empowered which can significantly enhance morale, productivity, and retention. The access to data provided to employers by reporting, provides the information they need to support systemic change.

More confidence and trust in the process also leads to an increase in reporting. This provides the company access to insights and data on misconduct in their workplace.

Pope addressed the benefit of an increase in reporting. “It fosters a safer and more equitable workplace environment, encourages employees to speak up without fear, and promotes transparency and accountability within the organization. This trend is particularly relevant in creating workplaces where women feel secure and supported in reporting misconduct.”

Pope shared with me that transparency “allows employers to identify trends, locate hot spots and make strategic decisions to address and prevent issues.” She continues, “this process helps reduce reputational risk and exposure to legal claims and settlement fees, saving organizations significant costs.”

The #MeToo movement has built an awareness around incidents of discrimination, harassment, microaggressions and mistreatment in the workplace for women. Now is the time for leaders who are committed to gender equity to work toward creating a safe environment for all employees and look for solutions for how to improve the reporting process and eliminate the fear of retaliation and distrust.

Bonnie Marcus, M.ED , is the author of Not Done Yet! How Women Over 50 Regain Their Confidence and Claim Workplace Power and The Politics of Promotion: How High Achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead. An executive coach and speaker, Bonnie is also host of the podcast, Badass Women At Any Age.

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The US Supreme Court on Friday denied the US government’s application to enforce a new Title IX rule that expands protections to LGBTQ+ students under the definition of “sex discrimination.”

The court unanimously agreed that federal court injunctions blocking three provisions in the Title IX rule related to gender identity should remain in effect while cases are decided at the federal appeals courts. The justices were split on whether the federal injunctions should be upheld fully or partially.

The five-justice majority denied the US government’s request and fully upheld the injunctions for several reasons. They found that the US government did not provide a sufficient basis to overturn the lower federal courts’ finding that the definitional changes to “sex discrimination” to include gender identity are “intertwined with and affect[t] many other provisions of the new rule.” The majority also held that the government did not indicate which other provisions of the rule are independent of “sex discrimination” and could be enforced. Finally, the court noted that the issue regarding the definition of “sex discrimination” will be decided shortly, with the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit scheduled to hear oral arguments in October.

Justice Sonia Sotomayer, writing for the dissent, would have partially upheld the injunctions. She found the preliminary injunctions to be overbroad because they prevented unrelated rules that protected other groups from taking effect. The dissent characterized the Title IX changes as “covering a range of discrimination matters, most of which do not reference gender identity discrimination.” Justice Sotomayer noted that the majority’s decision would prevent unchallenged protections “such as those governing preemployment inquiries about an applicant’s marital status or sex and prohibiting pregnancy discrimination,” which “include no reference to gender identity discrimination or hostile environment harassment,” from taking effect.

The ruling is the latest setback to the US Department of Education’s contentious Title IX interpretation , which follows US President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order on Title IX school protections. 26 states have now fully blocked the new Title IX protections from taking effect, and they will remain suspended until the merit of the injunctions is decided by the federal appeals courts. The next court hearings are the October oral hearings in the Sixth Circuit, a federal appeals court that hears appeals from the states of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The court will hear the federal government’s appeal of the Title IX injunction that was granted in Tennessee v. Cardona .

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was landmark legislation that prohibited “sex-based discrimination” in schools or other education programs that received federal government funding. At the time of its enactment, gender identity and sexual orientation were not included in the definition, and the 2021 executive order and interpretation were actions to codify these protections for LGBTQ+ students.

19th Amendment adopted

On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted, granting women full suffrage. The Amendment states that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Learn more about the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment from the National Archives.

Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted

On August 26, 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was adopted by the French National Assembly. Click here to read the text of the Declaration and learn more about its formulation.