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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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t002

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g001

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g002

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g003

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 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g004

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t003

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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Promoting Gender Equality: A Systematic Review of Interventions

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• 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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• 15 March 2022

Gender equality will enhance research around the world

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Efforts to improve life for women benefit both science and society. Credit: Getty

Last week, a group of inspiring scientists from all over the world met for a two-day online conference. The event, Breaking Barriers for Gender Equity Through Research, was organized and hosted by editors from across Springer Nature.

Delegates heard from women in disciplines such as mathematics and physics, in which the under-representation of women is particularly acute. There were discussions about gender equity in sustainable development, and how women’s lives are affected by crises such as wars, climate change and the current pandemic. There were conversations about mentorship, including the mentoring of men by women; about men championing women; and about the importance of teaching and learning listening skills.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly hard on female researchers. Even before SARS-CoV-2 emerged, women, on average, published less than men, and faced additional and potentially long-lasting career setbacks. Last week’s event, which coincided with this year’s International Women’s Day, with its theme of ‘break the bias’, was an opportunity to do something different: to reflect on the events of the past two years and to showcase ongoing efforts to advance gender equality in research and education, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Biases can build up

What speakers called compounded discrimination — also known as intersectionality — was a recurring theme. Someone experiencing discrimination on the basis of their gender might face further discrimination if they belong to an under-represented group or minority community. In many countries, for example, women face entrenched social biases about what they can and can’t do, because of their gender — but if they are from a family or community in which incomes are low, they probably also have less access to finance, fewer opportunities for education and less chance of getting a skilled job.

Accounting for sex and gender makes for better science

Intersectionality isn’t widely recognized in public policy in many countries, and this might be hindering the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are designed to end poverty and protect the environment. Goal 5 is dedicated to achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. Only recently has there been widespread acceptance that achieving gender equality will help to achieve the other SDGs. Among them are the goals to end hunger, boost employment and achieve universal education. This underscores a need to accelerate a shift from addressing gender equality on its own to tackling it alongside other causes of inequality.

Addressing diversity in a range of contexts benefits everyone in tangible ways, and scientists’ perspectives can help to address complex, real-world problems. For example, a better understanding of sex-based differences in immunity is helping to advance cancer immunotherapies ( Y. Ye et al. Nature Commun . 11 , 1779; 2020 ). And including data on gender in climate models provides a better understanding of different people’s vulnerability to climate risks. Moreover, the safety of products and medical procedures can be compromised when differences between women and men aren’t taken into account. In communities around the world, gender equality brings with it more resilient economies, reduced child mortality and better nutrition.

Action needed now

The SDGs are designed to drive change in the longer term, but people who face discrimination need action now, and several initiatives are making progress on this front in research. The European Union’s science funding programmes are embedding requirements on sex and gender equality into the grant application stage — and such rules have a ripple effect. If researchers elsewhere want to partner with European institutions, for example, they need to press their institutions to put a gender equality plan in place.

Sex and gender analysis improves science and engineering

Many research institutions are also actively working to improve gender equality. One conference speaker, Segenet Kelemu, the director-general of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, based in Nairobi, described a project to train 100,000 young people in Ethiopia — more than half of whom are women — in the science and business of bee-keeping and silkworm farming.

Similarly, international development agencies have been funding research on how public transport in LMICs can be made safer and more accessible to women (see go.nature.com/3khoeda ).

The results of these projects are clearly crucial to the communities involved, but they are not always widely shared. This needs to change so that others can benefit from the knowledge, and use it or build on it in their own local contexts. Institutions and funding bodies could make a big difference by considering how local projects might be scaled up, providing a more meaningful impact.

The need to achieve gender equality across various spheres of society, including research, is more than a response to pressure brought to bear by equality targets or to the equality setbacks caused by the pandemic. It’s an acknowledgement that being inclusive pays off across the board. Employees at gender-diverse institutions tend to be more satisfied and less likely to leave, and demonstrate better productivity, innovation and decision-making. So, if the global research community wants to have maximum impact, women must be at the table.

Nature 603 , 362 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00722-2

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The overturning of Roe v. Wade has heightened awareness of some of the broader issues the feminist movement and other allies for women’s rights have long championed, particularly advancing gender equality and economic well-being in societies around the globe.

Stanford scholars have studied some of the difficulties of reaching those goals and the many obstacles women face, whether it is at work, in the classroom and education, or as leaders. They have examined how gendered biases are perpetuated, why gender diversity and inclusion are imperative, and what can lead to prejudiced attitudes, assumptions, and adversities ultimately changing.

From the fields of business, social sciences, the humanities, law, education, health, and medicine, here are what Stanford researchers have to say about the evolution of women’s rights and the obstacles to advancing gender equity.

Impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade , and the U.S. Supreme Court

The decision by the U.S Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case will carry many wide-reaching and serious consequences for women, say Stanford professors. By ending the constitutional right to abortion, a protection women have had for nearly 50 years, it will now be up to states to decide what reproductive choices are available for women – regardless of the circumstance. 

“No matter the reason a woman seeks to terminate a pregnancy – including because her health is jeopardized, because she was raped, because the fetus has a condition making death likely shortly after birth – a majority of state legislators may usurp that deeply personal decision,” said Stanford law Professor Jane S. Schacter in the wake of the decision. 

Here, Stanford professors shed light on the ramifications the reversal will have, as well as research on the divergence between the justices’ positioning versus public opinion, which the Roe v. Wade overruling highlighted.

A constitutional earthquake: Jane Schacter on SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade

Stanford law Professor Jane Schacter, an expert on constitutional law and sexuality, discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion.

Using economics to understand the wide-reaching impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade

The greatest burden of abortion restrictions will likely fall onto low-income women and minorities, says Stanford economist Luigi Pistaferri.

Stanford’s Bernadette Meyler on possible SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade

Constitutional law scholar Bernadette Meyler discusses the leaked Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization memo and the implications of a possible decision.

The gap between the Supreme Court and most Americans’ views is growing

A new study finds that not only has the court’s majority shifted dramatically rightward in the past two years, its stances are now significantly more conservative than most Americans’.

Protecting reproductive health information after fall of Roe v. Wade

Michelle Mello writes that the overturning of Roe v. Wade – ending federal protection over a woman's right to an abortion – could also expose her personal health data in court.

The pandemic’s effect on women

While the overturning of Roe v. Wade has sent shockwaves across the country, the global pandemic continues to be problematic, particularly among women and people of color. According to Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll , the pandemic alone may set gender equality back a generation as women take on an unfair burden of job losses and child care.

“Feelings of burnout have increased over the last year for both men and women, but more so for women,” Correll said, noting how mental health challenges and the lack of reliable child care continue to be problematic. “My big concern, in terms of gender equality, is that this high level of burnout is going to either drive women out of the paid workforce entirely or cause them to dial back their careers to something that is more manageable.” 

Over the coming months, it will be increasingly clear what the ramifications of both the end of Roe v. Wade and the pandemic will have. But what is already apparent is the urgent need to ensure access to health care, child care, and education, Stanford scholars say. Here is some of that research.

It’s time to prioritize humane, thriving work environments

The global pandemic is an opportunity to make fundamental changes to how society approaches work by creating working environments centered around creativity, problem-solving and equity, says Adina Sterling.

The real benefits of paid family leave

Paid family leave is not a “silver bullet” for advancing gender equity in the workplace, Maya Rossin-Slater says, but it is beneficial for family health and well-being outcomes, particularly infant and maternal health and overall financial stability.

Gender equality could be set back by an entire generation, sociologist warns

Coming out of the pandemic is an opportunity to build more equitable workplaces. Otherwise, burnout is likely going to either drive women out of the paid workforce entirely or cause them to dial back their careers, with long-term consequences for gender equality, says Stanford scholar Shelley Correll.

Equity and inclusion key issues in new work-life balance

With work, school and family life all taking place in our homes, the challenges may be greater for women, according to a focus group consisting of corporate and nonprofit leaders convened by Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.

Stress during pregnancy doubled during pandemic

As the first shelter-in-place orders took hold in California, pregnant women reported substantially elevated depressive symptoms, potentially adversely affecting their health as well as that of their babies.

Feminism and overcoming gender discrimination across history

For feminists, choice over reproductive health symbolized the human right to self-determination , said Estelle Freedman in her seminal book, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Work (Ballantine Books, 2003). 

As Freedman explains, “Feminists have increasingly insisted that women’s health and children’s welfare must be central to international reproductive policies. In this way, reproductive choice can help alleviate economic injustice as well as extend human rights to women.”

Freedman, along with other Stanford scholars, has studied the evolution of feminist movements and women’s rights across history and the fight for economic justice and human rights in America and across the globe. Some have also examined these movements’ flaws, including historically overlooking people of color and people with a disability. Here are some of their findings.

How World War I strengthened women’s suffrage

Times of crisis can be catalysts for political change, says Stanford legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan. For women activists in the early 20th century, the catalyst was World War I.

The 19th Amendment is a milestone, not endpoint, for women’s rights in America

As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, the milestone in women’s suffrage must also acknowledge the intersection of gender and racial justice in America, says Stanford scholar Estelle Freedman.

Left out of the vote

As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, Stanford scholar Rabia Belt wants to acknowledge a history often overlooked in discourse about the franchise: people living with disabilities.

Why taking gender out of the equation is so difficult

Even as old stereotypes fade, gender remains “a very sticky category,” says Ashley Martin, assistant professor of organizational behavior.

Power forward

Tara VanDerveer, head coach of the Stanford women’s basketball team, talks about the state of women’s sports on the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

Roadblocks in the workplace

In 2020, women earned 83 cents to every dollar men earned, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. While the wage gap has narrowed over time, it still persists. Is it because of discrimination? Occupational differences? Workforce participation?

Scholars at the Stanford Graduate School of Business have tried to answer questions like these, including Stanford labor economist and Professor Emerita Myra Strober, who has dedicated her career to examining sexism across society, including the workplace.

“The American way, if you will, is to reward people who are valuable by paying them more. What’s not fair is rewarding them because you think they’re going to be more valuable before the game even starts. Managers should take people in entry-level positions and try to groom them all to see who turn out to be best,” Strober said in a 2016 interview . Strober suggests companies ought to examine salary disparities, offer paid parental leave and subsidize or offer childcare, and encourage workplace flexibility as ways to diversify and equalize the workplace.

Here is that interview, along with other research from scholars affiliated with the GSB who have examined gender differences and biases in the workplace and in leadership.

Is workplace equality the economy’s hidden engine?

In 1960, 94% of doctors and lawyers were white men. Today that number has fallen to 60%, and the economy has benefited dramatically because of it.

The language of gender bias in performance reviews

How negative stereotypes about men and women creep into a process intended to be meritocratic.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Having more power at the bargaining table helps women – but also sparks backlash

A large-scale study of job negotiations finds that women with stronger options were penalized for being too assertive.

How companies can solve the pay equity problem

A labor economist reveals how to close the pay gap.

Solving Silicon Valley’s gender problem

The authors of a survey on women in high tech answer the question: What now?

Making research, education more inclusive

In academic research, particularly the sciences, a gendered perspective has historically been overlooked, says Stanford historian Londa Schiebinger .

Such an oversight has come at a cost: For example, in clinical drug trials, women have been excluded on the grounds of reproductive safety  – meaning that when drugs hit market, doses may not be suited for female bodies. 

“Integrating sex and gender as variables in research, where relevant, enhances excellence in science and engineering,” said Schiebinger , who is the John L. Hinds Professor in the History of Science in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “The operative question is how can we harness the creative power of sex and gender analysis for discovery and innovation? Does considering gender add a valuable dimension to research? Does it take research in new directions?”  

Schiebinger has spent her career finding creative ways to make science more inclusive. Here is some of that work, and work by others – including research showing the barriers women have faced as students in K-12 and at the PhD level.

A hidden obstacle for women in academia

A sweeping new study finds that women are penalized for pursuing research perceived to be “feminized” – an implicit bias surprisingly strong in fields associated with women.

Gender diversity is linked to research diversity

Gender diversity in science comes down to more than just who is on the team. The research approaches and types of questions the field addresses also shift – and lead to better science.

Sex and gender analysis improves science, Stanford scholars say

Including a gender and sex analysis in scientific research can open the door to discovery and innovation, according to a study performed by Stanford historian Londa Schiebinger and a group of scholars.

Female researchers pay more attention to sex and gender in medicine

Sex and gender affect how people react to drugs or other therapies, but are often overlooked in research. Stanford researchers find that medical research teams that include women more often account for sex and gender in their work.

Whose history? AI uncovers who gets attention in high school textbooks

Natural language processing reveals huge differences in how Texas history textbooks treat men, women, and people of color.

High-stakes exams can put female students at a disadvantage, Stanford researcher finds

A new study suggests that women are more heavily influenced than men by test anxiety, and points to ways to help close the gender gap.

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New research: Gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and climate change are linked

Women Deliver and the International Institute for Sustainable Development launch new evidence highlighting integral connection between climate change, gender equality, and sexual and reproductive health and rights

New York, NY, 18 February 2021 —Today, Women Deliver , a global advocate for gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women, launches two new reports that explore the inextricable linkages between climate change, gender equality, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and propose recommendations for decision-makers. The second report, developed in partnership with the International Institute for Sustainable Development , an award-winning independent think tank and secretariat to the NAP Global Network, provides an overview of how SRHR can be integrated into national plans to adapt to climate change.

Women Deliver designed the first report, The Link Between Climate Change and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: An Evidence Review , to be used by decision-makers and climate change, humanitarian, and gender equality advocates to better understand the linkages between sectors and align efforts to generate effective policies and programs. The report finds that there is emerging evidence of the benefits of realizing SRHR as a basis for climate action. The study also finds that:

• The impacts of climate change have a detrimental effect on individuals’ SRHR.
• Climate action efforts may indirectly and directly impact SRHR, but more evidence is needed.
• Building a sustainable future for all requires the full potential — and participation — of girls and women in environmental and climate action, and the realization of that potential depends on their health and rights.
• The impact on girls and women, people of underrepresented sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC), and those who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and oppression must be particularly prioritized.

Until now, the linkages between climate change and SRHR have received little attention. However, recognizing these links is key to sustainably adapting to climate change while also improving gender equality and access to SRHR services.

This new evidence comes right before the 65th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW65) , which will highlight “women’s empowerment and the link to sustainable development,” the kick-off of the Generation Equality Forum , a civil society–centered, global gathering for gender equality, in which climate justice and SRHR are key initiatives, and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) , taking place later this year.

“To realize the vision of a gender-equal world, we need to identify and address how interconnected climate change issues and the health and rights of girls and women are. While growing evidence shows that climate change issues are not gender-neutral, there remain considerable gaps in related gender-disaggregated data and gender analyses in this space. There is an urgency for action as communities around the world grapple with unprecedented climate change-related challenges,” said Divya Mathew, Senior Manager, Policy and Advocacy at Women Deliver .

In a second report, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in National Adaptation Plan (NAP) Processes , IISD and Women Deliver explore the extent to which SRHR considerations have been incorporated into NAP processes, which are a fundamental driver of the global climate action agenda. These planning processes set priorities for action, improve coordination, mobilize resources, and allow countries to track progress toward the achievement of their adaptation goals. They also present an opportunity to address the impacts of climate change on SRHR. The analysis finds that:

• Though SRHR issues have not received significant attention in NAP processes to date, they represent an important consideration in building resilience to climate change, particularly to ensure equitable benefits for girls, women, and people of diverse genders and sexual orientations.
• Efforts to integrate gender considerations in NAP processes provide an important entry point for incorporating SRHR issues.
• If a gender-responsive approach is adopted, NAP processes can support investments that strengthen health systems toward the mutually supportive outcomes of increased climate resilience and realization of SRHR.

“NAP processes present an opportunity to bring together key actors working on climate change, gender, and health – including governments, civil society groups, donors, researchers, and advocates – to coordinate approaches that enable climate resilience, gender equality, and realization of rights, including those related to sexual and reproductive health,” said Angie Dazé, Lead on Gender Equality, Resilience Program, IISD.

Together, the two reports highlight 11 findings and make 14 recommendations to decision-makers and advocates to generate effective, rights-based policies and programs across sectors, including:

• Enhance collaboration between the climate change, health, and women’s rights advocacy and humanitarian communities.
• Promote gender-transformative climate action by addressing the linkages between climate change and SRHR across climate action processes.
• Invest in research to address the evidence gaps and integrate analysis of SRHR and climate data.
• Support health systems to address the underlying causes of vulnerability to climate change.
• Understand how compounding crises and intersecting identities shape vulnerability and resilience to climate change and SRHR to make sure climate actions do not exacerbate inequalities.

To help visualize the findings and recommendations of both reports, Women Deliver, IISD, and NAP Global Network launched an interactive digital platform for advocates and decision-makers.

Recognizing the links between gender and climate change is key to creating an effective response to climate change while also improving gender equality and access to SRH services. These new reports and their recommendations could lead the international community towards more integrated, systemic approaches to achieving inter-related objectives that improve gender equality and health while helping climate change, such as reaching the Sustainable Development Goals and the goals of the Paris Agreement .

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Where there's gender equality, people tend to live longer

Rachel Treisman

Protesters march in Berlin to mark International Women's Day on Wednesday. John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Protesters march in Berlin to mark International Women's Day on Wednesday.

Both women and men are likely to live longer when a country makes strides towards gender equality, according to a new global study that authors believe to be the first of its kind.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Global Public Health this week, just ahead of International Women's Day. It adds to a growing body of research showing that advances in women's rights benefit everyone .

"This International Women's Day, let's not forget that the evidence demonstrates that enhancing women's representation across multiple sectors contributes to wealthier and, hence, healthier societies for all," lead author Cat Pinho-Gomes, a research fellow at The George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London, said in a release .

Women in some countries will mark International Women's Day with protests

Researchers estimated gender equality in 156 countries using a "modified global gender gap index," which is based on an index developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) between 2010 and 2021. They believe this is the first study to examine the link between that index and the gender gap in life expectancy.

"Globally, greater gender equality is associated with longer [life expectancy] for both women and men and a widening of the gender gap in [life expectancy]," they conclude.

Overall, in 2021, each 10% increase in the modified gender gap index was associated with a 3.6-year increase in women's life expectancy and a 2.9-year increase for men. That amounts to an eight-month wider gender gap.

Women's History Month grew out of a weeklong commemoration by Jimmy Carter in 1980

There was considerable variation across geographical regions, with the gap much narrower among high-income countries .

That suggests that gender equality may initially widen the gender gap in life expectancy, researchers say, "as the benefits of greater gender equality mainly benefit women's lives and health." But the ripple effect would eventually benefit men's longevity too.

"As countries progress along the continuum of gender equality, the benefits of increased participation of women in society extend to men, thus leading to a larger increase in men's [life expectancy] and a narrowing of the gender gap in [life expectancy]," they write.

Equality in education has the strongest link to longevity

"Many of the factors that determine how long you will live — like working and living conditions, exposure to pollution, access to health care, education, income, and social support — are layered with gender differences around the world," Pinho-Gomes explains.

The World Economic Forum's global gender gap index focuses on four dimensions: health, economic opportunities, education and political leadership.

Goats and Soda

The taliban ended college for women. here's how afghan women are defying the ban.

The researchers homed in on the political, economic and educational aspects of gender equality, and found that the latter had the strongest association with increased life expectancy.

Pinho-Gomes says that underscores the importance of investing in education, especially in low- and middle-income countries where resources and opportunities for girls remain limited .

The study notes that while more than two-thirds of countries reached gender parity in primary education enrollment in 2020, significant disparities persist in parts of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Men are struggling. A new book explores why and what to do about it

Girls' access to education has long-term implications for their well-being and that of their community, including in areas like family planning and poverty reduction. And, Pinho-Gomes says, it's not only important in developing countries.

"Even high-income countries — where substantial progress has been made to address gender inequalities in recent years — investing in gender equality may still benefit life expectancy, particularly for men," she says.

Advances in politics and the workforce are needed too

The study also highlights some of the economic challenges women face, namely the gender pay gap and their lower rates of participation in the workforce.

It says "unleashing the full potential of half the world's population" will require changing social norms and implementing "gender-sensitive policies" like adequate parental leave and flexible hours.

On Equal Pay Day, women are trying to make a dollar out of 83 cents

Those policy reforms are easier said than done, the study acknowledges. Even when women are represented in large numbers in political institutions, it says, they often face glass ceilings and other challenges that limit their power to make change.

Pinho-Gomes says the weaker association between gender equality in the political domain and the life expectancy gender gap "raises concerns about how gender equality is being implemented by political systems worldwide."

United Nations data show that women around the world are underrepresented at all levels of decision-making, from executive to local government positions. At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years, it says.

Women leaders switch jobs at record rates as they demand better from their workplaces

Just 31 countries have female heads of state and/or government as of January 2023 — and that was before the resignation announcements of prominent women leaders like New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern and Scotland's Nicola Sturgeon .

"As we've seen from the recent resignations of high-profile female politicians, women still experience significant challenges in this field, including discrimination, balancing private, family and political life, gaining support from political parties, and securing campaign funding," Pinho-Gomes says.

The findings can help set policy priorities at a crucial time

While the authors say their study is strong — especially because of the reliability of the WEF data and the large number of countries included — they also acknowledge several limitations.

Changing the gender imbalance in housework may start with how we understand time

For one, data were not available for all of the countries in the world, so the associations observed in some regions might look different if all of their neighbors were included. The index they used is not exhaustive, so including additional indicators of gender inequality could potentially yield different results.

They also say it's possible that the associations they observed between gender equality and life expectancy could be explained by other factors, like socioeconomic development and sociocultural norms.

That said, they believe their findings could help policymakers worldwide set priorities in public health and other areas.

Women and girls are sharing their journals to create a herstory of the pandemic

And the issue has taken on a new urgency: The WEF estimates that the time it will take to close the global gender gap increased by an entire generation — from 99.5 years to 135.6 years — as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, in the words of the researchers, had "a gendered impact across multiple domains of life."

Correction March 16, 2023

Due to an error in the study, a previous version of this story used the wrong numbers to calculate the increase in the life expectancy gender gap. This story has been updated with the correct life expectancy increases.

• life expectancy
• women's empowerment
• global heath
• gender equality

Why Gender Research Matters Now More Than Ever

Seeing through the surface. This is the driving force behind the cutting-edge gender research of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. In an age of information overload punctuated by “ alternative facts ” and “ fake news ,” we know that the solutions to our most pressing societal problems are not remedied by the single act of a shattered glass ceiling when so much lies beneath. Our expert researchers look through the glass with a gender lens to expose gaps in our knowledge, identify the root causes of barriers to women's advancement, and propose workable solutions.

Utilizing a gender lens enables our research teams to uncover meaningful new insights in the effort to advance gender equality. In one research project, engagement survey results showed that women were dissatisfied with the transparency of promotion decisions—and, meaningfully, men felt a similar dissatisfaction. The  research project  uncovered a lack of clarity in the criteria for advancement, and the company initiated a project to clarify criteria for leadership and promotion. Thus, a gender lens not only uncovered the ways implicit and explicit biases limit women’s advancement in organizations but also revealed ways to improve the organizational processes overall so that all employees are more apt to thrive. The first step in diagnosing the problem is seeing the problem. As Clayman Institute Director  Shelley J. Correll  explains, “We have to help people first see biases. . . because until they see how stereotypes work, they are not going to be aware of how biases can affect their judgement. These stereotypes affect all our judgements—women’s as well as men’s.” Making invisible systems of discrimination visible is the first step in addressing gender inequality. “Seeing, and then blocking, bias is key,” Correll added.

Since its founding in 1974, the Clayman Institute has examined many societal issues through a gender lens, from how life longevity affects women differently than men and can help reimagine women's work-life balance, to how the "motherhood penalty" hinders women's career success. Today, we continue to ask the most complex and critical questions affecting women’s lives in our research: How do we break the culture of sexual assault? How do we move beyond bias? How do we understand why misogyny persists? And how do we examine gender inequities through an intersectional framework that encompasses the lived realities of all women?

An intersectional gender lens shines the light on the voices and perspectives that have been historically overlooked and marginalized in discussions of gender. This particular lens fosters both more comprehensive research on gender discrimination and more inclusive pathways for evidence-based solutions. Expanding our gender lens beyond whiteness enables us to see the world more fully and to better account for diversity in race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and economic status among women. This was the critical message imparted by legal and critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who delivered our most recent Jing Lyman lecture in November. Only through intersectional frameworks of research and analysis will we be able to eradicate the cycle of exclusion and invisibility of women of color in order to offer innovative research that addresses the inequities faced by all women. 

Through a gender lens, the Clayman Institute helps people to see what they are looking at.

Some definitions to help you see:

Bias: An error in evaluating performance, skill or potential. In evaluating performance, bias leads to lower assessments for some and more lenient ones for others—despite the same qualifications and level of accomplishment ( Steinpreis, Anders, Ritzke 1999 ).

Gender Lens: A conceptual aid that allows us to see the structural workings of gender, and helps to bring gender discrimination and oppression into focus in order to facilitate the creation of solutions to gender-based social inequalities.

Intersectionality: A black feminist framework of analysis, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, that exposes the interlocking systems of oppressions that often marginalize and erase women of color from singularly-focused discussions about gender or race, when, in fact, “race and gender are not mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” ( Crenshaw 1989 ).

Stereotypes: Generalized and widely-known beliefs about categories of people. In many male-dominated fields like technology and finance, or roles like leadership, stereotypes are male-advantaging. Men are more easily seen as a good fit and good performer in those areas, whereas women get more scrutiny of their qualifications and suitability ( Steinpreis, Anders, Ritzke 1999 ).

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

Paola belingheri.

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

Filippo Chiarello

Andrea fronzetti colladon.

2 Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

3 Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Paola Rovelli

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

Associated Data

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

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

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).

Funding Statement

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.

Data Availability

Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. There has been progress over the last decades, but the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030.

Women and girls represent half of the world’s population and therefore also half of its potential. But gender inequality persists everywhere and stagnates social progress. On average, women in the labor market still earn 23 percent less than men globally and women spend about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men.

Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers. All these areas of inequality have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: there has been a surge in reports of sexual violence, women have taken on more care work due to school closures, and 70% of health and social workers globally are women.

At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.

Political leadership, investments and comprehensive policy reforms are needed to dismantle systemic barriers to achieving Goal 5 Gender equality is a cross-cutting objective and must be a key focus of national policies, budgets and institutions.

How much progress have we made?

International commitments to advance gender equality have brought about improvements in some areas: child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) have declined in recent years, and women’s representation in the political arena is higher than ever before. But the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality, and where all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled. In fact, that goal is probably even more distant than before, since women and girls are being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Are they any other gender-related challenges?

Yes. Worldwide, nearly half of married women lack decision-making power over their sexual and reproductive health and rights. 35 per cent of women between 15-49 years of age have experienced physical and/ or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.1 in 3 girls aged 15-19 have experienced some form of female genital mutilation/cutting in the 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, where the harmful practice is most common with a high risk of prolonged bleeding, infection (including HIV), childbirth complications, infertility and death.

This type of violence doesn’t just harm individual women and girls; it also undermines their overall quality of life and hinders their active involvement in society.

Why should gender equality matter to me?

Regardless of where you live in, gender equality is a fundamental human right. Advancing gender equality is critical to all areas of a healthy society, from reducing poverty to promoting the health, education, protection and the well-being of girls and boys.

What can we do?

If you are a girl, you can stay in school, help empower your female classmates to do the same and fight for your right to access sexual and reproductive health services. If you are a woman, you can address unconscious biases and implicit associations that form an unintended and often an invisible barrier to equal opportunity.

If you are a man or a boy, you can work alongside women and girls to achieve gender equality and embrace healthy, respectful relationships.

You can fund education campaigns to curb cultural practices like female genital mutilation and change harmful laws that limit the rights of women and girls and prevent them from achieving their full potential.

The Spotlight Initiative is an EU/UN partnership, and a global, multi-year initiative focused on eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls – the world’s largest targeted effort to end all forms of violence against women and girls.

Facts and figures

Goal 5 targets.

• With only seven years remaining, a mere 15.4 per cent of Goal 5 indicators with data are “on track”, 61.5 per cent are at a moderate distance and 23.1 per cent are far or very far off track from 2030 targets.
• In many areas, progress has been too slow. At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
• Political leadership, investments and comprehensive policy reforms are needed to dismantle systemic barriers to achieving Goal 5. Gender equality is a cross-cutting objective and must be a key focus of national policies, budgets and institutions.
• Around 2.4 billion women of working age are not afforded equal economic opportunity. Nearly 2.4 Billion Women Globally Don’t Have Same Economic Rights as Men  
• 178 countries maintain legal barriers that prevent women’s full economic participation. Nearly 2.4 Billion Women Globally Don’t Have Same Economic Rights as Men
• In 2019, one in five women, aged 20-24 years, were married before the age of 18. Girls | UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023

5.1 End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere

5.2 Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation

5.3 Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation

5.4 Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate

5.5 Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decisionmaking in political, economic and public life

5.6 Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences

5.A  Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws

5.B Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women

5.C Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels

He for She campaign

United Secretary-General Campaign UNiTE to End Violence Against Women

Every Woman Every Child Initiative

Spotlight Initiative

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

UN Population Fund: Gender equality

UN Population Fund: Female genital mutilation

UN Population Fund: Child marriage

UN Population Fund: Engaging men & boys

UN Population Fund: Gender-based violence

World Health Organization (WHO)

UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)

UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Gender Statistics

Fast Facts: Gender Equality

Infographic: Gender Equality

The Initiative is so named as it brings focused attention to this issue, moving it into the spotlight and placing it at the centre of efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

An initial investment in the order of EUR 500 million will be made, with the EU as the main contributor. Other donors and partners will be invited to join the Initiative to broaden its reach and scope. The modality for the delivery will be a UN multi- stakeholder trust fund, administered by the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office, with the support of core agencies UNDP, UNFPA and UN Women, and overseen by the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General.

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The World Bank In Gender

The World Bank takes as its starting point that no country, community, or economy can achieve its potential or meet the challenges of the 21st century without the full and equal participation of women and men, girls and boys.

Gender equality is a fundamental human right and essential for a more peaceful, prosperous, and livable world.

• Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are central to addressing the world’s unprecedented intertwined global crises  from food insecurity and climate change to conflict, fragility, and violence, to sluggish economic growth.
• Urgent action is needed to  address gender-based violence (GBV) .  1 out of 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by a partner and/or some type of sexual violence by a non-partner. Gender-based violence hurts not only the individual survivors, but their families, communities, and entire societies – often across generations, undermining a women’s quality of life, and acce ss to paid work and employment.
• Expanding economic opportunities for women can drive inclusive growth. Low female labor force participation and occupational segregation lead to inefficiencies and misallocation of talent that, if addressed, would boost incomes, and stimulate growth.  On average across countries, long-run GDP per capita would be  almost 20% higher  if gender employment gaps were closed.
• Women’s leadership enhances long-term economic, environmental, and social outcomes, and strengthens institutions .  Research has correlated  higher net profit margins  for firms and  lower CO2 emissions  with more women in decision-making roles.

The World Bank has committed to accelerate gender equality.  In 2022, the Bank launched a year-long  #AccelerateEquality  initiative, to explore progress made and lessons learned over the last 10 years in closing gender gaps and promoting girls’ and women's empowerment. 

A series of  thematic policy notes  and  causal evidence briefs , along with  data , research, global knowledge, and lessons from experience has informed the forthcoming World Bank Gender Strategy  2024-30 to be launched in 2024.

Last Updated: May 24, 2024

Gender equality is an urgent moral and economic imperative. Yet achieving gender equality is uniquely challenging and complex.

The draft  World Bank Gender Strategy 2024–30  puts forward a bold ambition to accelerate gender equality to end poverty on a livable planet in alignment with the  World Bank’s evolution process .

Building on implementation of the  World Bank Gender Strategy 2016-23 , the new strategy proposes to engage with greater ambition—approaching gender equality for all as essential for global development—and to engage differently.

The WB  Gender Strategy 2024-30  includes three strategic objectives to:

• End gender-based violence and elevate human capital;
• Expand and enable economic opportunities; and
• Engage women as leaders. 

The Strategy has been shaped by  extensive and inclusive engagement  with public and private sector clients, development partners, civil society, and other key stakeholders through  formal consultations , and will be formally launched in 2024. 

A series of  thematic policy notes  and  causal evidence briefs , along with  data , research, global knowledge, and lessons from experience has informed the strategy.

The World Bank’s key corporate targets on gender equality are on track. Looking forward there is increasing emphasis on replicating and expanding evidence-informed approaches to deliver outcomes at scale. Three recently published retrospectives feature lessons learned from the World Bank’s work on gender equality:

Gender Equality in Development: A Ten-Year Retrospective

Retrospective of IFC’s Implementation of the World Bank Gender Strategy 2016- 2023

Gender-Based Violence Prevention and Response in World Bank Operations: Taking Stock After a Decade of Engagement (2012-2022)

The World Bank uses a “ gender tag ” to track Bank operations that use gender analysis to design actions to advance gender equality and include indicators to measure results. There has been a dramatic rise in the share of operations that are gender tagged, from 50% in 2017 to 92% in 2022.

Gender Innovation Labs (GILs)  in  Africa ,  East Asia and the Pacific ,  Latin America and the Caribbean , the  Middle East and North Africa , and  South Asia , generate public goods to promote gender equality. GILs conduct impact evaluations of development interventions seeking to generate evidence on how to close gender gaps in human capital, earnings, productivity, assets, voice, and agency. The GIL research supports evidence-based policy making for governments, development organizations, and the private sector to address the underlying causes of gender inequality.

The WB also curates data through the  Gender Data Portal , which is a comprehensive source for the latest sex-disaggregated gender statistics providing open access to over 900 indicators compiled from officially recognized international sources covering demography, education, health, economic activities, assets, leadership, gender-based violence, and more. This Portal allows users of all technical backgrounds to easily access and explore the data through interactive data visualizations and compelling narratives with the goal of influencing policy and decision-making.

Results Highlights:

Ending gender-based violence and elevating human capital:.

By 2023, the World Bank had increased the percentage of operations that incorporated GBV prevention or response from 38 in 2012 to 390 . These operations exist in every sector, every region, and at every level of country income in 97 countries.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a $100 million GBV Prevention and Response Project, was made possible through World Bank support. It sought to boost participation in programs that prevent GBV and to improve access to quality services for GBV survivors across different sectors. Implemented through non-governmental and civil society organizations, the project has reached 7 million people.

The Girls Empowerment and Learning for All Project in Angola aims to empower youth, particularly girls, by improving access to education and health services. With support from the World Bank, the project supports NGOs delivering sexual and reproductive health services in safe spaces, including sessions for boys emphasizing positive masculinity. Community leaders support girls to stay in school, delay marriage and pregnancy. Second Chance programs provide opportunities to return to education and acquire basic and life skills with about 250,000 additional physical spaces created. Additionally, the program finances scholarships for 900,000 students and supports the creation of additional physical schooling infrastructure with WASH facilities, improved school management and quality.

Expanding and Enabling Economic Opportunities:

In Zambia, the World Bank is putting more cash directly into the hands of women through cash transfer programs. These programs help women take control of their own, and their families’ economic destinies. They have helped more than 973,000 families, and sent livelihood packages, including, life and business skills training, mentorship, and support through savings groups, to 75,000 women.

In South Asia, the World Bank supports WePOWER, a professional network for women that supports women's participation in energy projects and institutions and promotes normative change regarding women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. By 2021, WePOWER had completed 1,400+ gender focused activities, benefitting more than 28,000 women. T hese initiatives included STEM awareness sessions, study tours, internships, hirings, technical trainings, and building female-friendly facilities.

The Takaful and Karama Cash Transfer Program , supported by the World Bank, has rapidly scaled, and expanded since its launch in 2015. With a budget increase from $116 million to $1.2 billion by 2023, mainly funded by the Egyptian government, the program now reaches 5.2 million households, benefitting approximately 22 million individuals.  Notably, 75% of beneficiaries are women, receiving smart cards to enhance financial inclusion and decision-making. Participation in the Takaful program promotes 80% school attendance and health visits for mother and child, as well as avoiding early marriage. Evaluations show significant impacts on women's autonomy and household welfare, while incentives for education and healthcare have also been effective.

The Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Economic Dividend (SWEDD ) project series tests, adapts, and scales innovations with the support of IDA and the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality. It addresses the root causes of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, and early school drop-out among adolescent girls, and promotes young women’s economic empowerment. With the involvement of governments, civil society organizations, and international partners such as the United Nations Population Fund, SWEDD mobilizes a wide range of allies, including teachers, religious and community leaders, future husbands, husbands, and fathers, to facilitate change on the ground. It deploys a comprehensive set of activities, such as ‘safe space’ clubs and reproductive health services for girls, community schools for husbands, and vocational training for women to enter male-dominated jobs.

Engaging Women as Leaders:

In Panama, the World Bank support the National Indigenous Peoples Development Plan Project. This project has helped increase the participation of indigenous women in decision-making spaces such as the National Council for the Integral Development of Indigenous Peoples (CONDIPI). In 2018, only 8% of CONDIPI participants were Indigenous women. In 2023, more than 35% were women, marking a 27% increase in women’s participation over just 5 years.

As well, the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (“We-Fi”): has shown the essential role of women entrepreneurs. Since 2018, We-Fi has worked with hundreds of partners in over 60 countries to support women entrepreneurs, catalyzing billions in funding to provide finance and training, and address systemic data & policy gaps.

Last Updated: Apr 05, 2024

Challenges for Women Opening and Running Businesses in Cambodia & Vietnam

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The Nigeria for Women Project (NFWP)

Areas of focus, initiatives.

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Tackling Gender-based Violence is a Development Imperative

World Bank support to GBV prevention and response activities have increased tenfold over ten years and are now present in over 97 countries

AROUND THE BANK GROUP

Learn about gender and development work across the World Bank.

Human Development Topics

STAY CONNECTED

Transforming Challenge into Action: Expanding Health Coverage for All

World Bank Group president Ajay Banga announced an ambitious plan to support countries in delivering quality, affordable health services to 1.5 billion people by 2030.

Gender Dimensions of Forced Displacement

How does forced displacement affect women and men differently? And how should policy and program design and implementation reflect these differences?

Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality

The UFGE is a World Bank multi-donor trust fund financing research, impact evaluations and data to help policy makers and practitioners close gender gaps in countries and sectors.

WePOWER Network

WePOWER is a professional network in South Asia that supports women's participation in energy projects and institutions and promotes change regarding women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) ...

Investing in Human Capital for a Greener Future

Global thought leaders came together to champion investments in people to build resilience, help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and accelerate the green transition

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Key takeaways on Americans’ views on gender equality a century after U.S. women gained the right to vote

Aug. 18 marks the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women in the United States the right to vote. As this milestone approaches, about half of Americans (49%) say granting women the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the country, according to a Pew Research Center study. And while many Americans say the last decade has seen progress in the fight for gender equality, a majority say the country still hasn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men. 

Here are some key takeaways from  the report , which was based on a nationally representative survey of 3,143 U.S. adults conducted online from March 18-April 1, 2020.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ views of the current state of gender equality and the advancement of women around the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. For this analysis, we surveyed 3,143 U.S. adults in March and April 2020, including an oversample of Black and Hispanic respondents. The adults surveyed are members of the Ipsos Public Affairs KnowledgePanel, an online survey panel that is recruited through national random sampling of residential addresses and landline and cellphone numbers. KnowledgePanel provides internet access for those who do not have it and, if needed, a device to access the internet when they join the panel. To ensure that the results of this survey reflect a balanced cross section of the nation, the data are weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish.

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

A majority (57%) of adults say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men.  Assessments of the country’s progress vary by gender and political party. Women (64%) are more likely than men (49%) to say that the country hasn’t made enough progress, and Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party are more than twice as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to say the U.S. hasn’t gone far enough to give women the same rights as men (76% vs. 33%). 

Americans are more dissatisfied with the state of gender equality now than when the question was asked in 2017. Three years ago, half of adults said the country hadn’t gone far enough in giving women equal rights with men, compared with 57% of adults today. This attitudinal shift has occurred across both gender and party lines.

Among those who think the country still has work to do in achieving gender equality, 77% say sexual harassment is a major obstacle to women’s equality.  Smaller shares, but still majorities, also point to other obstacles: 67% say women don’t have the same legal rights as men; 66% say that there are different societal expectations for men and women; and 64% say there aren’t enough women in positions of power. Women are more likely than men to say these are major obstacles.

When asked what gender equality would look like, many of those who say it’s somewhat or very important for men and women to have equal rights point to the workplace. Specifically, 45% volunteer that a society where women have equal rights with men would include equal pay, and 19% say there would be no discrimination in hiring, promotion or educational opportunities. About one-in-ten (9%) point to more or equal representation in business or political leadership.

About three-in-ten U.S. men think women’s gains have come at the expense of men. Most Americans (76%) say the gains have not come at the expense of men, although 22% of adults – including 28% of men and 17% of women – think they have come at the expense of men. Republican men (38%) are twice as likely as Democratic men (19%) to say the gains women have made have come at the expense of men. A quarter of Republican women also say this, compared with 12% of Democratic women.

Among women, those without a bachelor’s degree are about twice as likely as college graduates to say women’s gains have come at the expense of men (21% vs. 10%). Educational differences are less pronounced among men.

Americans are more than twice as likely to say that, when it comes to gender discrimination, the bigger problem is people not seeing it where it really does exist, rather than people seeing discrimination where it does not exist (67% vs. 31%). Three-quarters of women point to gender discrimination being overlooked as the bigger problem; 60% of men agree.

An overwhelming majority of Democrats (85%) say the bigger problem is people overlooking gender discrimination. Among Republicans, more say the bigger problem is people seeing discrimination where it doesn’t exist (53%) than say it is people not seeing it where it does exist (46%). Republican women are far more likely than Republican men to say people overlooking gender discrimination is the bigger problem (54% vs. 38%).

Majorities say the feminist movement and the Democratic Party have done at least a fair amount when it comes to institutions and groups that have helped advance women’s rights. Seven-in-ten Americans say the feminist movement has done a great deal or a fair amount to advance women’s rights in the U.S., while 59% say the same about the Democratic Party. Far fewer (37%) say the Republican Party has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights.

About three-in-ten adults (29%) say President Donald Trump has done at least a fair amount to advance women’s rights, while 69% say Trump has not done much or has done nothing at all.

While a majority of Americans say feminism has had a positive impact on the lives of white, Black and Hispanic women, more say feminism has helped White women a lot. About three-in-ten U.S. adults say feminism has helped the lives of white women (32%), About three-in-ten U.S. adults say feminism has helped the lives a white women a lot, compared with 21% and 15% who say this about Black women and Hispanic women, respectively.

Asked about the impact of feminism on other groups of women, a majority of Americans (57%) say feminism has helped lesbian and bisexual women at least a little, but fewer (41%) say feminism has helped transgender women. And while about half (49%) say feminism has helped wealthy and poor women at least a little, more say it’s helped wealthy women a lot (24%) than say it’s been equally helpful to poor women (10%).

About four-in-ten women (41%) say feminism has helped them personally. Women most likely to say this include those with a bachelor’s degree or more education (55%), Hispanic women (46%), women younger than 50 (47%) and Democratic women (50%).

Most who say the country still has work to do on gender equality say equality is likely to be achieved in the future. More than eight-in-ten Americans who say the country hasn’t made enough progress say it is very likely (31%) or somewhat likely (53%) that women will have equal rights with men in the future, compared with 16% who say they think gender equality is not too likely or not at all likely. Men who say the country has not yet achieved gender equality are more likely than women to say that gender equality is very likely (37% vs. 26%). Democratic women are the least likely to say this is very likely: 23% say this, compared with 35% of Republican women and 38% of Democratic and Republican men.

Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

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Amanda Barroso is a former writer/editor focusing on social trends at Pew Research Center .

Americans’ views of offensive speech aren’t necessarily clear-cut

Cultural issues and the 2024 election, rising numbers of americans say jews and muslims face a lot of discrimination, how u.s. muslims are experiencing the israel-hamas war, how u.s. jews are experiencing the israel-hamas war, most popular.

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Push for Gender Equality in E.U.’s Top Roles Looks Set to Fall Short

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, asked member countries to nominate both men and women for commission roles.

By Jenny Gross

Reporting from Brussels

The European Union has presented itself as a champion for promoting gender equality, adopting rules requiring companies to increase the number of women on their boards and pushing employers to address the gender pay gap .

So when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, asked recently for member countries to nominate both male and female candidates for leadership positions within the 27-member bloc’s executive arm, it was seen as an attempt to apply that vision to its own halls. The problem is, few have listened.

Only five countries — Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal and Croatia — have put forward female candidates ahead of a Friday deadline. Seventeen countries have nominated only men for their commissioner posts. (Three countries have yet to submit names.) Each country gets one leadership slot.

It’s possible that some countries could still change their nominees ahead of the deadline. But the current slate of nominees suggests that the European Commission’s leadership team will likely be composed mostly of men for the next five years — and analysts said the public snub of Ms. von der Leyen’s request signals her leadership could be weakened.

“It’s not a small thing, asking for gender balance and clearly not getting it,” said a senior European official. “It’s not just one, two countries.” Speaking on condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing, the official said that indicated Ms. von der Leyen’s relations with member states would be more difficult.

Ms. von der Leyen, a conservative German politician, secured a second five-year term in a vote last month.

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Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

Equality, diversity, and inclusion are essential components of scientific quality. Science Europe works to promote a research ecosystem where all scholars can realise their potential regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, disabilities, ethnic origin, or social background.

Why do equality, diversity, and inclusion matter?

Diversity leads to better research and can be a major resource for scientific excellence. All researchers should be enabled to realise their full potential and rewarded for the quality of their scholarly contributions, independently of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, disabilities, ethnic origin, or social background. Research organisations have a crucial role to play in addressing inequality, not only for the benefit of the science ecosystem, but to contribute to progress in wider society.

What are research organisations doing to address equality, diversity, and inclusion?

To ensure that their research processes are fair, Science Europe’s Member Organisations aim to scrutinise their activities against any form of bias. To that end, they seek to avoid unconscious bias in peer review processes, monitor progress towards gender equality, and improve grant management practices. There is an increased realisation that gender inequality can affect the design and content of research itself. An increasing number of research organisations require researchers to integrate or specify the sex and gender dimensions in the research they fund or perform.

The Global Research Council's Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group

Science Europe actively collaborates with other relevant initiatives, institutional groups, and stakeholders to further promote equality in the research ecosystem. The association currently co-chairs the Global Research Council’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group (EDI WG) alongside the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) where it promotes research policies promoting equality and the integration of the gender and sex dimensions in the content and design of research.

The group released a survey report on gender-disaggregated data ; this landmark study provides an opportunity for benchmarking and a better understanding of the needs of different research systems.

Practical Guide to Improving Gender Equality in Research Organisations

Research organisations have a crucially important role to play in addressing gender inequality; not only for the benefit of their own ecosystem, but to contribute to progress in wider society. This practical guide sets out good practice examples and guides the further development of context specific approaches including how to avoid unconscious bias in peer review processes, how to monitor gender equality, and how to improve grant management practises.

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From Ambition To Action: Fostering Research Excellence In Europe - 2023 Annual Report

2023 proved to be another landmark year for Science Europe: building on the achievements of the previous year and setting the direction for new approaches in vital areas of research policy.

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Paris 2024: The first Games to achieve full gender parity

On International Women’s Day (8 March), Olympics.com looks at the progress made towards gender equality at the Olympic Games and assesses some of the upcoming challenges. 

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The Olympic Movement has made great strides with regards to gender equality over recent years. Paris 2024 will be the first Olympics in history to achieve numerical gender parity on the field of play, with the same number of female and male athletes participating in the largest sporting event in the world. This key achievement was made possible due to a large number of initiatives led by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and delivered in partnership with Olympic Movement stakeholders, such as Paris 2024, International Federations, National Olympic Committees and broadcasters.

“The progress is nice,” said fencing World Champion Ysaora Thibus , who is deeply involved in addressing gender equality issues in sport, before looking forward to the next challenges. “There’s also much to improve with everyone involved in sport, including other employees and leaders.”

To mark International Women’s Day 2023, Olympics.com takes a look at some of the achievements the Olympic Movement has made regarding gender equality.

Olympic Movement: Achievements in gender equality

• Paris 1900: Female athletes first took part in the Olympic Games, four years after the first modern Olympics took place in Athens
• 1996 : Promotion of women becomes a mission of the IOC and is enshrined in the Olympic Charter
• Tokyo 2020 : The last edition of the Games were the most gender-balanced to date with 48.7 per cent of athletes women. At Tokyo 1964, only 13 per cent of the athletes were women.
• Tokyo 2020 : Following a rule change allowing one male and one female athlete to jointly carry their flag during the Opening Ceremony, 91 per cent of NOCs had a female flag bearer
• Tokyo 2020 : Three disciplines achieved gender balance (BMX racing, mountain biking and freestyle wrestling)
• Beijing 2022 : The last Olympic Winter Games were the most gender balanced to date with 45 per cent female athletes
• Paris 2024 : Out of the 10,500 athletes participating in the Games, 5,250 will be men and 5,250 women. These Games will be the first to reach full gender parity in terms of number of athletes.
• Female IOC membership currently stands at 40 per cent, up from 21 per cent at the start of the Olympic Agenda 2020
• Youth Olympic Games : The Youth Games Buenos Aires 2018 and Winter Youth Games Lausanne 2020 reached full gender parity in overall athlete participation (2,000 athletes per gender in 2018 and 936 in 2020)
• Female representation on the IOC Executive Board stands at 33.3 per cent, versus 26.6 per cent before the Olympic Agenda 2020
• 50 per cent of the members of IOC Commissions positions have been held by women since 2022, compared with 20.3 per cent prior to the Olympic Agenda 2020. In addition, a record high of 13 of the 31 commissions were chaired by women in 2022.

Paris 2024’s commitment to gender equality

Today, only one per cent of sports facilities in France are named after women. In order to contribute towards change, 70 local authorities certified “Terre de Jeux 2024”, with the assistance of Paris 2024, have committed to renaming their sports facilities with the names of prominent women.

On International Women’s Day (8 March), the city of Livry-Gargan in the suburb of Paris will name its football pitch “Marianne Mako” to pay tribute to the iconic sports journalist who passed away in 2018.

As the organiser of the world’s biggest sporting event, Paris 2024 is working to improve the position of women in sport. While female athletes first competed at the Games at Paris 1900, France is preparing to host the first Games with full numerical gender parity on the playing field. After choosing a woman’s face for its emblem, Paris 2024 has developed a schedule for the Games that ensures balance between genders for “prime time” sessions in order to promote women’s sport to the public, particularly young girls.

“Because equality also involves visibility, the renaming of these sports facilities with women’s names is a key challenge,” said Tony Estanguet, President of Paris 2024. “We thank the local authorities working with us who, through these symbolic actions - which are not only strong but also concrete - contribute to making sport more inclusive and equal.”

Further challenges for the Olympic Movement

While the same number of female and male athletes will compete at Paris 2024, there is still a real gender gap across all leadership roles at the Olympic Games, such as that of Chef de Mission, Technical Official and coach. At Tokyo 2020, only 13 per cent of coaches were women and 10 per cent at Beijing 2022.

The IOC has launched many initiatives to address this issue, including working in partnership with International Federations, NOCs and Organising Committees to open up more coaching roles and pathways to women, such as the WISH programme (Women in Sport High Performance Pathway) which is funded by Olympic Solidarity . The programme aims to provide training to 100 female coaches in the lead-up to Paris.

The IOC is also committed to going a further step by implementing an ambitious 2021-2024 plan.

In May 2021, the IOC approved 21 Gender Equality and Inclusion Objectives for 2021-2024 . These objectives build on the progress achieved as part of the Olympic Agenda 2020 and the IOC Gender Equality Review Project and set out actions to help achieve Recommendation 13 of the Olympic Agenda 2020+5.

Based on consultations with internal and external stakeholders, and taking into account the global context, the objectives centre around five focus areas: Participation, Leadership, Safe Sport, Portrayal and Resource Allocation, and are categorised into the IOCs three areas of responsibility: the IOC as an organisation, the IOC as owner of the Olympic Games and the IOC as the leader of the Olympic Movement.

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Goal is to integrate ‘gender into all branches of research to boost accuracy,’ ‘generate innovative, equitable and inclusive findings’

International scholars concluded a five-year “equity” project by determining the concept of “gender” cannot be defined but should be incorporated into all aspects of scientific research nonetheless.

Funded by the European Union, their research was part of a project called GENDER-NET Plus . Launched in 2017, it brought together scholars from various countries to overcome “challenges in achieving gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research and innovation.”

Their final report “Integrating gender analysis into research,” published in The Lancet in July, summarized the scholars’ thoughts on “how to best integrate both sex and gender into studies ranging from social sciences, humanities, and health research.”

“Over the last two decades, there has been growing recognition … that sex (a biological variable) and gender (a sociocultural variable) influence research and research outcomes,” they wrote.

“Consequently, it has become increasingly important to integrate considerations of sex … and gender into all branches of research to boost accuracy, provide high-quality science, improve reproducibility and generate innovative, equitable and inclusive findings,” the researchers wrote.

The scholars pointed out that the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., as well as its Canadian counterpart and the European Commission, all have begun “outlining expectations that sex and gender be integrated in funding submissions and provided some guidance on how to do so.”

Still, they concluded that more work needs to be done to ensure “the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of intersectional sex and gender integration [are] promoted across the entire range of research endeavours.”

However, the scholars also refused to provide an exact definition of gender. Instead, they wrote that each research team should define it for themselves.

“Though tempting, creating a single ‘centralized’ authoritative voice (e.g., guidelines) were thought to run the risk of being dogmatic/political and contrary to scientific freedom and debate,” they wrote.

“Defining and documenting gender was found to be complex, challenging, and was approached in diverse ways in the funded studies …” they wrote. “In [some] cases … it was noted that care should be taken to avoid suggesting that ‘sex’ is a simple binary; doing so misrepresents the diversity of humans.”

In other cases, social science researchers considered “class, race, poverty level, ethnic group and age” in their definitions of gender, according to their report.

“Definitions of ‘gender’ in these studies emphasized that unequal power relations between dominant (e.g., white cisgendered) and underserved (e.g., older, substance using, migrant) groups and individuals, required thoughtful methodological choices,” they wrote.

MORE: NIH kicks out scholars critical of gender identity from ‘sex and gender’ event

A leader of Do No Harm, a U.S.-based organization focused on ethical medical practice in line with the Hippocratic oath, called the researchers’ conclusion “illogical.”

“How do you implement something that cannot be defined? Given a lack of scientific evidence to support ill-defined gender ideology, it is simply illogical to continue allowing it to shape or define American institutions,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chair of Do No Harm, told The Fix in an emailed statement Thursday.

Goldfarb said pushing “gender theory” is a waste of educational resources. He is a former associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

“Educators should be solely focused on factual, scientific evidence in their teaching. The delusion that gender is malleable and distinct from sex is disproven and dangerous when pushed on minors who may be confused or vulnerable,” he told The Fix .

“Many European countries have taken steps back from gender theory, and in England a transgender youth clinic was closed because of a lack of evidence for the experimental interventions they were performing. Why should any professor be teaching a disproven theory?” Goldfarb said.

Most of the scholars involved in the GENDER-NET Plus project were European and Canadian, but one member of the advisory board, Londa Schiebinger, ( pictured ) is a professor at Stanford University. Her contribution to the project was on computer science and the role that gender plays in its study.

Schieberger did not respond to several requests for comment from The Fix via email. The Fix also contacted several other project leaders by email recently, but none responded.

In a keynote presentation to GENDER-NET Plus in 2022, Schieberger said incorporating gender into research is important because there are problems with “unintentional bias” even in “algorithms” and “software systems.”

For example, an MIT study found facial recognition programs performed better on men’s faces than women’s and on lighter skinned people than those with darker skin, she said. Additionally, “the system cannot recognize transgender faces often, especially during periods of transition,” Schieberger said.

GENDER-NET Plus concluded in 2023 with a total of “13 transnational research projects integrating a gender dimension.” These included a study about “gender difference” in immunotherapy side effects for cancer patients and research on “overcoming the entrepreneurial ecosystem gender divide,” according to its website .

The project also provided free trainings to help researchers and institutions embrace “gender equality in research, innovation, and higher education.”

The European Union spent 3.8 million euros (about $4.1 million) on the project, according to the grant agreement .

MORE: Evolutionary biologists reject ‘white, male’ framework, embrace ‘queer’ DEI research

IMAGE: GENDER-NET Plus/YouTube

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Gender equality through marriage

09 October 2024, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm

Join this event to hear Emma Tominey discuss research on a potential increase in gender equality by estimating the causal effect of marriage versus cohabitation on labour market trajectories of new parents.

This event is free.

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Traditionally, a “marriage surplus” was created through specialisation of household activities, but in modern times gains from a more egalitarian marriage can be through increased coordination.

The research looks at whether marriage can increase gender equality by estimating the causal effect of marriage versus cohabitation on labour market trajectories of new parents. This seminar will also assess whether increased gender equality for the coordinators lowers or raises household welfare.

This event will be particularly useful for researchers.

Please note this is a hybrid event and can be joined either in-person or online.

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About the Speaker

Professor emma tominey.

Professor of Economics at the University of York

Emma Tominey is also affiliated with the FAIR research institute at NHH. She serves as an IZA Research Fellow and is a Network Member of the Human Capital Economic Opportunities Working Group.

Additionally, she holds editorial roles, including Associate Editor at the European Economic Review, Co-Editor at the Scottish Journal of Political Economy, and Associate Editor at Fiscal Studies. She is also on the Editorial Board for the Economics Observatory and serves as a member of the Royal Economic Society Committee.

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UN Women Reveals Concerning Regression in Attitudes Towards Gender Roles During Pandemic in New Study

Findings of the 20-country study show attitudes towards gender roles have deteriorated amid covid-19 as outdated social norms and stereotypes continue to hold society back from reaching gender equality..

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Cannes, France, 20 June 2022 – UN Women and the Unstereotype Alliance, an industry-led coalition convened by UN Women to eradicate harmful stereotypes in advertising, today launched “The Levers of Change: Gender Equality Attitudes Study 2022, the latest iteration of a bi-annual global study that tracks attitudes towards gender. The 20-country-wide survey shows that some antiquated views of gender have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, developed under the leadership of UN Women in partnership with Johnson & Johnson, Kantar, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, examines perceptions across a multitude of areas including leadership and political participation, education, healthcare, the workplace, media representation, marriage and family life, safety and violence, and control over personal decisions. The results of the survey were revealed during the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which has sharpened its focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion this year.

While the 20 surveyed countries saw some areas of improvement, the sobering findings demonstrate that discriminatory social norms continue to stifle progress. Overall, most respondents agree that gender equality in all areas is essential to their countries’ success (91%), yet attitudes towards domestic violence have slipped backwards and young men now hold some of the most regressive attitudes towards gender. Data from the survey also reflected the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the lives of women and girls in perceptions about gender roles, reinforcing trends of unpaid care responsibilities, gender pay gaps, and job segregation identified in other UN Women research.

Detailed breakouts by country along with additional context and perspective can be found in the full report available here . Some key findings include:

• COVID-19 has set back attitudes towards domestic violence . 19% of all respondents believe that there are acceptable circumstances for someone to hit their spouse or partner—an increase of 2 percentage-points compared to 2018, most notably in India, Sweden and the United States.
• Despite progress, women continue to face multiple barriers to political leadership and decision-making. 82% of respondents agree that having more opportunities for women in politics is important for their country’s success, an increase of 2 percentage points since 2018. However, 63% of respondents agree that it is easy for men to run for elected office and only 38% agree that it is easy for women to do the same.
• Prevailing attitudes hamper progress for women in business and leadership positions. While 9 in 10 respondents agree that equal pay for equal work is important to their country’s future success, 52% of men aged 16-19 and 54% of men aged 20-34, agree that ‘women should work less and devote more time to caring for their family.’ 44% of all respondents agree that it is easy for women to be hired as skilled workers, while 57% believe that the same is true for men—a gender gap of 13 percentage points.
• In times of hardship, gender attitudes and beliefs that drive people’s decisions can lead to reversals in the hard-won gains in gender equality. A surprising 25% of respondents agree that ‘in times of food shortages, priority should be given to men’, and 31% of respondents agree that ‘when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’.
• The media continues to portray traditional gender roles, particularly male roles . Respondents believe that the media portrays women and men in traditional roles and this perception has increased significantly since 2018. 68% of respondents believe that the media portrays women in traditional female roles, such as wives, mothers, or caregivers (+14 percentage points since 2018) and 72% of respondents believe the media represents men in conventional male roles, including as providers for the family, as leaders, or as businessmen (+20 percentage points since 2018).

Sima Bahous, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UN Women, said : “The study findings reiterate the urgency of addressing the social norms holding back women and girls.  The positive attitudes towards opportunities for women in political leadership are welcome and much needed.  However, the increase in acceptance of domestic violence, held in particular by young men, is deeply disturbing and an alarm bell for action. These findings show exactly why social norms are at the heart of our strategic plan for gender equality”.

Aline Santos, Chief Brand Officer & Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, Unilever, said:  "For those of us that work in ED&I we know that the work is never done, and the study results reflect this. Whilst over half of ads are now rated as progressive and marketers are confident in creating unstereotypical advertising, we are still at the halfway mark. The primary ingredient for progress is optimism - we must continue creating advertising that drives humanity forward and is a force for positive change". 

Caroline Frankum, CEO of Kantar’s Profiles Division, said:  “For more than 50% of the world’s population, It is no longer sufficient to say that the arc of justice is long, but it bends towards justice. Steps must be taken across societies today to deliver a more equal world for women and girls. Our partnership with UN Women is one of our most important partnerships precisely because, in measuring the Gender equality gap, we inform the equality debate at the most crucial of times. COVID-19 has set back gender equality and societal attitudes towards domestic violence. Women must understand and demand their rights, and follow the inspiring examples set by young women aged under 20, who are unafraid to voice their demands. Men, of all ages, must discover the importance of allyship. Politicians must better protect and better promote women and girls’ rights, and hold those who seek to hold us back accountable“.

Across the study’s themes, attitudes towards gender equality vary vastly among the 20 countries. The findings aim to provide an evidence-based tool for decision-makers by highlighting locally nuanced beliefs and perceptions. The data can be leveraged by policymakers, advertisers and media owners, civil society organizations and more in their efforts to effectively address harmful gender stereotypes and the threats they pose to progress in their societies.

About the Research

Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company conducted the perceptions-based study in 2020, surveying over 20,000 men and women in twenty countries including Colombia, India, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sweden, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—all of which were included in the first report—with the addition of Austria, Brazil, Denmark, France, Mexico, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, and Vietnam.

Additionally, during the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity the Unstereotype Alliance hosted a mainstage session in Palais I, It's Not the Time to Pat Ourselves on the Back , featuring model and activist Munroe Bergdorf and TV presenter, Diversity Expert and Award-winning Author, June Sarpong . The audience was challenged to reflect on their efforts towards diversity, equity and inclusion and creating unstereotyped content. Positive stories of impact were contrasted with negative comments from the public and individual stories of adversity to inspire action. Transgender icon Munroe Bergdorf then gave an emotive closing address, sharing her story to highlight the criticality of positive representation. The session took place on Tuesday, June 21 from 4:15-4:45PM in the Debussy Theatre, Palais I.

About Unstereotype Alliance

The Unstereotype Alliance seeks to eradicate harmful stereotypes from advertising and media to help create a more equal world. Convened by UN Women, the Alliance collectively acts to empower people in all their diversity (including gender, race, class, age, ability, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality) by using advertising as a force for good to drive positive change all over the world. Since the Unstereotype Alliance’s formation in 2017, national chapters have launched in 12 countries across five continents to tackle culturally nuanced stereotypes on the ground ( http://www.unstereotypealliance.org ).

Media Contacts 

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• Gender stereotypes
• Media leadership
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Parliamentary Secretary Hepfner announces funding for 2SLGBTQI+ organizations in Alberta to improve gender inclusion

From: Women and Gender Equality Canada

News release

Today, in the lead up to Calgary Pride 2024, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth, Lisa Hepfner, announced over $400,000 for three 2SLGBTQI+ organizations based in Alberta.

August 30, 2024 – Calgary, Alberta — Women and Gender Equality Canada

Gender equality depends on all people having the opportunity to participate fully in Canada’s economic, social and political life. Removing systemic barriers with respect to sexual orientation, gender identity or expression and ensuring the inclusion of 2SLGBTQI+ communities will create a better future for all Canadians. 

Though this funding, the Government of Canada is supporting the following Alberta-based 2SLGBTQI+ organizations to address barriers to equality and strengthen their capacity to improve skills, information, collaboration and tool development:

• Calgary Outlink will receive $147,000 for their project Developing Interagency Networks, Community Connections, and Awareness of Services for 2SLGBTQI+ Service Providers . This project aims to establish an interagency network to build stronger capacity of 2SLGBTQI+ community organizations and service providers, addressing the current gaps in connection, communication, and collaboration between organizations.
• End of the Rainbow Foundation will receive $137,000 for their initiative entitled Promoting Structural Change toward Living Well Together . This project will investigate where gaps in 2SLGBTQI+ services exist in the Calgary region.
• Pride Calgary Planning Committee will receive up to $157,000 for their Sustainability & Strategy Planning Project . This project will work to improve police relations with 2SLGBTQI+ communities in Calgary. This will include a study about 2SLGBTQ+ individuals and policing practices, a townhall event, and recommendations for enhancing inclusivity.

This funding builds on the foundation of the Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan that was announced two years ago this week, in August 2022. The Action Plan was created to advance the rights and equality of 2SLGBTQI+ people in Canada. Through this 2SLGBTQI+ community capacity and project funding, the Government of Canada is addressing persistent disparities faced by these communities, and building a safer, more inclusive country.  

“Two years ago this week, we launched the Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan. As we celebrate Pride 2024 across the country, the federal government is continuing to work with grassroots organizations to prioritize and sustain 2SLGBTQI+ community action across Canada, end persistent stigma and discrimination, and create and sustain inclusive, vibrant communities. Supporting the innovative work of these three organizations in Alberta brings us one step closer to equality for everyone in Canada.” Lisa Hepfner, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth

“Calgary’s 2SLGBTQI+ grassroots organizations are leading the way when it comes to creating a safer, more diverse city and province. I’m proud that the federal funding being provided to these three organizations ensures we continue to walk the path towards inclusion for all and testifies to our commitment to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the 2SLGBTQI+ community amidst hateful attacks and rising violence.” George Chahal, Member of Parliament for Calgary Skyview

Quick facts

Between 2019-2021, 1.3 million Canadians aged 15 years and older (4.4% of the Canadian population) reported being part of the 2SLGBTQ+ population

A 2019 Canadian Health Survey of Children and Youth identified that 77% of sexually and gender diverse youth reported being the target of bullying in the previous year. Not only are sexually and gender diverse youth more likely to be bullied, but their mental health is also often worse than cisgender youth attracted exclusively to a different gender.

Among those aged 15 years and older, 3 in 10 (29.7%) 2SLGBTQ+ people reported their mental health to be fair or poor, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 non-2SLGBTQ+ individuals (9.1%).

2SLGBTQI+ homeless respondents had a greater likelihood of reporting all health challenges than their non-2SLGBTQI+ counterparts. Differences were greatest for learning or cognitive limitations (48% for 2SLGBTQI+ respondents, compared to 31% for non-2SLGBTQI+ ones) and mental health issues (78% for 2SLGBTQI+ respondents, compared to 57% for non-2SLGBTQI+ ones).

Over the past eight years, the Government of Canada has invested over $250 million to advance rights and improve equality for 2SLGBTQI+ communities. As part of this total, $100 million over five years (2022-27) has supported the implementation of the 2SLGBTQI+ Federal Action Plan.

Associated links

• Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan
• 2SLGBTQI+ Community Capacity Fund
• 2SLGBTQI+ Projects Fund 2024
• Facts, stats and impact: 2SLGBTQI+ communities
• 2SLGBTQI+ glossary
• Women and Gender Equality Canada

Carolyn Svonkin Director of Communications Office of the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth [email protected]

Media Relations    Women and Gender Equality Canada   819-420-6530   [email protected]

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