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Promoting gender equality across the sustainable development goals

• Open access
• Published: 15 September 2022
• Volume 25 , pages 14177–14198, ( 2023 )

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• Walter Leal Filho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1241-5225 1 , 2 ,
• Marina Kovaleva 1 ,
• Stella Tsani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7302-4930 3 ,
• Diana-Mihaela Țîrcă   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9155-9616 4 ,
• Chris Shiel 5 ,
• Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2198-6740 6 ,
• Melanie Nicolau   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6532-9657 7 ,
• Mihaela Sima   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2069-3639 8 ,
• Barbara Fritzen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0346-1270 9 ,
• Amanda Lange Salvia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4549-7685 10 ,
• Aprajita Minhas 1 ,
• Valerija Kozlova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5639-6396 11 ,
• Federica Doni   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6581-9530 12 ,
• Jane Spiteri   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6625-2372 13 ,
• Tanushka Gupta 14 ,
• Kutoma Wakunuma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8236-3221 15 ,
• Mohit Sharma 16 ,
• Jelena Barbir   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9226-0680 1 ,
• Kalterina Shulla 1 ,
• Medani P. Bhandari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2213-2349 17 , 18 &
• Shiv Tripathi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3806-1960 19  

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Gender issues, and gender equality in particular, can be regarded as cross-cutting issues in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), even though it is unclear how they are taken into account. This study addresses this information gap by performing an assessment of the emphasis on gender issues across all the other 16 SDGs, in addition to SDG5, through a literature review and case study analysis, the basis for the newly developed framework, highlighting specific actions associated to each SDG. The 13 countries addressed in the 16 case studies include China, India, or Australia and illustrate the inclusion of SDG5 into the SDGs. Using an SDG matrix, the SDG targets are analysed. Those where an emphasis on gender equality is important in allowing them to be achieved are listed. The novelty of our approach resides in offering an in-depth analysis of how gender issues interact with the other SDGs, proposing a new analysis framework clearly identifying SDGs 1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16 demanding further attention for successful SD gender implementation and illustrating specific areas where further actions may be necessary, which may be used by policy-makers, raising further awareness on gender equality contribution to achieve the SDGs. A set of recommendations aimed at placing gender matters more centrally in the SDGs delivery are presented as a final contribution. These focus on the need for greater awareness and attention to good practices, to achieve successful implementation initiatives.

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1 Introducing SDG5–gender equality

In an unprecedented global effort, the heads of state and government and high representatives in the United Nations (UN) meeting of September 2015 put forward the ‘2030 Agenda’, a global plan for human and environmental prosperity, structured in 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, indicative of the scale and of the ambition of the global action to be pursued. The 2030 Agenda recognises that the achievements of the 17 SDGs are linked to human and planetary prosperity, strengthening universal peace, greater freedom and promoting the eradication of poverty, discrimination and inequalities in all forms (UN, 2015 ). In the collective journey of meeting the SDGs and the UN 2030 Agenda targets, countries and stakeholders will act in partnership (Leal Filho et al., 2022a ) to take a transformative and inclusive path towards a resilient and sustainable future in economic, social and environmental terms. The 2030 Agenda plans for the SDGs and the related targets trigger action in critical areas for human and planetary welfare. These include (UN, 2015 ): (i) human existence in prosperity, equality and a healthy environment, (ii) planet conservation through timely climate action, sustainable production, consumption and management of natural resources, (iii) economic, social and technological prosperity in a harmonious symbiosis with nature, (iv) peaceful, just and inclusive societies and (v) revived global partnership of countries, stakeholders and people.

SDG5, ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’, reflects the ever-increasing efforts of the UN towards gender equality, earmarked with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 (UN Women, 2020a ) and the adoption of landmark agreements such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979 (OHCHR, 2020 ), the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995 (UN, 1995 ), and the establishment of UN Women in 2010 (UN, 2012 ). The important role of gender equality for socio-economic development is well highlighted in the UN publication “We the Peoples” (Annan, 2000 ), emphasising the untapped development potential due to social, economic and political inequalities arising from gender discrimination, deeply rooted and persistent in many developing and developed economies, related to access to decent work and equal pay, education, healthcare, resources, decision-making, among others (Brixiová et al., 2020 ; Tsige et al., 2020 ; Connor et al., 2020 ; Maheshwari & Nayak, 2020 ). Women are still more vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and underrepresentation in the political, economic, and business spheres (Milazzo & Goldstein, 2019 ; European Commission, 2019 ). The recognition of the important role of women in global, social, economic and environmental prosperity is clearly stated in paragraphs 236–243 of the ‘Future We Want’ (UN, 2012 ) and in the Open Working Group Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals ( 2014 ).

SDG5 brings forward issues of gender-based discrimination such as unpaid work, sexual and reproductive rights, and gender-based violence (Hirsu et al., 2019 ). Achieving SDG5 is a priority that contributes to the increase in global well-being. SDG5 includes nine targets that aim at ending all forms of discrimination, as described in Table 1 . These targets set the sustainable development (SD) goals to be achieved. The indicators provide the monitoring approaches for status, progress, and assessment, chosen according to the respective objectives and measured globally, or at regional and country levels.

But despite the relevance of the SDGs as a whole and the importance of handling gender issues, in particular, there is a research gap when it comes to looking at both topics in a combined way. In order to address this research need, this paper reports on a study aimed at fostering a thorough assessment of the emphasis that gender issues should be given in order to achieve all the SDGs. The research question pursued by the paper is the following: o what extent are gender issues being considered in the overall implementation of the SDGs?

Through a literature analysis and 16 case studies discussion in a sample of 13 developed and developing countries, e.g., China, India, Spain, and Morocco, this study sheds some light on the topic. The novelty behind this study consists in not only offering a sound analysis of how gender is considered across all other SDGs, but also indicating areas where further actions may be required. The innovation of this work is also based on the fact that it offers specific insights into gender equality and the SDGs. Also, this study may offer further guidance to policy-makers, thus prioritising women’s empowerment in developing collaborative initiatives in the area of gender equality. Finally, this paper also serves the purpose of raising awareness about the need for capacity building and sensitisation around gender-related issues and their crucial contribution to the SDGs.

2 Research on gender equality and the SDGs: assessing the relations

SDGs have clear, often measurable and very straightforward targets aiming to improve the quality of life and living conditions for all. The interactions between these goals and the larger policy frameworks aiming to ensure economic growth from the country level to the regional level turns out to be more complex and challenging due to numerous types of constraints, from financial to cultural, when considering gender equality and ways of promoting it.

The global agenda for change, intent, purpose and overall goals were generally defined with the publishing of the Brundtland Report (1987), and the progress since then entered a new phase when the SDGs were adopted by the UN as the 2030 Agenda, while SD has been adopted across several economic policy fields in order to define specific objectives and goals. While highlighting SD challenges and opportunities, studies have included the gender dimension to a lesser extent, as illustrated in the existing literature that concerns the SDGs (Magendane & Kapazoglou, 2021 ; Scharlemann et al., 2020 ).

Gender inequality is pervasive across the world and women experience a series of disadvantages, in comparison to men. Yet, SD requires that we should all enjoy equal rights and be able to appreciate lives, free from violence and discrimination (UN Women, 2020a ). There has been progress in some areas of discrimination, e.g., more girls in education, fewer girls forced into marriage, and more women in leadership roles, but policy decisions related to education, health and other sectors continue to take place in gendered contexts (Morgan et al., 2020 ). A situation where approximately half of the population is denied equal opportunities, equal participation in decision-making, and equal access to resources, education and employment will contribute to severely inhibiting SD and global prosperity (Dugarova, 2018 ).

Thus, and through SDG5, gender equality is rightfully at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for SD (UN, 2015 ), recognised as an essential human right and important enough to be a goal in its own right, among other 16 SDGs . Its significance is such that it constitutes a cross-cutting theme spanning all the other 16 SDGs, with a total of 45 targets and 54 indicators gender-related. It is suggested that not only is SDG5 critical to all the other SDGs, with gender inequality being an obstacle to progress, but that it has the potential to serve as an SD accelerator, with a positive multiplier effect, to speed up the progress of the 2030 Agenda (UNSDG, 2018 ). Gender equality and women’s empowerment should have a catalytic effect on human development (Odera & Mulusa, 2020 ) if gender is in fact actively addressed across all SDGs.

There are a number of reasons why gender equality has to be considered in relation to all of the SDGs. If under-utilising part of the world’s talent, we fall short of reducing poverty (SDG1) and encouraging economic growth (SDG8). Gender equality in education and the labour market contributes to enhancing the gross domestic product and should help to reduce extreme poverty by 2030 (Dugarova, 2018 ). Compared to 1998, the gender gaps in the labour force, measured as the difference between the labour force participation rates of women and men, have decreased in most regions of the world in 2018, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern, Southern and Western Europe, but the gap has widened in Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe (Klasen, 2018 ). According to world regions, the Gender Inequality Index of 2020, can be seen in Fig.  1 . Also, the Life-course Gender Gap in 2019, translating into a deviation from gender parity, reveals the gaps in the adult population (Fig.  2 ). The studies on gender equality reveal that women worldwide are more fragile in aspects such as poverty, representativeness in public employment positions, insecurity, or physical and sexual violence, thus emphasising the need to ensure a redesigned gender-responsive approach towards implementing the 2030 Agenda (Hirsu et al., 2019 ; Liu et al., 2019 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ). Dugarova ( 2018 ) also demonstrates the multiple benefits of gender equality in relation to SD beyond SDG5, including food security, agricultural production, climate change (Caridade et al., 2022 ) and natural resource management. Similarly, Morgan et al. ( 2020 ) raise similar points but focusing on showing the importance of gender in relation to health and well-being (SDG3) and the less obvious connection between water and sanitation (SDG6) and energy (SDG7), illustrating the interconnected nature of SD and meaning that gender equality plays, in fact, an integral role to achieving all of the SDGs. Women are more likely to be impacted by unsafe water and poor sanitation (SDG6) and to die from unclean fuel (SDG7) (James et al., 2020 ), than men.

Gender Inequality Index, by developing region, 2020, modified from UNDP ( 2020 )

Life-course Gender Gap, 2019, modified from UNDP ( 2020 )

The World Employment and Social Outlook suggests that women are underpaid and under-employed (ILO, 2018 ), although playing a central role in the household economy and being important influencers in peaceful societies. The study from Manandhar et al. ( 2018 ) suggests that the concept of gender in SDG5, seeking the achievement of gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls, is narrow, focusing on women-specific limited roles. When considered in terms of social context impact, gender inequality affects justice in opportunities, leading to economic inefficiency and thus inhibiting growth and global SD (de Jong & Vijge, 2021 ).

According to Agarwal ( 2018 ), a bold interpretation of SDG5 and the establishment of synergies with the other SDGs could allow ways for women to contribute to progress in different aspects concerning SD. Asadikia et al. ( 2020 ) show the lack of influence that SDG5 alone has on an SDG index based on all observations, clearly highlighting the need to interact with other SDGs to increase SDG5 influence. Accordingly, it is important that other SDGs should refocus on the interactions of gender equality to achieve specific global sustainability objectives by 2030. Fariña García et al. ( 2020 ) used a semantic network analysis, including computational linguistics and text processing of SDGs in official documents, to measure interactions in specific countries (Nigeria and Spain), to be used to planners in every country. The results revealed that each SDG is connected with all the other remaining 16 SDGs, despite the language used to search for information. SDGs 2, 8, 11 and 12, known as the driving forces, were found to be always connected to all the others, and SDG5 was not among them, being translated into a difficulty in terms of transitioning from current to sustainable systems of governance and management, and failing to address the gender agenda (Rai et al., 2019 ).

SDG5 is clearly dependent on how governments interpret targets in order to allow women to access resources and have effective participation in all levels of societal decision-making, by involving various stakeholders in order to implement and reinforce legal and institutional arrangements on gender equality (Obura, 2020 ). The identification of interlinkage between the SDGs (Bali Swain & Ranganathan, 2021 ; Del Río Castro et al., 2021 ) is critical in allowing policy-makers to prioritise SDG5 targets and strategies for SD and achieving the 2030 Agenda indivisibility (Bennich et al., 2020 ). Biggeri et al. ( 2019 ) highlight the importance of adjusting the targets and indicators with specific goals, aiming to increase gender awareness and consciousness in the selection of parameters and to allow different strategic options to be involved in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda (Nilsson et al., 2018 ; Obura, 2020 ; Parkes et al., 2020 ). When assessing the sustainability performance of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Lamichhane et al. ( 2020 ) found that only 35% of OECD countries had identified a key national system to monitor all SDGs, a significant gap.

Most studies suggest that progress in achieving gender equality continues to be slow. The Global Gender Gap 2020 (World Economic Forum, 2020 ) report highlights the urgency of achieving gender equality, while reporting gaps between men and women in health, education and policy areas, and across all forms of economic participation, reinforcing that there is a long way to go with a 31.4% distance to parity. Women are closer than men in indicators related to health (SDG3), but further away from them in terms of employment targets. There are undoubtedly a number of local projects addressing gender equality, but it is predicted that it will take almost 100 years to close the gap in relation to political empowerment. Even in Western Europe, the same report suggests that gender equality will not be achieved for another 54 years.

Many countries are not on track to achieving the SDGs, and the COVID-19 pandemic has and continues to exacerbating widespread gender inequity (Shulla et al., 2021 ). Lockdowns have further increased the burden placed on women in the home and putting them at increased risk from domestic violence (Huiskes et al., 2022 ), with women also accounting for 70% of healthcare workers fighting the virus (UN Department of Economic & Social Affairs, 2020 ). In this context, and considering that the SDGs are not effectively considering gender in their implementation, the gender gap may widen, rather than narrow.

3 Methodology

The work performed in the scope of this study was undertaken in three different phases:

Documenting the targets of all the 17 SDGs that would require gender issues to be accommodated before the respective SDGs can be implemented

For achieving phase 1, which also attempts to cover an information gap regarding the integration and interaction of the 17 SDGs, an effort was made to identify the main strands dominating the literature concerned with policies, aims, interactions and analytical approaches regarding SDG5 integration in the SDGs. The first step consisted in analysing how SDGs interact in the complex framework generated by the current world’s economic and social context, and therefore the methodology was based on reviewing how literature integrates gender equality leading to the UN 2030 Agenda. This resulted in a set of questions for which answers still need to be provided by considering that all SDGs need to be and are in fact interacting, guided by indivisibility, thus requiring inclusiveness as the sine qua non condition. Literature review allows to obtain a road overview of the existing scientific research, as well providing the context for new research (Hempel, 2020 ), forming the basis of all scientific research (Block & Fisch, 2020 ), while allowing the researcher to establish the key constructs of a future research agenda based on the identified gaps (Paul & Criado, 2020 ).

Presenting 16 international case studies in 13 countries that specifically reflect how gender issues are being considered when implementing the 17 SDGs

The case studies in phase 2 were selected using an open international call for collaboration, in the context of which different experts were invited to provide inputs. After a detailed and critical examination of the published research, this study allows to document the cross-cutting gender issues that should be included in the targets of each of the 17 SDGs to achieve SD, while considering SDG5. A case study was associated to each SDG, demonstrating how gender issues have been successfully infused into the actions driving the achievement of all the SDGs. Thus, by setting up the main interactions/relations and policies dominating the policy-making that addresses SDG5, and identifying current vulnerabilities, gaps and delays in this respect, the 16 international case studies reflect how gender issues are taken into account when implementing the SDGs, a necessary step in developing a judicious framework and recommendations for facilitating the achievement of SD across all SDGs, by integrating the SDG5 targets and indicators.

Develop a framework that is able to consider how gender issues across all the SDGs can be implemented to facilitate the achievement of SD at global level

In phase 3, data was first collected by documenting targets related to gender for each SDG (data from phase 1). Then, a set of case studies reflecting how gender issues have been successfully infused into the achievement of each SDG was used (data from phase 2). The combined results of both phases 1 and 2 formed the basis for the framework developed in phase 3, analysing the impact of gender issues on all the SDGs. The impact indicator showed the percentage of particular goal targets impacted by gender inequality. It was calculated for each SDG by using the following equation:

where IT represents the Impacted targets quantity, TQ , the total targets quantity of each goal and PI , the percentage impact.

The percentage values fall under one of the four categories:

Low impact: 0%—39.9%

Average impact: 40%—60%

Highly impacted: 60.1%—99.9%

Extremely impacted:100%

The combined results from the three phases are presented and discussed in the next section.

4 Results and discussion

This section reports on the literature search information and data collected. The evidence collected using the case studies allowed the development of a proposed framework that can be helpful to practitioners in promoting a cross-cutting approach to gender issues in the context of all other SDGs.

4.1 Gender equality and the SDGs

In the attempt to identify the gender issues predominant trends, the findings based on reviewing specialised literature have shown that contributions to gender equality and SDGs are mostly theoretical, focusing on trade-offs and synergies, followed by studies concerned with policy implications, and possible methodological and empirical approaches about the interactions of all the SDGs, while suggesting a wide number of indicators that are currently used or that need further refinement for properly measuring progress in achieving the SDGs. These frameworks of analyses assume particular relevance in developing countries, but also developed ones alike, as inequalities are still deeply rooted, irrespective of the SD degree.

Studies have referred to interactions among the 17 goals, while neglecting the specifics of interactions with SDG5 on gender equity studies (Abualtaher et al., 2021 ; Miola et al., 2019 ), the focus of this study. Moreover, most studies propose models and approaches often contradictory, thus delivering inconsistent outcomes regarding costs and effectiveness of policies or measures and actions for achieving the SDGs. Most of the studies are in an increasing trend of building up on the findings of other studies, while failing the novelty dimension (Magendane & Kapazoglou, 2021 ).

Faced with the vast volume of recent research and studies in approaching the dimension of the interaction between the SDGs, and by assessing the outcomes of relevant studies at this regard, it may be stated that most studies seek to bring improvements for three main processes: policy development, impact assessment, and how synergies are achieved or not (Alcamoet al., 2020 ; Biggeri et al., 2019 ; Scharlemann et al., 2020 ), while this study aims to cover both the theoretical and practical issues related to gender equity, as included in the 17 SDGs. Based on the analysed literature review, it is important to be careful about forming a generalised perspective by including general insights and gained knowledge about one SDG in relation to all other SDGs, because the context from the economic, social and environmental perspective is of paramount relevance (Nilsson et al., 2018 ). Integrated perspectives provide the best opportunities in assessing the relations and interactions with all other SDGs, while allowing for the identification of the main weaknesses, in particular regarding SDG5.

By affirming the overarching relevance of gender equality and its developments in the short time framework between 2015 and 2021 (Dugarova, 2018 ; Klasen, 2018 ; Odera & Mulusa, 2020 ), it was then possible to develop a general theoretic-empirical framework for underpinning the relevance of a gender-responsive approach to implementing the 2030 Agenda (Hirsu et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ).

The above information does reveal the need to focus on specific practical implementation at local level, though benchmarking. The case studies presented below aim to illustrate successful implementations.

4.2 Case Studies

Gender issues extend beyond SDG5 and needs to be addressed within all the other SDGs. The international case studies included in this section have thus been chosen as illustrative examples of gender equality, considered in relation to each SDG, other than SDG5. Further detail on how a focus on gender has brought a positive benefit in relation to each SDG, as the full list of case studies, is given in Online resource 1.

Non-governmental and governmental organisations are working together to help rural women improve the quality of their life by expanding access to sexual and reproductive health care in Tanzania (Engender Health, 2021 ). The Trans-Boundary Rivers of South Asia programme in Nepal promotes and supports women’s leadership in water governance to increase their social accountability (Crawford, 2020 ). A case study from China demonstrates that the implementation of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) may significantly benefit from the integration of gender analysis into the design of SCP policies, strengthening women’s participation in natural resource management and decision-making processes (Fan & Jaffre, 2020 ). In the frame of the educational programme Soochnapreneur (Information-Preneur) in India, rural women received necessary information and technology training to become change agents and assist in disseminating information regarding government schemes and benefits in communities. Participation in the programme not only develops their entrepreneurial abilities as Digital Information entrepreneurs but also allows them to charge a nominal amount for their services to sustain their livelihood (Soochnapreneur, 2021 ). In South Africa, the skills-driven project that supports the creation of rural, women-only entrepreneur craft groups contributes towards improving quality of life and developing a more sustainable community (Pretorius & Nicolau, 2020 ). The Samoa’s Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development and the Disaster Management Office are working towards increasing women’s engagement and participation in climate change and Disaster risk reduction community discussions and development projects (Aipira et al., 2017 ). The ‘Blue Economy Aquaculture Challenge’ initiative supports projects for transforming sustainable aquaculture practises with solutions linked to gender equality, among others (Australian Government, 2018 ).

The addressed case studies illustrate useful approaches for tackling a variety of local problems in a cross-cutting way, as a support for governments as they focus on gender equality issues, showing that there is room for further similar initiatives in different geographical and socio-economic contexts. The case studies presented clearly indicate that various initiatives related to gender across the globe have been successfully addressed at local levels, and these initiatives have directly and indirectly affected the achievement of the particular SDG under analysis, thus affirming the need to infuse gender issues within all the targets of the 17 SDGs to ensure more productive outcomes and achievements in the drive to SD. It has been shown that governmental and non-governmental organisations cooperate in improving the overall quality of life for women, either in rural or urban areas and in regards to health, education and access to leadership/management positions. Still, it was found that much is still to be done, as shown found below, analysing the interaction with all of the SDGs.

4.3 The proposed framework for assessing gender equality impact across the SDGs

Achieving gender equality is a matter of human rights and is crucial to progress across all the goals and targets (Dhar, 2018 ), as highlighted before. Gender inequalities intersect other inequalities, power imbalance and discriminatory practices, and as such, they unequivocal serve as routes to addressing the causes preventing SD globally (Hepp et al., 2019 ). We have pointed out that while being a goal in its own right, gender equality cuts across all other SDGs and is reflected in 86 targets for the SDGs.

Through the use of the data collected by documenting targets related to gender for each SDG (see the SDG Matrix–Online resource 2) and the identification of fruitful case studies reflecting how gender issues have been successfully infused into the achievement of each SDG, both based on a detailed analysis and synthesis of the literature, the authors have used the lessons learnt to develop a framework aimed at analysing the impact of gender issues on all the SDGs, illustrated in Fig.  3 . This framework allows to establish which SDGs need the most attention for successful SD implementation and can serve as a guide for all practitioners in accommodating and promoting a cross-cutting approach of contemplating gender issues within the target of all the SDGs.

Proposed framework for considering gender impact across all the SDGs

According to the results of calculations, the following SDGs are extremely or highly impacted by gender inequality and should be prioritised: SDG1 (No Poverty), SDG4 (Quality Education), SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG14 (Life below Water) and SDG16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) (Fig.  4 ). If government and non-governmental organisations strive to achieve SD, as proposed by the 2030 Agenda, they would have to ensure that gender equality is prioritised in their endeavours, particularly in the context of the six aforementioned SDGs (1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16).

Percentage of gender inequality impact on SDG goals, according to the authors’ proposed methodology

A fundamental part of achieving SD is the reduction of poverty, and this needs greater priority in policy decisions. The literature makes it clear that high poverty is interlinked with high gender disparities (Warchold et al., 2021 ), particularly in developing countries (Workneh, 2020 ). More women are affected by poverty due to their larger share of unpaid work , limited access to resources and social protection, and lack of control over spending decisions when compared to men (UN, 2015 ). Countries that reflect statistics of more women in remunerated positions have lower poverty rates (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2018 ), though this might not be the case when the income size is below the poverty line (European Institute for Gender Equality, 2016 ). The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have deepen gender poverty gaps, affecting women more strongly than men (Leal Filho et al., 2022b , 2022c ). According to the report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, 232 million women will be living in extreme poverty in 2030, compared to 221 million men (Azcona et al., 2020 ).

Gender gaps in education negatively affect economic growth (Klasen & Lamanna, 2009 ). Globally, approximately 17% of women, compared to 10% of men, are illiterate. In developing countries, this gap is much larger. As example, only 26% of women are literate, compared to 46% of men in Mali, 27%, compared to 60% in South Sudan, and 70%, compared to 45% in Afghanistan (World Bank, 2020 a, b ). Every additional year of primary school increases the future earnings of girls, decreasing their vulnerability to violence and motivating them to marry later (UN Women, 2012 ). Addressing gender imbalance in land ownership rights and access to natural, social and economic resources is essential for responsible consumption and production (Franco et al., 2018 ). Women demonstrate a higher tendency towards product reuse, waste reduction, and purchase of organic and eco-labelled products (Bulut et al., 2017 ; OECD, 2018 ). The promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for SD and access to justice for all are impossible without targeting gender inequalities. In 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recorded more than 82 million people fleeing war, violation of human rights, persecution or conflict, of which 48% are women and girls (UNHCR, 2021 ). The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have intensified domestic violence (Azcona et al., 2020 ; UN Women, 2020b ; Akel et al., 2021 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ). The preliminary data indicate a 25%—100% increase in reported cases globally (UN Women, 2020c ), one of the consequences of the inability of institutions to provide equal gender access to justice and essential services, and of gender representation imbalance in global, regional or national governance (UN Women, 2018 ). Particularly in developing countries, the achievement of the social inclusion of vulnerable groups such as women can be ensured by local government policies, especially related to well-being gender budgeting (Gunluk-Senesen, 2021 ). More equal gender participation is one of the key factors to sustainable peace.

5 Conclusions

A recent major challenge impairing the proper achievement of gender equality is the COVID-19 pandemic, which is causing an expansion of inequalities in topics related to education, employment and well-being, healthcare, consumption and production, or climate change, being imperative that all stakeholders involved in SD thus prioritise and infuse gender equality in all their endeavours, while policy-makers need to critically reflect on whether their strategies for particular individual goals would be enhanced by a broader consideration of gender equality issues. While most of the previous studies investigated the potential interactions of gender equality with other SDGs (Barbier & Burgess, 2019 ; Dawes, 2022 ; Pham-Truffert et al., 2020 ; Tremblay et al., 2020 ; van Zanten & van Tulder, 2021 ; Warchold et al., 2021 ), this study contributes to a better understanding of gender equality as a cross-cutting issue among all the SDGs, underscoring the need to prioritise gender issues at all scopes of SD.

This study aimed to assess and define the relations and interactions regarding gender inequality, based on specific literature related to main gender inequality concerns, access to education, employment and implicitly to equal pay, along with all other related issues, from legal aspects to metrics of violence. An extensive body of literature was explored in this study, also documenting 16 relevant international case studies in 13 countries to emphasise the significance of positive interventions in terms of gender equality, considered as a cross-cutting issue among all the other SDGs, as reflected in 86 targets. As a result, the study proposes an innovative qualitative assessment framework, according to which targets can be impacted negatively by gender inequality, an important factor that can impair the achievement of a particular SDG. Among the most-impacted SDGs that should more attentively consider the promotion of gender equality as an important condition for their achievement are SDGs 1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16, being possible to notice a strong diversity of approaches involved, covering issues of concern that are equally of future interest. Understanding the strong interconnectedness of the SDGs in terms of addressing the issues related to gender equality needs to become a trend. If widely spread, this trend may serve as an accelerator for the achievement of global SD, through the 17 SDGs, and can offer further guidance to policy-makers for prioritising the achievements of the targets, by empowering women worldwide. The literature review outlines that the progress in achieving gender equality continues to be slow, as many gaps still exist between men and women in health, education, politics, and across all forms of economic participation. However, as demonstrated by the successful case studies implemented worldwide, there is a growing interest among different stakeholders to develop collaborative initiatives that give particular attention to promoting gender equality, and the trend is likely to increase in the future. However, while the presented case studies illustrate positive interventions in terms of SDG5 contribution to SD, they are clearly still insufficient.

One all-encompassing finding is that in spite of a wide range of studies and academic papers related to SDGs and SD, there continues to be divisiveness in assessing the challenges and opportunities of the 2030 Agenda, associated with the need for developing sound frameworks for drafting and assessing ex-ante policies, measures and actions for ensuring the integrated interaction among the 17 SDGs, by considering necessary trade-offs and integrating other environmental, social and economic policy objectives. All these, while not explicitly mentioned in this study, have been implicitly considered, along with policy paradigms that consider the lifestyle, technological and even healthcare/educational changes. The 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda imply by their formulation a principle of indivisibility, as SDGs address the shared concerns of all humanity. In fact, it is precisely this governing principle which is the foundation for the approach used in this study, guided by the interest in analysing how SDG5 can be assessed and further implemented when associated to the other 16 SDGs, substantiated by the fact that the 2030 Agenda has an implied target-integrated approach regarding the SDGs. Investigating SDG5 relationship with the other 16 SDGs proved to be challenging and promising, as it provided for new insights about the relationships and interactions between all the SDGs. Thus, a key implication of this study is that it illustrates the fact that more attention should be given to mainstreaming the gender equality theme within all development initiatives of every country. Also, considerations to gender issues should be included in the design of targeted policies and programmes, data collection on indicators, and also in the defining of priorities in every region.The study has limitations. The first one is the fact that, being a qualitative study, it was not possible to cover all the works published in the field. Also, the selection of the case studies was not exhaustive or intended to cover all geographical regions, and it should be only regarded as an illustration of gender equality as a cross-cutting issue. Furthermore, the sample of 13 countries does not cater for a worldwide representation. However, despite these limitations, this study represents a significant knowledge addition to the existing literature on the connections between SDG5 and overall efforts to implement global SD and successfully advancing the SDGs.

Based on the evidence collected, the following recommendations may help in efforts aimed at placing matters related to gender more centrally in the delivery of the SDGs:

Inclusion of gender issues as a cross-cutting topic in the implementation of the SDGs.

A greater emphasis on gender equality in SDGs-related projects across all themes.

An increased attention should be paid to the opinion, views and voices of women on SDGs-associated policies, a procedure often overlooked.

More attention should be given to poverty alleviation, a trend often unnoticed in gender discussions.

A more detailed and continued review of novel case studies across the globe should be undertaken to establish how existing good practices on mainstreaming gender are integrated into the targets of all the SDGs, and then to infuse these local initiatives into policy and development initiatives.

Finally, there is a perceived need to build more capacity among professionals involved in the implementation of the SDGs, so as to better sensitise them about the need to always consider gender issues, raising global awareness about gender-related matters.

Data availability

The manuscript has data included as electronic supplementary material.

Abbreviations

Convention on biological diversity

Christian blind mission

Central and Eastern Europe and the commonwealth of independent states

Civil registration centre for development

Courant research centre–poverty, equity and growth

Disability inclusive and accessible urban development

Division for public administration and development management, department of economic and social affairs

Economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

European environment agency

Economic and social commission for Asia and the Pacific

Education for sustainable development

European union

Food and agriculture organisation

Individual deprivation measure

International institute for sustainable development

International labour organisation

International telecommunication union

Joint research centre

Dutch research council

Organisation for economic co-operation and development

Open society justice initiative

Sustainable consumption and production

Sustainable development

Sustainable development goals

Swedish international development co-operation agency

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Trans-boundary rivers of south Asia

United nations

United Nations convention on the law of the sea

United Nations conference on trade and development

United Nations development programme

United Nations economic commission for Africa

United Nations economic commission for Europe

United Nations environment programme finance initiative

United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation

United Nations framework convention for climate change

United Nations high commissioner for refugees

United Nations international children's emergency fund

United Nations industrial development organisation

United Nations office on drugs and crime

United Nations sustainable development group

United Nations university–operating unit on policy-driven electronic governance

World meteorological organisation

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Leal Filho, W., Kovaleva, M., Tsani, S. et al. Promoting gender equality across the sustainable development goals. Environ Dev Sustain 25 , 14177–14198 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02656-1

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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

Gender equality in research: papers and projects by Highly Cited Researchers

Strategic Alliances and Engagement Manager

Empowering women and girls is a critical target of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this installment of our blog series about Highly Cited Researchers contributing to the UN SDGs, we focus on SDG 5: Gender Equality. We discuss the research that Highly Cited Researchers have published and the trends we’re seeing emerge.

Gender equality is a fundamental human right and yet women have just three quarters of the legal rights of men today. While the speed of progress differs across regions, laws, policies, budgets and institutions must all be strengthened on an international scale to grant women equal rights as men.

The socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and high-profile policy changes like the overturning of Roe v. Wade have shown how much work needs to be done. The COVID-19 pandemic caused many women to leave the workforce and amplified challenges related to child and elder care, with women shouldering much of the burden. This can disproportionately affect girls’ educational prospects and, as is often the case in stressful environments and during times of crisis, puts women at increased risk of domestic violence .

While some high-profile issues related to women’s rights and safety make the news cycle, gender inequalities are firmly entrenched in every society, impacting the daily lives of women and girls in ways that are rarely reported on. As Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, once said , “from the economy to climate change to criminal justice reform to national security, all issues are women’s issues.”

Women’s issues are interconnected with all the SDGs, as we touched on in our recent post in this series, which explored the research centered around SDG 16: Peaceful, just and strong institutions . In that post we found that sexual, domestic and intimate partner abuse and violence against women are the most published topics related to SDG 16.

In this post, we look at Highly Cited Researchers who focus specifically on SDG 5 and issues of equality and gender .

What is SDG 5: Gender equality?

SDG 5: Gender Equality is intended to address the serious inequalities and threats faced by women around the globe. The targets related to this goal include:

• End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.
• 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.
• Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life.

There has been an increase in articles and reviews related to this SDG since the establishment of the SDGs in 2015. This trend graph from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics ™, using Web of Science Core Collection ™ data, shows growth from 86,000 papers in 2015 to 152,000 in 2021. That’s a 77% increase in six years.

Growth in academic papers related to SDG 5: Gender Equality

Source: Incites Benchmarking & Analytics. Dataset: articles and reviews related to SDG 5: Gender Equality published between 2015-2021.

The top ten countries publishing on SDG 5: Gender Equality during this period are shown below, with the U.S. producing roughly one third of all papers.

Countries producing the most papers related to SDG 5: Gender Equality

We explore these angles from research published between 2010 and 2020 in more detail, below.

Inequalities in the treatment of women during childbirth

Özge Tunçalp , a Highly Cited Researcher from the World Health Organization (WHO), wrote a systematic review in 2015 about the mistreatment of women globally during childbirth. This paper, coauthored with Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, University of Sao Paulo and PSI (a global nonprofit working in healthcare), has been cited more than 590 times to date in the Web of Science Core Collection. Tunçalp’s paper provides further information about the type and degree of mistreatment in childbirth, which supports the development of measurement tools, programs and interventions in this area.

Tunçalp authored another open access paper on this topic in 2019 , which followed women in four low-income and middle-income countries to study their experiences during childbirth. Unfortunately, more than one third of the women in the study experienced mistreatment during childbirth, a critical time in their lives, with younger and less educated women found to be most at risk. Beyond showing that mistreatment during childbirth exists, this study demonstrates the inequalities in how some women are treated in comparison to others, which informs the interventions needed.

“Our research showed that mistreatment during childbirth occurs across low-, middle- and high-income countries and good quality of care needs to be respectful as well as safe, no matter where you are in the world.” Dr Özge Tunçalp, World Health Organization

According to Dr. Tunçalp, “Women and families have a right to positive pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal experiences, supported by empowered health workers, majority of whom are women. Improving the experience of care throughout pregnancy and childbirth is essential to help increase the trust in facility-based care – as well as ensuring access to quality postnatal care following birth. Our research showed that mistreatment during childbirth occurs across low-, middle- and high-income countries and good quality of care needs to be respectful as well as safe, no matter where you are in the world. It was critical to ensure that these findings were translated into WHO global recommendations to inform country policy and programmes .”

Autism spectrum disorder and the gender bias in diagnosis

William Mandy, a Highly Cited Researcher in Psychiatry and Psychology, looks at gender differences related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Mandy, from University College London, and his co-authors found that the male-to-female ratio of children with ASD is closer to 3:1, not the often assumed 4:1 . With an apparent gender bias in diagnosis, girls who meet the criteria for ASD are at risk of being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. This can cause confusion and challenges with social interactions growing up, and can put women and girls at greater risk of traumatic experiences. Mandy et al’s paper has been cited more than 830 times to date.

“The reason for this diagnostic bias is that sex and gender influence how autism presents, such that the presentations of autistic girls and women often do not fit well with current conceptualisations of the condition, which were largely based on mainly male samples.” Dr William Mandy, University College London

When asked about the relevance of his research to the clinical community, Dr. Mandy said: “Clinicians have long held the suspicion that there is a diagnostic bias against autistic girls and women – that they are more likely to fly under the diagnostic radar. Our work (Loomes et al., 2017) has helped to provide systematic, empirical evidence that this bias does indeed exist, and to quantify its impact, in terms of how many autistic girls go undiagnosed.

The reason for this diagnostic bias is that sex and gender influence how autism presents, such that the presentations of autistic girls and women often do not fit well with current conceptualisations of the condition, which were largely based on mainly male samples. Therefore, to address the gender bias in autism diagnosis, we need an evidence-based understanding of the characteristics of autistic girls and women. Our study (Bargiela et al, 2016), in which we interviewed late-diagnosed autistic women about their lives, helps do this, revealing distinctive features of autistic women and of their experiences. This knowledge is shaping research and clinical practice.”

Going forward

The above papers are just a few examples of Highly Cited Researchers contributing to SDG 5-Gender Equality. Others focus on depression, Alzheimer’s Disease, cardiovascular disease and ovarian cancer. The fact that biomedical research featured so prominently in these results should not be a surprise. Gender bias has been identified in many areas of healthcare, including patient diagnosis , discrimination against health care workers , and low rates of women in clinical studies to name a few.

The Highly Cited Researchers working on gender equality within their respective fields, which also include social sciences, economics and other areas in addition to medicine, are helping to address the complex issues related to SDG 5. And what’s worthy of note is that many of the researchers mentioned here were named as Highly Cited Researchers in the cross-field category, which identifies researchers who have contributed to Highly Cited Papers across several different fields. This shows that a multifaceted and integrated approach to gender equality research may be playing a significant role in addressing this global issue.

Stay up to date

We discussed the SDG Publishers Compact in the first post in our series and then celebrated the Highly Cited Researchers in SDG 1: No Poverty and SDG 2: Zero Hunger. We then covered SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 4: Quality Education , and then jumped ahead to cover SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions . Alongside this, we also looked at Ukrainian research contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, here , and published an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™Insights paper called, Climate change collaboration: Why we need an international approach to research .

In our next post, we will identify Highly Cited Researchers who are working to address SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation.

At Clarivate, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, and this includes support of human rights, diversity and inclusion, and social justice. Read more about our commitment to driving sustainability worldwide, and see highlights from our 2021 Clarivate Sustainability Report .

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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Men and women differ in their perception of gender bias in research institutions

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

* E-mail: [email protected] (JGG); [email protected] (MJS)

Affiliations Wom = n Equity & Research Committee, Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom (SRUK/CERU), International House, 12 Constance Street, London, United Kingdom, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Wom = n Equity & Research Committee, Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom (SRUK/CERU), International House, 12 Constance Street, London, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Wom = n Equity & Research Committee, Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom (SRUK/CERU), International House, 12 Constance Street, London, United Kingdom, Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

• Judit García-González, 
• Patricia Forcén, 
• Maria Jimenez-Sanchez

• Published: December 5, 2019
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763
• Reader Comments

There is extensive evidence of gender inequality in research leading to insufficient representation of women in leadership positions. Numbers revealing a gender gap in research are periodically reported by national and international institutions but data on perceptions of gender equality within the research community are scarce. In the present study, a questionnaire based on the British Athena Survey of Science, Engineering and Technology (ASSET 2016) was distributed among researchers working in Spain. Consistent with the original UK-based study, women in research perceived a greater degree of gender inequality than men. This difference was consistent from junior to senior positions, within public and private universities as well as research centres, and across all research disciplines. When responses were compared with the existing UK-based questionnaire, researchers in Spain felt that women and men are treated more equally in the workplace, yet they perceived their home departments to be less supportive regarding matters of gender equality. The results of this study provide clear evidence that men and women do not share the same perceptions of gender equality in science and that their differing perceptions are relatively consistent across two major European countries. The fact that men occupy the majority of senior positions while not perceiving the same inequality as women do, may be critical when it comes to ensuring the fair ascent of women to senior positions in an academic system. These data encourage the implementation of measures to ensure that both men and women are aware of gender biases in research.

Citation: García-González J, Forcén P, Jimenez-Sanchez M (2019) Men and women differ in their perception of gender bias in research institutions. PLoS ONE 14(12): e0225763. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763

Editor: Luís A. Nunes Amaral, Northwestern University, UNITED STATES

Received: April 28, 2019; Accepted: November 12, 2019; Published: December 5, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 García-González 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 paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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

Introduction

Worldwide, women represent 53% of bachelor’s and master’s graduates. Parity drops at the PhD level (43% women vs 57% men) and even more at postgraduate level, where only 28% of research positions are occupied by women [ 1 ]. This gender gap is more noticeable at the senior level, with a lower representation of women in leadership positions and consequently in decision- and policy-making. She Figures 2015, a report that investigates gender equality in research and innovation in Europe [ 2 ], showed that only 21% of grade A, top-level researchers were women and, strikingly, numbers have not improved much from the 20% observed in 2010. In the Spanish academic system, the representation of women is nearly identical to that of the rest of the EU (40.8% vs 41.0%), and women occupy 21.0% of senior positions in Spain vs 20.9% in the EU [ 2 , 3 ].

Gender perceptions may influence women’s ascent to senior positions [ 4 ]. Women are perceived as worse scientific leaders [ 5 , 6 ] and are stereotyped as not possessing the innate talent that is required in some fields [ 7 ]. These and other gender stereotypes may explain why women receive similar levels of research funding when they are judged on the quality of their research but less funding when judged on the excellence of the researcher [ 8 ], are less frequently invited to conferences [ 9 , 10 ], are less likely to be selected for scientific awards [ 11 , 12 ], are less represented on editorial boards [ 13 ], their work is less likely to be cited [ 14 ], they have less chances of being invited to participate in peer review [ 14 , 15 ], and they have a more restricted access to influential networks [ 16 ]. In 2015, Handley et al reported that men do not recognise the presence of gender bias in research to the same extent as women: when men and women were asked to read an abstract from a study reporting gender bias in research, men tended to evaluate this study less favourable, suggesting reluctance of men to acknowledge gender bias. The gender difference was more prominent among academics working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) [ 17 ]. Moreover, many women’s choices of undergraduate discipline are dependent on the potential discrimination that is anticipated in each field [ 18 ]. A lack of understanding of these issues, especially at the senior level, will likely result in fewer measures put in place to tackle them. It is therefore necessary to understand how gender biases are perceived by researchers in their workplace, and, importantly, whether gender, seniority, research area and type of institution influence these perceptions. While reports are published periodically to evaluate the current gender situation in science and its evolution over the years [ 1 – 3 , 19 ], much less is known about researchers’ perceptions of gender equality.

The Athena Survey of Science, Engineering and Technology (ASSET) 2016 [ 20 ] was commissioned by The Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Biology and The Academy of Medical Sciences and managed by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) [ 21 ] to assess experiences, expectations and perceptions in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) in academia in the United Kingdom (UK). The survey, which expanded from previous iterations of the survey, had 4,869 respondents and covered six aspects of British academics’ working life: perception of gender equality, recruitment, job and career, caring responsibilities, training and leadership, and promotion and development. On average, men felt that the department where they worked was more committed to gender equality than women did. Also, although differences were relatively small, women perceived that men had an advantage regarding the allocation of tasks and resources related to career development, while men’s perceptions on this topic were more neutral.

In Spain, while public organisations such as the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the Women and Science Unit of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities publish periodic reports of statistics regarding women in research [ 3 , 19 , 22 ], to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a formal assessment of perceptions on gender equality. Moreover, policies to encourage and recognise commitment to advancing the careers of women have not yet being implemented systematically, in contrast to the UK, where charters such as Athena SWAN (Scientific Women's Academic Network) [ 23 ] have been active for more than ten years. The present study seeks to understand gender perceptions and experiences among researchers in Spanish academic institutions, and to compare these with the perceptions of researchers working in their British counterparts. A questionnaire with items adapted from the ASSET 2016 [ 20 ] ( S1 Table ) was distributed among researchers working in both public and private universities and public research institutes in Spain [ 24 ]. The effects of respondents’ gender, seniority, type of institution and research area on their perceptions of gender equality were systematically assessed, and the results of this survey were then compared with those of the ASSET 2016. Data from our survey show that men and women differ in the perceptions of gender equality and that findings are consistent across research areas, type of institutions and researchers’ positions. Our findings largely agree with those obtained from respondents in the UK, while highlighting differences in how researchers in Spain perceive less institutional support for gender-related issues.

Participants

A total of 2,619 individuals were contacted via email through their institutions or through the Society of Spanish Researchers in the UK (SRUK/CERU). Of these, we analysed the data provided by 2,255 respondents that were currently working in Spain and discarded the data from individuals that did not reach the end of the survey. To ensure that our sampling method did not introduce a non-response bias in our analyses, we compared responses from those that did not complete the survey with those that completed it and found no differences between them ( S2 Table for women and S3 Table for men). 10 individuals younger than 21 were discounted. While this survey included the opportunity for respondents to indicate that they would prefer not to disclose their gender (n = 11), the data presented are limited to those respondents who identified themselves as either men or women. The final sample for analysis contained 1,295 adults from 63 institutions (see S4 Table for a complete list of the institutions represented in the survey), of which 36% (n = 469) were men and 64% (n = 826) were women. For more details of the sample used in the study, see Table 1 and S1 Appendix .

Research ethics

The data in this study were analyzed anonymously. Data were collected through the website surveymonkey.com . At the beginning of the survey, all participants were informed about the purpose of the questionnaire and the anonymisation of their data. Responses were obtained between 5 February 2018 and 4 May 2018. Participants were given the option of not responding at each question. We only included data from participants older than 21 years old.

The present report is part of a wider survey to explore the perceptions and experiences of gender equality of academics working in STEMM, as well as in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL) in Spain. Items included in the original survey were adapted from the Athena Survey of Science, Engineering and Technology (ASSET), managed by the Equality Challenge Unit [ 20 ]. The survey was circulated in English to ensure that the questions had the same meaning in both countries. In this study, only the responses relevant to the perception of gender biases were analysed. A description of the survey questions that were adapted from the ASSET survey and analysed in this study, their variable names and scales used is provided in S1 Table .

The measurement of gender equality in research is multidimensional. In this case, two dimensions of gender equality were explored: perceptions of gender equality in departments where respondents work and perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources . Perceptions of gender equality in departments were assessed using six statements such as “My department is committed to promoting gender equality” or “My department is (or would be) responsive to concerns about gender equality”. Each statement was rated using a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = “Strongly disagree” to 7 =“Strongly agree”. Perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources were assessed using 15 items, such as “Invitations to conferences”, “Appointments to editorships” or “Allocation of teaching”. Each item was evaluated using a 7-point scale ranging from 1 = “Much easier for a woman” to 7 = “Much easier for a man” ( S1 Table ).

We performed Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to confirm that the two previously-described dimensions of gender equality are present in the Spanish research system. PCA calculates the correlating variation among a set of observed variables (items) to identify underlying latent variables (dimensions/constructs) by obtaining the covariance matrix of the variables, and then its eigenvectors and the corresponding eigenvalues. Cronbach’s alpha [ 25 ] was used to examine the internal validity of the items for each component. To assess whether respondents’ gender had a significant effect on their perceptions of gender equality, independent samples t-tests were performed for each survey question and for the sum of all items within each dimension. Effect sizes were assessed using Cohen's d [ 26 ], where 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8 indicated a small, medium and large effect, respectively. To evaluate the effects of research area, position, type of institution, as well as the interaction between those and the respondents’ gender, two-way ANOVA tests were used (three ANOVA tests were run, one for each factor). Mean, standard deviation and sample sizes for male and female respondents in the UK were obtained from ASSET 2016 and t-tests were carried out separately to compare each question and gender group.

To account for multiple testing when exploring group differences between men and women, a Bonferroni correction was applied based on 21 independent t-tests (one for each question for the Spain based questionnaire) and significance was declared at a threshold of 0.002. For the comparison across countries, a Bonferroni correction was applied based on 38 independent t-tests (19 questions available in both countries stratified by male and female respondents). In this case significance was declared at a threshold of 0.001. Analyses were undertaken using Minitab v.17 and v.18 and R version 3.4.3.

To assess how researchers working in Spain perceive gender equality, a survey adapted from the ASSET 2016 in the UK, was distributed among researchers working in Spanish universities and research centres. A total of 1,295 complete responses were collected from 63 institutions, of which 36% (n = 469) were men and 64% (n = 826) were women. Respondents’ ages ranged between 21 and 66 or over and represented all stages of the research and academic ladder ( Table 1 ). The survey was composed of two categories: perceptions of gender equality in departments and perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources . We first confirmed the existence of two defined categories among the questions by performing a principal component analysis (PCA) and their internal reliability was assessed by Cronbach’s alpha. With Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.7 to 0.9, we confirmed that the items within each component were closely related. These results are in line with the ASSET 2016 survey structure, ensuring a reliable comparison between both countries (see S2 Appendix in supporting information and S1 Fig for details on the psychometric analyses).

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We then assessed the impact that gender, position, research area and type of institution may have on perceptions of gender equality in the Spanish academic system. T-tests and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used to assess the effect of these factors as well as the interaction between them and the respondents’ gender. In addition, responses were compared with those from the ASSET 2016 to investigate potential differences in perceptions across Spain and the UK.

Gender differences in perceptions of gender equality in departments

In the first part of the survey, a total of six items were used to evaluate how participants perceived gender equality in their departments in terms of (1) leadership (assessing how well women and men perceive women as leaders ( Fig 1A )), (2) equality treatment (assessing whether men and women are treated equally in their departments ( Fig 1B )), and (3) promotion of gender equality (investigating whether participants perceived that their departments have measures in place to promote gender equality ( Fig 1C )). Perceptions of gender equality in the respondents’ department was overall lower for women, with average score across the six items close to neutral ( M = 4.44, SD = 1.93) compared to men, who perceived their departments are somewhat committed to gender equality ( M = 5.18, SD = 2.13) ( p <0.002, S6 Table ). The distribution of responses for this category also showed that, despite the high variability in responses within each gender, most of men responses were 6 = ‘Agree’ and 7 = ‘Strongly agree’ (that there is gender equality in their departments), whereas women responses were more variable and a larger percentage of them failed to perceive gender equality (1 = ‘Strongly disagree’, 2 = ‘Disagree’ and 3 = ‘Somehow disagree’) ( Fig 1 ).

Graph shows the distribution of responses by gender where responses ranged from 1 = “Strongly disagree” to 7 = “Strongly agree”. The neutral value is 4 = “Neither agree nor disagree”. Sample sizes ranged from 1,287 to 1,293 respondents (n = 465 to 468 men and n = 821 to 826 women). Sample sizes for each question are detailed in S6 Table .

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The largest gender differences were observed when participants were asked about leadership perception ( Fig 1A ). Although both women and men mostly agreed with the statement ‘Women are perceived as good leaders by women’, there was a slight shift in the distribution of responses towards a more negative perception by women ( M = 5.05, SD = 2.26) than men ( M = 5.40, SD = 1.76). The difference between women and men’s perception was more striking for the question “Women are perceived as good leaders by women ”, which showed that women felt that women’s leadership abilities are less recognised by men ( M = 4.03, SD = 1.88) ( p <0.002, S6 Table ).

When respondents were asked whether men and women receive equal treatment in their departments ( Fig 1B ), 87% of men agreed (strongly agree/agree/somehow agree). In contrast, women’s perceptions of equality were significantly lower and only a 69% agreed with that statement, while 25% of them strongly disagreed, disagreed or somehow disagreed with the equality of the treatment received. With an average of 6.05 ( SD = 1.41) for men versus 5.06 ( SD = 1.79) ( p <0.002, S6 Table ) for women, female researchers perceived less gender equality in the treatment provided by their departments.

To evaluate whether participants perceived that their departments have measures in place to promote gender equality, we used three items that included questions such as “I would know who to approach if I had concerns about gender equality” or “My department is responsive to concerns about gender equality” ( Fig 1C ). For both men and women, item means ranged between 3.90 ( SD = 2 . 15 ) and 5.07 ( SD = 1 . 90 ) (scores of 3, 4 and 5 correspond to “Somehow disagree”, “Neither agree nor disagree” and “Somehow agree”, respectively). For these three items, women perceived that their departments had significantly lower commitment to promote gender equality compared to men ( p <0.002, S6 Table ).

Overall, these results show that in the Spanish research system men have a more positive perception about their departments treatment and commitment to gender equality than women do. Importantly, we found that women felt they are not valued as good leaders by men.

Gender differences in perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources

To evaluate whether men and women perceive that the tasks and resources are equally allocated in their departments, 15 tasks and resources were assessed and stratified by: (1) allocation of markers of esteem ( Fig 2A ), (2) allocation of professional development resources ( Fig 2B ) and allocation of academic duties (3) ( Fig 2C ) ( S7 Table ).

Gender differences in perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources related to A) markers of esteem, B) professional development and C) additional professional duties. The item ‘Distribution of office/laboratory space or equipment’ refers to both A) markers of esteem and B) professional development. Graphs show distribution of responses by gender where responses ranged from 1 = “Much easier for a woman” to 7 = “Much easier for a man”. The neutral value is 4 = “Neither agree nor disagree”. See S4 Table for descriptive statistics and t-test results. Sample size ranged from n = 1,259 to 1,287 respondents (n = 455 to 467 men and n = 804 to 821 women). Sample sizes for each question are detailed in S7 Table .

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Compared to men, a larger percentage of women perceived that the recognition of intellectual contributions, invitations to conferences, distribution of office/laboratory space or equipment and appointments to editorships, all markers of esteem, are more easily allocated to men ( Fig 2A ), with mean scores between 4.01 ( SD = 2.07) and 4.88 ( SD = 1.43) ( S7 Table ). However, male respondents mostly rated the allocation of these resources as ‘the same for men and women’, with mean scores between 3.81 ( SD = 1 . 02) and 4.07 ( SD = 1 . 13 ) , Fig 2A and S7 Table).

Similarly, most of the men perceived that the allocation of resources related to professional development ( Fig 2B and S7 Table ) are allocated to men and women with similar ease ( M = 3.98, SD = 1.25). However, a larger proportion of female respondents felt that most of these resources are more easily allocated to men ( M = 4.75, SD = 1.46). Although these differences were subtle, they were statistically significant, with p<0.002 for all of the items individually and when considered together ( S7 Table ). The most noticeable differences were found when asked about promotion to senior posts or access to circles of influence (women: M = 5.29, SD = 1.57; men: M = 4.24, SD = 1.43; p<0.002, S7 Table ). Across all the items, the response distribution is markedly shifted between women and men. The percentage of women that think that it is slightly easier, easier or much easier for a man to get these resources ranged between 24 and 65%, in contrast to a smaller fraction of men with similar opinion, between 6 and 34%. For the different questions, between 50 and 84% of men perceived that professional development resources are distributed equally ( Fig 2 ).

The results above contrast with the findings in relation to the allocation of academic duties ( Fig 2C ). Both women and men perceived that pastoral care roles, or the support provided for the well-being of students and trainees, are allocated more easily to women and no significant differences between genders were observed for this category ( S7 Table ). They also agreed that the allocation of teaching is more equally distributed ( Fig 2C and S7 Table ). While there is a general perception that administrative tasks are more easily allocated to women, women perceived this more strongly (women: M = 3.25, SD = 1.42; men: M = 3.60; SD = 1.19. p <0.002, S7 Table ).

Altogether, gender differences were observed for the allocation of all the items referring to professional development and markers of esteem, where women perceived that these are more easily allocated to men while men did not perceive a biased distribution to the same extent. On the contrary, men and women perceived similarly that academic duties (teaching, pastoral care roles and administrative tasks), which are tasks not directly related to research performance, are distributed more easily to women.

Interaction of gender and research area in perceptions of gender equality

We next determined whether these gender differences may vary across research areas. Results from a two-way ANOVA for gender and research area suggested that overall women and men differences in gender perception were independent of the research discipline, as no gender-by-research area interaction was statistically significant ( S8 – S10 Tables). When we compared how researchers from different disciplines perceive gender equality in their workplace, we observed a significant main effect of research area only on the items “In general, men and women are treated equally in my department” and “Allocation of pastoral care roles”. Compared to other research areas, women working on law and earth sciences perceived the lowest gender equality regarding the treatment that men and women receive in their departments ( S2 Fig ). Researchers in the areas of maths and physical sciences are the ones perceiving that pastoral care roles are more easily allocated to women, with mean scores for both women and men of around 2 (i.e. “Easier for a woman”), while law had the most neutral perception, with mean scores above 3 (i.e. “Slightly easier for a woman”) ( S3 Fig ). It is worth noting that law and earth sciences are the research areas with the lowest responses and larger samples are needed to reach further conclusions.

Interaction of gender and position in perceptions of gender equality

To investigate the effect of seniority on perceptions of gender equality, we created four groups of positions according to their experience level ( Table 1 ): senior researcher, intermediate career researcher, early career researcher and research student. Gender and position were included as factors in a two-way ANOVA. Women’s estimates of gender equality were lower than those of men regardless of seniority, as the interaction between position and gender did not reach statistical significance for any item ( S11 – 13 Tables). Similar results were obtained when the interaction was done between age and gender ( S11 – 13 Tables). Only for the item “receiving positive feedback from management” the effect of gender differed by age ( S13 Table )

The only significant main effect of position was found on the items “If I had concerns about gender equality in my department, I would know who to approach” ( S4 Fig ), and “Appointment to editorships” and “Allocation of administrative tasks” ( S5 Fig ). For all three items, junior researchers perceived more gender biases in the allocation of these resources than researchers in more advanced positions.

Interaction of gender and type of centre in perceptions of gender equality

We observed that perceptions of gender equality in departments and in the allocation of tasks and resources were consistent across research centres, private and public universities. There were no significant main effects of type of centre, nor any interactions between gender and type of centre ( S14 – S16 Tables), suggesting that the previously-observed gender differences did not vary as a function of the institution where the respondents work.

Perceptions of gender equality in the Spanish and British academic systems

Overall, results from our survey and from the ASSET 2016 indicate that lower gender equality was perceived by women researchers working at both Spain and the UK. When all the items from the category perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources were considered together, we found no significant differences between countries ( S17 Table ). In contrast, when the six items for the category perceptions of gender equality in the department were jointly assessed, male and female researchers in the UK perceived greater gender equality than their counterparts in Spain. In both countries, men perceived higher equality in their departments than women, but country differences were consistent across genders with p <0.001 ( S17 Table ).

We then evaluated all the items individually and compared the responses from both surveys. Significant differences in perceptions between participants from Spain and the UK were observed for both genders ( p <0.001) in 13 items as per t-test ( S17 Table ). The largest differences were observed for items related to the support provided by the department and the allocation of teaching and pastoral tasks.

Relative to British respondents, researchers from Spanish institutions perceived greater equality in the treatment that men and women receive in their departments ( p <0.001, S17 Table ) ( Fig 3A ). Conversely, respondents from Spain perceived a lower level of support from their departments concerning issues of gender equality relative to their British counterparts, with p <0.001 for the three items ( Fig 3B–3D and S17 Table ).

Responses range from 1 = “Strongly disagree” to 7 = “Strongly agree”. The neutral value is 4 = “Neither agree nor disagree”. Spanish sample size ranged from 1,297 to 1,303 respondents (n = 467 to 468 men and n = 817 to 826 women). British sample size ranged from 4,804 to 4,862 respondents (n = from 2,466 to 2,491 men and n = from 2,338 to 2,372 women). Sample sizes for each question, country and gender are detailed in S17 Table .

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For perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources related to professional development, we observed that differences between Spain and the UK were driven almost exclusively by female respondents ( Fig 4 ). Women working as researchers in Spain perceived to a greater extent that it is easier for a man to be allocated tasks and resources related to professional development such as receiving positive feedback, receipt of mentoring for career decisions, promotion to senior posts, recruitment for academic posts, attention from senior management or access to informal circles of influence ( Fig 4 ). For all these items, significant differences between Spain and the UK were observed for female respondents, where the UK-based respondents perceived higher levels of equality compared to their Spanish counterparts ( p <0.001).

Responses range from 1 = “Much easier for women” to 7 = “Much easier for men”. Spanish sample size ranged from n = 1,279 to 1,287 (n = 46 to 470 men and n = 810 to 827 women). British sample size ranged from 4,814 to 4,824 respondents (n = from 2,467 to 2,477 men and n = from 2,342 to 2,349 women). Sample sizes for each question, country and gender are detailed in S17 Table .

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Women in Spain perceived greater inequality in the recognition of intellectual contributions than women in the UK did (p<0.001) ( Fig 5A ), while no significant differences were observed across countries for other markers of esteem such as invitation to conferences ( Fig 5B ). Conversely, male Spanish researchers perceived that editorships were more easily allocated to women than British researchers did (p<0.001) ( Fig 5C ) ( S17 Table ). Regarding the allocation of teaching, administrative tasks and pastoral roles, Spain-based researchers perceived that these roles are more easily allocated to women while in the UK these would be equally allocated to women and men ( p <0.001) ( Fig 5D–5F and S17 Table ). Interestingly, opposite directions in the gender effect were observed between countries for the allocation of administrative tasks and pastoral care roles ( Fig 5E–5F ).

Perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources in the Spanish and British academic systems: markers of esteem (A-C) and additional professional duties (D-F). Responses range from 1 = “Much easier for women” to 7 = “Much easier for men”. Spanish sample size ranged from n = 1,259 to 1,286 respondents (n = 455 to 466 men and n = 804 to 820 women). British sample size ranged from 4,722 to 4,813 respondents (n = from 2,433 to 2,476 men and n = from 2,289 to 2,346 women). Sample sizes for each question, country and gender are detailed in S17 Table .

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Despite reaching similar conclusions, both studies also highlight significant differences in gender perception among Spain and the UK. Some of these disparities may arise from inherent characteristics existing between research systems, however it may also underline areas where more work is required to promote gender equality.

The present study is the first one assessing perception of gender equality and comparing it across two major European countries. It provides clear and significant evidence that men and women have a different understanding of the gender gap in academia regardless of the country, research area, junior or senior position and type of academic institution. Our results show that women perceive greater gender inequality than men do and encourage the implementation of measures to increase awareness and address the problem.

Firstly, we evaluated perceptions of gender equality in a sample of 1,295 researchers working in academic positions in Spain. Estimates of gender equality were lower amongst women than men, with small to medium effect sizes, and the largest effect sizes being observed for items related to leadership. Previous research has revealed a systematic, unconscious gender bias that hinders women’s ascent to senior positions [ 8 – 16 , 27 , 28 ]. Despite the considerable body of objective scientific evidence, data from our survey shows that male researchers perceive equal gender treatment in their departments, equal access to the resources that are necessary for professional development or that can be viewed as markers of esteem and a stronger commitment from their departments to ensure gender equality. Data from our survey suggests that gender inequalities previously reported in the Spanish research system [ 3 , 19 , 22 ] are perceived by women researchers in their daily life in their departments but not by men to the same extent. To ensure a fair ascent of women in the academic ladder and fair allocation of resources, it seems necessary that those who occupy senior positions, who are mostly men, have a fair perception of gender inequality.

No significant interactions were observed between academic position or age and gender in our analyses, indicating that men and women of varying ages and seniority shared similar feelings regarding gender equality. Gender inequality has often been explained by a generational effect [ 29 , 30 ], and such an effect was widely cited by respondents when given the option to add comments in our survey (data not shown). These opinions are consistent with reports claiming that women in academia no longer face systematic discrimination [ 29 , 30 ]. However, contrary to this view, EU reports show only a modest increase in the number of women reaching senior positions in recent years [ 2 ], while in Spain, the proportion of women occupying senior positions did not change between 2012 and 2017 [ 3 , 19 ]. Results from this survey show that a generational change in perception, which is necessary to reach equality, is not happening in the new generations. Therefore, our data do not support a scenario where perception of gender bias will change over time without a need for intervention.

Our results agree to a large extent with those obtained in the ASSET 2016. Male researchers in both the UK and Spain perceived greater gender equality in their departments compared to female researchers. Interestingly, our analyses also highlighted some key differences in perceptions between the two countries, especially in perceptions related to gender equality in the workplace. While researchers in Spain felt that women and men are treated more equally in the workplace than researchers in the UK did, British departments were perceived as more committed, concerned and responsive to matters of gender equality. Overall perception on the allocation of tasks and resources was more similar between countries, but female respondents based in Spain perceived greater inequality regarding the allocation of resources related to professional development than the UK-based female respondents, while male respondents from both countries perceived no gender inequality. In the UK, the representation of women in the academic system (44.0%) is slightly higher than in Spain (41.0%) and in the EU average (40.8%) [ 2 ]. On the contrary, for the representation of women in senior positions, Spain does better, with 21.0% compared to only 17.5% in the UK, which is far from the EU average, 20.9% [ 2 ]. We could hypothesize that higher representation of women in senior positions results in greater perceptions of equality among researchers working in Spain. This contrasts with a more positive perception in terms of commitment and support at the workplace in the UK and the resources allocated to professional development.

The UK has been a pioneer in the implementation of awards to encourage and recognise commitment of the institutions to advance the careers of women, such as the Athena SWAN Awards, established by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) in 2005. The differences that researchers in Spain and in the UK perceive in terms of institutional support and allocation of resources could be explained by the existence of these measures. Recent evaluations of this program have acknowledged that its implementation has resulted in structural and cultural changes as well as in an effort to advance gender equality in research institutions in the UK [ 31 – 33 ].

The observation of large country differences in the allocation of pastoral care roles and administrative tasks is of special interest. The allocation of these duties has been associated with high workload and low reward [ 34 ]. Therefore, some of these differences may arise from the inherent characteristics of both research systems, where the recognition of pastoral roles may not be equally valued. Initiatives such as Athena Swan in the UK, that recognize and value these roles, have potentially led to a more equal distribution in this country.

In the last few years, multiple countries have adopted policies to increment the participation of women in science and to foster their career progression. The Horizon 2020 programme in Europe has incorporated gender in its research and innovation strategy by promoting gender balance in research teams and in decision-making panels and advisory groups, as well as providing funds for initiatives that support gender balance [ 35 ]. In the US, the National Science Foundation has invested over $270M to help higher education and STEM-related organizations to support ADVANCE (Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions) projects that aim to increase the representation of women in science [ 36 ]. In the UK, the Athena SWAN Charter recognises the commitment of academic organisations to gender equality [ 23 ], in particular where active policies and specific programmes have been adopted. Gender bias influence decision-making [ 4 , 37 ], therefore how gender biases are perceived by those designing, implementing and assessing these and future measures is a critical aspect to take into consideration [ 38 , 39 ]. At the individual level, perceptions are likely to be shaped during childhood, and working with children to eliminate stereotypes may help eliminating women and men differences in perception from early on [ 40 ]. Studies in the social psychology field have shown that alerting about the existence of a certain bias, may reduce that bias [ 41 – 43 ]. Therefore, increasing self-awareness in adulthood through gender bias and unconscious bias workshops could also help shaping perceptions [ 44 ]. It is important to note, that identifying the source of bias is critical for an effective intervention [ 42 ] and that effective changes require more than a one-off diversity training [ 45 ]. More importantly, institutions need to put in place evidence-based, data-driven measures to ensure that perceptions do not have a negative impact in women’s careers progression [ 46 ]. Only by applying policy changes and action plans at multiple levels, we will be able to address and remove institutional, organisational, structural and systemic barriers to full gender equality in research.

The ASSET 2016 provided a valuable resource to evaluate perceptions of gender equality in British STEMM. The current survey represents a further attempt to robustly evaluate such perceptions in a representative sample from a different country, although it was limited by an unequal gender distribution, whereby there were twice as many female as male respondents. In addition, the survey was limited to researchers working in universities (public and private universities) and public research centres. Future efforts to better define policies that benefit the largest number of people should include initiatives that encourage the participation and support of men in gender equality surveys, as well as extending surveys to researchers in the private sector.

The present study represents the first formal comparison of men and women perceptions of gender equality between two European countries. Our data on the researchers based in Spanish institutions largely agree with the observations of the British ASSET 2016, while highlighting important differences in gender perceptions between the two research systems. This and future international surveys should aid the design and implementation of effective measures to drive a cultural change and to close the gender gap in research, by increasing our understanding of gender perceptions in academic environments.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. responses “perceptions in gender equality”..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s001

S2 Appendix. Psychometric properties of the survey.

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A) Loading plot of survey where first component is represented vs second component. B) Scree plot of the 21 items included in this analysis. As the number of components increases, the variance (within-group sum of squares) decreases. The elbow at two/three clusters represents the most parsimonious balance between minimum number of clusters that explain most of the variance.

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S2 Fig. Research area by gender interaction in the perception of gender equality in departments.

Item represented in the figure corresponds to “In general, men and women are treated equally in my department”. Graph shows means by gender ranging from 1 =“Strongly disagree” to 7 = “Strongly agree”. Sample size N = 1,293 (N = 468 men and N = 825 women).

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S3 Fig. Research area by gender interaction in the perception of gender equality in the allocation of pastoral care roles.

Figure represents the responses to perceptions of gender equality in the “allocation of pastoral care roles” and shows means by gender ranging from 1 =“Much easier for women” to 7 = “Much easier for men”. Sample size N = 1,259 (N = 455 men and N = 804 women).

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S4 Fig. Position by gender interaction in the perception of gender equality in departments.

Item represented in the figure corresponds to “If I had concerns about gender equality in my department, I would know who to approach” and shows means by gender ranging from 1 =“Strongly disagree” to 7 = “Strongly agree”. Sample size N = 1,291 (N = 468 men and N = 823 women).

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S5 Fig. Position by gender interaction in the perception of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources.

A) Appointments to editorships and B) Allocation of administrative tasks. Graph shows means by gender ranging from 1 =“Much easier for a woman” to 7 = “Much easier for a man”. Sample size N = 1,275 to 1,279 (N = from 462 to 463 men and N = from 813 to 816 women).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s007

S1 Table. Description of the questions in the survey and variable names.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s008

S2 Table. Comparison between responses from female participants that did not complete the survey (excluded respondents) and participants included in the analysis (respondents that completed the survey).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s009

S3 Table. Comparison between responses from male participants that did not complete the survey (excluded respondents) and participants included in the analysis (respondents that completed the survey).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s010

S4 Table. List of the institutions represented in the sample analysed.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s011

S5 Table. Cronbach alpha coefficients for each item and whole category.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s012

S6 Table. Descriptive and t-tests results for perceptions of gender equality in departments.

“sd” = standard deviation. “N” = sample size. “df” = degrees of freedom. “95CI” = 95% Confidence intervals.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s013

S7 Table. Descriptive and t-tests results for perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s014

S8 Table. Research area variable names, sample size for each research area and gender distribution by research area.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s015

S9 Table. Interaction analysis of gender by research area in perceptions of gender equality in departments.

“Df” = degrees of freedom. “Sum Sq” = Total sum of squares. “Mean Sq” = Mean Squares.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s016

S10 Table. Interaction analysis of gender by research area in the perceptions of gender equality in the allocation of tasks and resources.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s017

S11 Table. Position variable names, sample size for each position and gender distribution by position.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s018

S12 Table. Interaction analysis of gender by position in the perceptions of gender equality in departments.

“Df” = degrees of freedom. “Sum Sq” = total sum of squares. “Mean Sq” = Mean Squares.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s019

S13 Table. Interaction of gender by position in the perceptions of gender equality in allocation of tasks and resources.

“Df” = degrees of freedom. “Sum Sq” = total sum of squares. “Mean Sq” = mean Squares.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s020

S14 Table. Type of institution variable names, sample size for each type of institution and gender distribution.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s021

S15 Table. Interaction analysis of gender by type of institution in the perceptions of gender equality in departments.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s022

S16 Table. Interaction analysis of gender by type of institution in the perceptions of gender equality in allocation of tasks and resources.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s023

S17 Table. Comparison of responses between Spain vs the United Kingdom-based researchers.

“N” = Sample size, “M” = mean, “SD” = Standard deviation, “df” = degrees of freedom. Note: The questions “women are perceived as good leaders by women/men” from the Spain based questionnaire are not reported in this analysis, as no equivalent questions were available in ASSET 2016. Significance declared at Bonferroni corrected threshold p = 0.001.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763.s024

Acknowledgments

We thank all members of the Wom = n Equity & Research committee of SRUK/CERU—especially Diego Alonso and Nerea Irigoyen-, members of the Board of Directors of SRUK/CERU -especially Javier Escudero and Rocio Gaudioso- as well as David Pritchett, Caroline Brennan, Kristin Hadfield, Elke Vlemincx, Frederike Beyer, Eulalia Perez Sedeño and Pavel Ovseiko for reviewing the manuscript, helpful comments and discussion. We thank the Spanish universities, scientific societies and research institutes that distributed the survey, as well as all the researchers who took the time to complete it. This work was possible thanks to the previous work done in the ASSET 2016, and we thank Amanda Aldercotte from the Equality Challenge Unit for sharing data that enabled comparisons between our surveys.

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• Published: 28 April 2020

The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation

• J. Chubb   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9716-820X 1 &
• G. E. Derrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5386-8653 2  

Palgrave Communications volume  6 , Article number:  72 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 19 May 2020

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Using an analysis of two independent, qualitative interview data sets: the first containing semi-structured interviews with mid-senior academics from across a range of disciplines at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK, collected between 2011 and 2013 ( n  = 51); and the second including pre- ( n  = 62), and post-evaluation ( n  = 57) interviews with UK REF2014 Main Panel A evaluators, this paper provides some of the first empirical work and the grounded uncovering of implicit (and in some cases explicit) gendered associations around impact generation and, by extension, its evaluation. In this paper, we explore the nature of gendered associations towards non-academic impact (Impact) generation and evaluation. The results suggest an underlying yet emergent gendered perception of Impact and its activities that is worthy of further research and exploration as the importance of valuing the ways in which research has an influence ‘beyond academia’ increases globally. In particular, it identifies how researchers perceive that there are some personality traits that are better orientated towards achieving Impact; how these may in fact be gendered. It also identifies how gender may play a role in the prioritisation of ‘hard’ Impacts (and research) that can be counted, in contrast to ‘soft’ Impacts (and research) that are far less quantifiable, reminiscent of deeper entrenched views about the value of different ‘modes’ of research. These orientations also translate to the evaluation of Impact, where panellists exhibit these tendencies prior to its evaluation and describe the organisation of panel work with respect to gender diversity.

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Introduction.

The management and measurement of the non-academic impact Footnote 1 (Impact) of research is a consistent theme within the higher education (HE) research environment in the UK, reflective of a drive from government for greater visibility of the benefits of research for the public, policy and commercial sectors (Chubb, 2017 ). This is this mirrored on a global scale, particularly in Australia, where, at the ‘vanguard’ (Upton et al., 2014 , p. 352) of these developments, methods were first devised (but were subsequently abandoned) to measure research impact (Chubb, 2017 ; Hazelkorn and Gibson, 2019 ). What is broadly known in both contexts as an ‘Impact Agenda’—the move to forecast and assess the ways in which investment in academic research delivers measurable socio-economic benefit—initially sparked broad debate and in some instances controversy, among the academic community (and beyond) upon its inception (Chubb, 2017 ). Since then, the debate has continued to evolve and the ways in which impact can be better conceptualised and implemented in the UK, including its role in evaluation (Stern, 2016 ), and more recently in grant applications (UKRI, 2020 ) is robustly debated. Notwithstanding attempts to better the culture of equality and diversity in research, (Stern, 2016 ; Nature, 2019 ) in the broader sense, and despite the implementation of the Impact agenda being studied extensively, there has been very little critical engagement with theories of gender and how this translates specifically to more downstream gendered inequities in HE such as through an impact agenda.

The emergence of Impact brought with it many connotations, many of which were largely negative; freedom was questioned, and autonomy was seen to be at threat because of an audit surveillance culture in HE (Lorenz, 2012 ). Resistance was largely characterised by problematising the agenda as symptomatic of the marketisation of knowledge threatening traditional academic norms and ideals (Merton, 1942 ; Williams, 2002 ) and has led to concern about how the Impact agenda is conceived, implemented and evaluated. This concern extends to perceptions of gendered assumptions about certain kinds of knowledge and related activities of which there is already a corpus of work, i.e., in the case of gender and forms of public engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ). This paper explores what it terms as ‘the Impact a-gender’ (Chubb, 2017 ) where gendered notions of non-academic, societal impact and how it is generated feed into its evaluation. It does not wed itself to any feminist tradition specifically, however, draws on Carey et al. ( 2018 ) to examine, acknowledge and therefore amend how the range of policies within HE and how implicit power dynamics in policymaking produce gender inequalities. Instead, an impact fluidity is encouraged and supported. For this paper, this means examining how the impact a-gender feeds into expectations and the reward of non-academic impact. If left unchecked, the propagation of the impact a-gender, it is argued, has the potential to guard against a greater proportion of women generating and influencing the use of research evidence in public policy decision-making.

Scholars continue to reflect on ‘science as a gendered endeavour’ (Amâncio, 2005 ). The extensive corpus of historical literature on gender in science and its originators (Merton, 1942 ; Keller et al., 1978 ; Kuhn, 1962 ), note the ‘pervasiveness’ of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘objective and the scientific’. Indeed, Amancio affirmed in more recent times that ‘modern science was born as an exclusively masculine activity’ ( 2005 ). The Impact agenda raises yet more obstacles indicative of this pervasiveness, which is documented by the ‘Matthew’/‘Matilda’ effect in Science (Merton, 1942 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Perceptions of gender bias (which Kretschmer and Kretschmer, 2013 hypothesise as myths in evaluative cultures) persist with respect to how gender effects publishing, pay and reward and other evaluative issues in HE (Ward and Grant, 1996 ). Some have argued that scientists and institutions perpetuate such issues (Amâncio, 2005 ). Irrespective of their origin, perceptions of gendered Impact impede evaluative cultures within HE and, more broadly, the quest for equality in excellence in research impact beyond academia.

To borrow from Van Den Brink and Benschop ( 2012 ), gender is conceptualised as an integral part of organisational practices, situated within a social construction of feminism (Lorber, 2005 ; Poggio, 2006 ). This article uses the notion of gender differences and inequality to refer to the ‘ hierarchical distinction in which either women and femininity and men and masculinity are valued over the other ’ (p. 73), though this is not precluding of individual preferences. Indeed, there is an emerging body of work focused on gendered associations not only about ‘types’ of research and/or ‘areas and topics’ (Thelwall et al., 2019 ), but also about what is referred to as non-academic impact. This is with particular reference to audit cultures in HE such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is the UK’s system of assessing the quality of research (Morley, 2003 ; Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ; Weinstein et al., 2019 ). While scholars have long attended to researching gender differences in relation to the marketisation of HE (Ahmed, 2006 ; Bank, 2011 ; Clegg, 2008 ; Gromkowska-Melosik, 2014 ; Leathwood et al., 2008 ), and the gendering of Impact activities such as outreach and public engagement (Ward and Grant, 1996 ), there is less understanding of how far academic perceptions of Impact are gendered. Further, how these gendered tensions influence panel culture in the evaluation of impact beyond academia is also not well understood. As a recent discussion in the Lancet read ‘ the causes of gender disparities are complex and include both distal and proximal factors ’. (Lundine et al., 2019 , p. 742).

This paper examines the ways in which researchers and research evaluators implicitly perceive gender as related to excellence in Impact both in its generation and in its evaluation. Using an analysis of two existing data sets; the pre-evaluation interviews of evaluators in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework and interviews with mid-senior career academics from across the range of disciplines with experience of building impact into funding applications and/ or its evaluation in two research-intensive universities in the UK and Australia between 2011 and 2013, this paper explores the implicitly gendered references expressed by our participants relating to the generation of non-academic, impact which emerged inductively through analysis. Both data sets comprise researcher perceptions of impact prior to being subjected to any formalised assessment of research Impact, thus allowing for the identification of unconscious gendered orientations that emerged from participant’s emotional and more abstract views about Impact. It notes how researchers use loaded terminology around ‘hard’, and ‘soft’ when conceptualising Impact that is reminiscent of long-standing associations between epistemological domains of research and notions of masculinity/femininity. It refers to ‘hard’ impact as those that are associated with meaning economic/ tangible and efficiently/ quantifiably evaluated, and ‘soft’ as denoting social, abstract, potentially qualitative or less easily and inefficiently evaluated. By extending this analysis to the gendered notions expressed by REF2014 panellists (expert reviewers whose responsibility it is to review the quality of the retrospective impact articulated in case studies for the purposes of research evaluation) towards the evaluation of Impact, this paper highlights how instead of challenging these tendencies, shared constructions of Impact and gendered productivity in academia act to amplify and embed these gendered notions within the evaluation outcomes and practice. It explores how vulnerable seemingly independent assessments of Impact are to these widespread gendered- associations between Impact, engagement and success. Specifically, perceptions of the excellence and judgements of feasibility relating to attribution, and causality within the narrative of the Impact case study become gendered.

The article is structured as follows. First, it reviews the gender-orientations towards notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ excellence in forms of scholarly distinction and explores how this relates to the REF Impact evaluation criteria, and the under-representation of women in the academic workforce. Specifically, it hypothesises the role of how gendered notions of excellence that construct academic identities contribute to a system that side-lines women in academia. This is despite associating the generation of Impact as a feminised skill. We label this as the ‘Impact a-gender’. The article then outlines the methodology and how the two, independent databases were combined and convergent themes developed. The results are then presented from academics in the UK and Australia and then from REF2014 panellists. This describes how the Impact a-gender currently operates through academic cultural orientations around Impact generation, and in its evaluation through peer-review panels by members of this same academic culture. The article concludes with a recommendation that the Impact a-gender be explored more thoroughly as a necessary step towards guiding against gender- bias in the academic evaluation, and reward system.

Literature review

Notions of impact excellence as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’.

Scholars have long attempted to consider the commonalities and differences across certain kinds of knowledge (Becher, 1989 , 1994 ; Biglan, 1973a ) and attempts to categorise, divide and harmonise the disciplines have been made (Biglan, 1973a , 1973b ; Becher, 1994 ; Caplan, 1979 ; Schommer–Aikins et al., 2003 ). Much of this was advanced with a typology of the disciplines from (Trowler, 2001 ), which categorised the disciplines as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. Both anecdotally and in the literature, ‘soft’ science is associated with working more with people and less with ‘things’ (Cassell, 2002 ; Thelwall et al., 2019 ). These dichotomies often lead to a hierarchy of types of Impact and oppose valuation of activities based on their gendered connotations.

Biglan’s system of classifying disciplines into groups based on similarities and differences denotes particular behaviours or characteristics, which then form part of clusters or groups—‘pure’, ‘applied’, ‘soft’, ‘hard’ etc. Simpson ( 2017 ) argues that Biglan’s classification persists as one of the most commonly referred to models of the disciplines despite the prominence of some others (Pantin, 1968 ; Kuhn, 1962 ; Smart et al., 2000 ). Biglan ( 1973b ) classified the disciplines across three dimensions; hard and soft, pure and applied, life and non-life (whether the research is concerned with living things/organisms) . This ‘taxonomy of the disciplines’ states that ‘pure-hard’ domains tend toward the life and earth sciences,’pure-soft’ the social sciences and humanities, and ‘applied hard’ focus on engineering and physical science with ‘soft-applied’ tending toward professional practice such as nursing, medicine and education. Biglan’s classification looked at levels of social connectedness and specifically found that applied scholars Footnote 2 were more socially connected, more interested and involved in service activities, and more likely to publish in the form of technical reports than their counterparts in the pure (hard) areas of study. This resonates with how Impact brings renewed currency and academic prominence to applied researchers (Chubb, 2017 ). Historically, scholars inhabiting the ‘hard’ disciplines had a greater preference for research; whereas, scholars representing soft disciplines had a greater preference for teaching (Biglan, 1973b ). Further, Biglan ( 1973b ) also found that hard science scholars sought out greater collaborative efforts among colleagues when teaching as opposed to their soft science counterparts.

There are also long-standing gendered associations and connotations with notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ (Storer, 1967 ). Typically used to refer to skills, but also used heavily with respect to the disciplines and knowledge domains, gendered assumptions and the mere use of ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ to describe knowledge production carries with it assumptions, which are often noted in the literature; ‘ we think of physics as hard and of political science as soft ’, Storer explains, adding how ‘hard seems to imply tough, brittle, impenetrable and strong, while soft on the other hand calls to mind the qualities of weakness, gentleness and malleability’ (p. 76). As described, hard science is typically associated with the natural sciences and quantitative paradigms whereas normative perceptions of feminine ‘soft’ skills or ‘soft’ science are often equated with qualitative social science. Scholars continue to debate dichotomised paradigms or ‘types’ of research or knowledge (Gibbons, 1999 ), which is emblematic of an undercurrent of epistemological hierarchy of the value of different kinds of knowledge. Such debates date back to the heated back and forth between scholars Snow (Snow, 2012 ) and literary critic Leavis who argued for their own ‘cultures’ of knowledge. Notwithstanding, these binary distinctions do few favours when gender is then ascribed to either knowledge domain or related activity (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). This is particularly pertinent in light of the current drive for more interdisciplinary research in the science system where there is also a focus on fairness, equality and diversity in the science system.

Academic performance and the Impact a-gender

Audit culture in academia impacts unfairly on women (Morley, 2003 ), and is seen as contributory to the wide gender disparities in academia, including the under-representation of women as professors (Ellemers et al., 2004 ), in leadership positions (Carnes et al., 2015 ), in receiving research acknowledgements (Larivière et al., 2013 ; Sugimoto et al., 2015 ), or being disproportionately concentrated in non-research-intensive universities (Santos and Dang Van Phu, 2019 ). Whereas gender discrimination also manifests in other ways such as during peer review (Lee and Noh, 2013 ), promotion (Paulus et al., 2016 ), and teaching evaluations (Kogan et al., 2010 ), the proliferation of an audit culture links gender disparities in HE to processes that emphasise ‘quantitative’ analysis methods, statistics, measurement, the creation of ‘experts’, and the production of ‘hard evidence’. The assumption here is that academic performance and the metrics used to value, and evaluate it, are heavily gendered in a way that benefits men over women, reflecting current disparities within the HE workforce. Indeed, Morely (2003) suggests that the way in which teaching quality is female dominated and research quality is male dominated, leads to a morality of quality resulting in the larger proportion of women being responsible for student-focused services within HE. In addition, the notion of ‘excellence’ within these audit cultures implicitly reflect images of masculinity such as rationality, measurement, objectivity, control and competitiveness (Burkinshaw, 2015 ).

The association of feminine and masculine traits in academia (Holt and Ellis, 1998 ), and ‘gendering its forms of knowledge production’ (Clegg, 2008 ), is not new. In these typologies, women are largely expected to be soft-spoken, nurturing and understanding (Bellas, 1999 ) yet often invisible and supportive in their ‘institutional housekeeping’ roles (Bird et al., 2004 ). Men, on the other hand are often associated with being competitive, ambitious and independent (Baker, 2008 ). When an individual’s behaviour is perceived to transcend these gendered norms, then this has detrimental effects on how others evaluate their competence, although some traits displayed outside of these typologies go somewhat ‘under the radar’. Nonetheless, studies show that women who display leadership qualities (competitiveness, ambition and decisiveness) are characterised more negatively than men (Rausch, 1989 ; Heilman et al., 1995 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Incongruity between perceptions of ‘likeability’ and ‘competence’ and its relationship to gender bias is present in evaluations in academia, where success is dependent on the perceptions of others and compounded within an audit culture (Yarrow and Davis, 2018). This has been seen in peer review, reports for men and women applicants, where women were disadvantaged by the same characteristics that were seen as a strength on proposals by men (Severin et al., 2019 ); as well as in teaching evaluations where women receive higher evaluations if they are perceived as ‘nurturing’ and ‘supportive’ (Kogan et al., 2010 ). This results in various potential forms of prejudice in academia: Where traits normally associated with masculinity are more highly valued than those associated with femininity (direct) or when behaviour that is generally perceived to be ‘masculine’ is enacted by a woman and then perceived less favourably (indirect/ unconscious). That is not to mention direct sexism, rather than ‘through’ traits; a direct prejudice.

Gendered associations of Impact are not only oversimplified but also incredibly problematic for an inclusive, meaningful Impact agenda and research culture. Currently, in the UK, the main funding body for research in the UK, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) uses a broad Impact definition: ‘ the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy ’ (UKRI website, 2019 ). The most recent REF, REF2014, Impact was defined as ‘ …an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia ’. In Australia, the Australian Research Council (ARC) proposed that researchers should ‘embed’ Impact into the research process from the outset. Both Australia and the UK have been engaged in policy borrowing around the evaluation of societal impact and share many similarities in approaches to generating and evaluating it. Indeed, Impact has been deliberately conceptualised by decision-makers, funders and governments as broad in order to increase the appearance of being inclusivity, to represent a broad range of disciplines, as well as to reflect the ‘diverse ways’ that potential beneficiaries of academic research can be reached ‘beyond academia’. The adoption of societal impact as a formalised criterion in the evaluation of research excellence was initially perceived to be potentially beneficial for women, due to its emphasis on concepts such as ‘public engagement’; ‘duty’ and non-academic ‘cooperation/collaboration’ (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). In addition, the adoption of narrative case studies to demonstrate Impact, rather than adopting a complete metrics-focused exercise, can also be seen as an opportunity for women to demonstrate excellence in the areas where they are over-represented, such as teaching, cultural enrichment, public engagement (Andrews et al., 2005 ), informing public policy and improving public services (Schatteman, 2014 ; Wheatle and BrckaLorenz, 2015). However, despite this, studies highlight how for the REF2014, only 25% of Impact Case Studies for business and management studies were from women (Davies et al., 2020 ).

With respect to Impact evaluation, previous research shows that there is a direct link between notions of academic culture, and how research (as a product of that culture) is valued and evaluated (Leathwood and Reid, 2008 ; p. 120). Geertz ( 1983 ) argues that academic membership is a ‘cultural frame that defines a great part of one’s life’ influences belief systems around how academic work is orientated. This also includes gendered associations implicit in the academic reward system, which in turn influences how academics believe success is to be evaluated, and in what form that success emerges. This has implications in how academic associations of the organisation of research work and the ongoing constructions of professional identity relative to gender, feeds into how these same academics operate as evaluators within a peer review system evaluation. In this case, instead of operating to challenge these tendencies, shared constructions of gendered academic work are amplified to the extent that they unconsciously influence perceptions of excellence and the judgements of feasibility as pertaining to the attribution and causality of the narrative argument. As such, in an evaluation of Impact with its ambiguous definition (Derrick, 2018 ), and the lack of external indicators to signal success independent of cultural constructions inherent in the panel membership, effects are assumed to be more acute. In this way, this paper argues that the Impact a-gender can act to further disadvantage women.

The research combines two existing research data sets in order to explore implicit notions of gender associated with the generation and evaluation of research Impact beyond academia. Below the two data sets and the steps involved in analysing and integrating findings are described along with our theoretical positioning within the feminist literature Where verbatim quotation is used, we have labelled the participants according to each study highlighting their role and gender. Further, the evaluator interviews specify the disciplinary panel and subpanel to which they belonged, as well as their evaluation responsibilities such as: ‘Outputs only’; ‘Outputs and Impact’; and ‘Impacts only’.

Analysis of qualitative data sets

This research involved the analysis and combination of two independently collected, qualitative interview databases. The characteristics and specifics of both databases are outlined below.

Interviews with mid-senior academics in the UK and Australia

Fifty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2013 with mid-senior academics at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK. The interviews were 30–60 min long and participants were sourced via the research offices at both sites. Participants were contacted via email and invited to participate in a study concerning resistance towards the Impact agenda in the UK and Australia and were specifically asked for their perceptions of its relationship with freedom, value and epistemic responsibility and variations across discipline, career stage and national context. Mostly focused on ex ante impact, some interviewees also described their experiences of Impact in the UK and Australia, in relation to its formal assessment as part of the Excellence Innovation Australia (EIA) for Australia and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.

Participants comprised mid to senior career academics with experience of winning funding from across the range of disciplines broadly representative of the arts and humanities, social sciences, physical science, maths and engineering and the life and earth sciences. For the purposes of this paper, although participant demographic information was collected, the relationship between the gender of the participants, their roles, disciplines/career stage was not explicitly explored instead, such conditions were emergent in the subsequent inductive coding during thematic analysis. A reflexive log was collected in order to challenge and draw attention to assumptions and underlying biases, which may affect the author, inclusive of their own gender identity. Further information on this is provided in Chubb ( 2017 ).

Pre- and post-evaluation interviews with REF2014 evaluators

REF2014 in the UK represented the world’s first formalised evaluation of ex-post impact, comprising of 20% of the overall evaluation. This framework served as a unique experimental environment with which to explore baseline tendencies towards impact as a concept and evaluative object (Derrick, 2018 ).

Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted with willing participants: sixty-two panellists were interviewed from the UK’s REF2014 Main Panel A prior to the evaluation taking place; and a fifty-seven of these were re-interviewed post-evaluation. Main Panel A covers six Sub-panels: (1) Clinical Medicine; (2) Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care; (3) Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy; (4) Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; (5) Biological Sciences; and (6) Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Sciences. Again, the relationship between the gender of the participants and their discipline is not the focus for the purposes of this paper.

Database combination and identification of common emergent themes

The inclusion of data sets using both Australian and UK researchers was pertinent to this study as both sites were at the cusp of implementing the evaluation of Impact formally. These researcher interviews, as well as the evaluator interviews were conducted prior to any formalised Impact evaluation took place, but when both contexts required ex ante impact in terms of certain funding allocation, meaning an analysis of these baseline perceptions between databases was possible. Further, the inclusion of the post-evaluation interviews with panellists in the UK allowed an exploration of how these gendered perceptions identified in the interviews with researchers and panellists prior to the evaluation, influenced panel behaviour during the evaluation of Impact.

Initially, both data sets were analysed using similar, inductive, grounded-theory-informed approaches inclusive of a discourse and thematic analysis of the language used by participants when describing impact, which allowed for the drawing out of metaphor (Zinken et al., 2008 ). This allowed data combination and analysis of the two databases to be conducted in line with the recommendations for data-synthesis as outlined in Weed ( 2005 ) as a form of interpretation. This approach guarded against the quantification of qualitative findings for the purposes of synthesis, and instead focused on an initial dialogic approach between the two authors (Chubb and Derrick), followed by a re-analysis of qualitative data sets (Heaton, 1998 ) in line with the outcomes of the initial author-dialogue as a method of circumventing many of the drawbacks associated with qualitative data-synthesis. Convergent themes from each, independently analysed data set were discussed between authors, before the construction of new themes that were an iterative analysis of the combined data set. Drawing on the feminist tradition the authors did not apply feminist standpoint theory, instead a fully inductive approach was used to unearth rich empirical data. An interpretative and inductive approach to coding the data using NVIVO software in both instances was used and a reflexive log maintained. The availability of both full, coded, qualitative data sets, as well as the large sample size of each, allowed this data-synthesis to happen.

Researcher’s perceptions of Impact as either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’

Both UK and Australian academic researchers (researchers) perceive a guideline of gendered productivity (Davies et al., 2017 ; Sax et al., 2002 ; Astin, 1978 ; Ward and Grant, 1996 ). This is where men or women are being dissuaded (by their inner narratives, their institutions or by colleagues) from engaging in Impact either in preference to other (more masculine) notions of academic productivity, or towards softer (for women) because they consider themselves and are considered by others to be ‘good at it’. Participants often gendered the language of Impact and introduced notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. On the one hand, this rehearses and resurfaces long-standing views about the ‘Matthew Effect’ because often softer Impacts were seen as being of less value by participants, but also indicates that the word impact itself carries its own connotations, which are then weighed down further by more entrenched gender associations.

Our research shows that when describing Impact, it was not necessarily the masculinity or femininity of the researcher that was emphasised by participants, rather researchers made gendered presumptions around the type of Impact, or the activity used to generate it as either masculine or feminine. Some participants referred to their own research or others’ research as either ‘hard’ or as ‘soft and woolly’. Those who self-professed that their research was ‘soft’ or woolly’ felt that their research was less likely to qualify as having ‘hard’ impact in REF terms Footnote 3 ; instead, they claimed their research would impact socially, as opposed to economically; ‘ stuff that’s on a flaky edge — it’s very much about social engagement ’ (Languages, Australia, Professor, Male) . One researcher described Impact as ‘a nasty Treasury idea,’ comparing it to: a tsunami, crashing over everything which will knock out stuff that is precious ’ . (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) . This imagery associates the concept of impact with force and weight (or hardness as mentioned earlier) particularly in disciplines where the effect of their research may be far more nuanced and subtle. One Australian research used force to depict the impact of teaching and claimed Impact was like a footprint, and teaching was ‘ a pretty heavy imprint ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Participants characterised ‘force and weight’ as masculine, suggesting that some connotations of Impact and the associated activities may be gendered. The word ‘Impact’ was inherently perceived by many researchers as problematic, bound with linguistic connotations and those imposed by the official definitions, which in many cases are perceived as negative or maybe even gendered (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ The etymology of a word like impact is interesting. I’ve always seen what I do as being a more subtle incremental engagement, relevance, a contribution ’. (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) .

Researchers associated the word ‘impact’ with hard-ness, weight and force; ‘ anything that sorts of hits you ’ (Languages, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . One researcher suggested that Impact ‘ sounds kind of aggressive — the poor consumer! ’ (History, Australia, Professor, Female) . Talking about her own research in the performing arts, one Australian researcher commented: ‘ It’s such a pain in the arse because the Arts don’t fit the model. But in a way they do if you look at the impact as being something quite soft ’ (Music, Australia, Professor, Female) . Likewise, a similar comparison was seen by a female researcher from the mechanical engineering discipline: ‘ My impact case study wasn’t submitted mainly because I’m dealing with that slightly on the woolly side of things ’ (Mechanical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Largely, gender related comments hailed from the ‘hard’ science and from arts and humanities researchers. Social scientists commented less, and indeed, one levelled that Impact was perhaps less a matter of gender, and more a matter of ability (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ It’s about being articulate! Both guys and women who are very articulate and communicate well are outward looking on all of these things ’ ( Engineering Education, Australia, Professor, Female).

Gendered notions of performativity were also very pronounced by evaluators who were assessing the outputs only, suggesting how these panel cultures are orientated around notions of gender and scientific outputs as ‘hard’ if represented by numbers. The focus on numbers was perceived by the following panellist as ‘ a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types ’ within the panel that relate to findings about the association of certain traits—risk aversion, competitiveness, for example, with a masculinised market logic in HE;

And I like that a lot because I think that there is a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types of always looking at the numbers, like the numbers and everything. And I just did feel that steer that we got from the panel chairs, both of them were men by the way, but they were very clear, the impact factors and citations and the rank order of a journal is this is information that can be useful, but it’s not your immediate first stop. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

However, a metric-dominant approach was not the result of a male-dominated panel environment and instead, to the panels credit, evaluators were encouraged not to use one-metric as the only deciding factor between star-rating of quality. However, this is not to suggest that metrics did not play a dominant role. In fact, in order to resolve arguments, evaluators were encouraged to ‘ reflect on these other metrics ’ (Panel 3, Outputs only, Male) in order to rectify arguments where the assessment of quality was in conflict. This use of ‘other metrics’ was preferential to a resolution of differences that are based on more ‘soft’ arguments that are based on understanding where differences in opinion might lie in the interpretation of the manuscript’s quality. Instead, the deciding factor in resolving arguments would be the responsibility, primarily, of a ‘hard’ concept of quality as dictated by a numerical value;

Read the paper, judge the quality, judge the originality, the rigour, the impact — if you have to because you’re in dispute with another assessor, then reflect on these other metrics. So I don’t think metrics are that helpful actually if and until you’ve got a real issue to be able to make a decision. But I worry very much that metrics are just such a simple way of making the process much easier, and I’m worried about that because I think there’s a bit of game playing going on with impact factors and that kind of thing. (Panel 3, Outputs Only, Male)

Table 1 outlines the emergent themes, which, through inductive coding participants broadly categorised domains of research, their qualities and associations, types of activities and the gendered assumption generally made by participants when describing that activity. The table is intended only to provide an indicative overview of the overall tendencies of participants toward certain narratives as is not exhaustive, as well as a guide to interpret the perceptions of Impact illustrated in the below results.

Table one describes the dichotomous views that seemed to emerge from the research but it’s important to note that researchers associated Impact as related to gender in subtle, and in some cases overt ways. The data suggests that some male participants felt that female academics might be better at Impact, suggesting that female academics might find it liberating, linked it to a sense of duty or public service, implying that it was second nature. In addition, some male participants associated types of Impact domains as female-orientated activity and the reverse was the case with female and male-orientated ‘types’ of Impact. For example, at one extreme, a few male researchers seemed to perceive public engagement as something, which females would be particularly good at, generalising that they are not competitive ‘ women are better at this! They are less competitive! ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Indeed, one male researcher suggested that competitiveness actually helps academics have an impact and does not impede it:

I get a huge buzz from trying to communicate those to a wider audience and winning arguments and seeing them used. It’s not the use that motivates me it’s the process of winning, I’m competitive! (Economics, UK, Professor, Male)

Analysis also revealed evidence that some researchers has gendered perceptions of Impact activities just as evaluators did. Here, women were more likely to promote the importance of engaging in Impact activities, whereas men were focused on producing indicators with hard, quantitative indicators of success. Some researchers implied that public engagement was not something entirely associated with the kinds of Impact needed to advance one’s career and for a few male researchers, this was accordingly associated with female academics. Certain female researchers in the sciences and the arts suggested similarly that there was a strong commitment among women to carry out public engagement, but that this was not necessarily shared by their male counterparts who, they perceived, undervalued this kind of work:

I think the few of us women in the faculty will grapple with that a lot about the relevance of what we’re doing and the usefulness, but for the vast majority of people it’s not there… [She implies that]…I think there is a huge gender thing there that every woman that you talk to on campus would consider that the role of the university is along the latter statement (*to communicate to the public). The vast majority of men would not consider that’s a role of the university. There’s a strong gender thing. (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

Notwithstanding, it is important to distinguish between engagement and Impact. This research shows that participants perceive Impact activities to be gendered. There was a sense from one arts female researcher that women might be more interested in getting out there and communicating their work but that crucially, it is not the be-all and end- all of doing research: ‘ Women feel that there’s something more liberating, I can empathise with that, but that couldn’t be the whole job ’. Music, Australia, Professor, Female Footnote 4 . When this researcher, who was very much orientated towards Impact, asked if there were enough interviewees, she added ‘ mind you, you’ve probably spoken to enough men in lab coats ’. This could imply that inward-facing roles are associated with male-orientated activity and outward facing roles as perceived as more female orientated. Such sentiments perhaps relate to a binary delineation of women as more caring, subjective, applied and of men as harder, scientific and theoretical/ rational. This links to a broader characterisation of HE as marketised and potentially, more ‘male’ or at least masculinised—where increasing competitiveness, marketisation and performativity can be seen as linked to an increasingly macho way of doing business (Blackmore, 2002 ; Deem, 1998 ; Grummell et al., 2009 ; Reay, n.d. ). The data is also suggestive of the attitude that communication is a ‘soft’ skill and the interpersonal is seen as a less masculine trait. ‘ This is a huge generalisation but I still say that the profession is so dominated by men, undergraduates are so dominated by men and most of those boys will come into engineering because they’re much more comfortable dealing with a computer than with people ’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Again, this suggests women are more likely to pursue those scientific subjects, which will make a difference or contribute to society (such as nursing or environmental research, certainly those subjects that would be perceived as less ‘hard’ science domains).

There was also a sense that Impact activity, namely in this case public engagement and community work, was associated with women more than men by some participants (Amâncio, 2005 ). However, public engagement and certain social impact domains appeared to have a lower status and intellectual worth in the eyes of some participants. Some inferred that social and ‘soft’ impacts are seen as associated. With discipline. For instance, research concerning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) subjects with females. They in turn may be held in low esteem. Some of the accounts suggest that soft impacts are perceived by women as not ‘counting’ as Impact:

‘ At least two out of the four of us who are female are doing community service and that doesn’t count, we get zero credit, actually I would say it gets negative credit because it takes time away from everything else ’. (Education Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

This was intimated again by another female UK computer scientist who claimed that since her work was on the ‘woolly side’ of things, and her impacts were predominantly in the social and public domain, she would not be taken seriously enough to qualify as a REF Impact case study, despite having won an award for her work:

‘ I don’t think it helps that if I were a male professor doing the same work I might be taken more seriously. It’s interesting, why recently? Because I’ve never felt that I’ve not been taken seriously because I’m a woman, but something happened recently and I thought, oh, you’re not taking me seriously because I’m a woman. So I think it’s a part ’. (Computer Science, UK, Professor, Female)

Researchers also connect the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ associations with Impact described earlier to male and female traits. The relationship between Impact and gender is not well understood and it is not clear how much these issues are directly relatable to Impact or more symptomatic of the broader picture in HE. In order to get a broader picture, it is important to examine how these gendered notions of Impact translate into its evaluation. Some participants suggested that gender is a factor in the securing of grant money—certainly this comment reveals a local speculation that ‘the big boys’ get the grants, in Australia, at least: ‘ ARC grants? I’ve had a few but nothing like the big boys that get one after the other ,’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . This is not dissimilar to the ‘alpha male’ comments from the evaluators described below who note a tendency for male evaluators to rely on ‘hard’ numbers whose views are further examined in the following section.

Gendered excellence in Impact evaluation

In the pre-evaluation interviews, panellists were asked about what they perceived to be ‘excellent’ research and ‘excellent’ Impact. Within this context, are mirrored conceptualisations of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ as was seen with the interviews with researchers described above. These conceptualisations were captured prior to the evaluation began. They can therefore be interpreted as the raw, baseline assumptions of Impact that are free from the effects of the panel group, showed that there were differences in how evaluators perceived Impact, and that these perceptions were gendered.

Although all researchers conceptualised Impact as a linear process for the purposes of the REF2014 exercise (Derrick, 2018 ), there was a tendency for female evaluators to be open to considering the complexity of Impact, even in a best-case scenario. This included a consideration that Impact as dictated within the narrative might have different indicators of value to different evaluators; ‘ I just think that that whole framing means that there is a form of normative standard of perfect impact ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Female) . This evaluator, in particular, went further to state how that their impression of Impact would be constructed from the comparators available during the evaluation;

‘ Given that I’m presenting impact as a good story, it would be like you saying to me; ‘Can you describe to me a perfect Shakespearean play?’…. well now of course, I can’t. You can give me lots of plays but they all have different kinds of interesting features. Different people would say that their favourite play was different. To me, if you’re taking interpretivist view, constructivist view, there is no perfect normative standard. It’s just not possible ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female)

Female evaluators were also more sensitive to other complex factors influencing the evaluation of Impact, including time lag; ‘ …So it takes a long time for things like that to be accepted…it took hundreds of studies before it was generally accepted as real ’ (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female ); as well as the indirect way that research influences policy as a form of Impact;

‘ I don’t think that anything would get four stars without even blinking. I think that is impossible to answer because you have to look at the whole evidence in this has gone on, and how that does link to the impact that is being claimed, and then you would then have to look at how that impact, exactly how that research has impacted on the ways of the world, in terms of change or in terms of society or whatever. I don’t think you can see this would easily get four stars because of the overall process is being looked at, as well as the actual outcome ’ . (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Although these typologies were not absolute, there was a lack of complexity in the nuances around Impact. There was also heavily gendered language around Impacts as measurable, or not, that mirrored the association of Impact as being either ‘hard’, and therefore measurable, or ‘soft, and therefore more nuanced in value. In this way, male evaluators expressed Impact as a causal, linear event that occurred ‘ in a very short time ’ (P2, Outputs and Impact, Male) and involved a single ‘ star ’ (P3, Impacts only, Male) or ‘ impact champion ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Male) that drove it from start (research), to finish (Impact). These associations about Impact being ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ made by evaluators, mirror the responses from researchers in the above sections. In the example below, the evaluator used words such as ‘ strong ’ and ‘ big way ’ to describe Impact success, as well as emphasises causality in the argument;

‘ …if it has affected a lot of people or affected policy in a strong way or created change in a big way, and it can be clearly linked back to the research, and it’s made a difference ’. (Panel 2, Outputs and Impact, Male)

These perhaps show disciplinary differences as much as gendered differences. Further, there was a stronger tendency for male evaluators to strive towards conceptualisations of excellence in Impact as measurable or ‘ it’s something that is decisive and actionable ’ (Panel 6, Impacts, Male) . One male evaluator explained his conceptualised version of Impact excellence as ‘ straightforward ’ and therefore ‘ obviously four-star ’ due to the presence of metrics with which to measure Impact. This was a perception more commonly associated with male evaluators;

‘ …if somebody has been able to devise a — let’s say pancreatic cancer — which is a molecular cancer, which hasn’t made any progress in the last 40 years, and where the mortality is close to 100% after diagnosis, if someone devised a treatment where now suddenly, after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, 90 percent of the people are now still alive 5 years later, where the mortality rate is almost 0%, who are alive after 5 years. That, of course, would be a dramatic, transformative impact ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Male)

In addition, his tendency to seek various numeric indicators for measuring, and therefore assessing Impact (predominantly economic impact), as well as compressing its realisation to a small period of time ( ‘ suddenly ’ ) in a causal fashion, was more commonly expressed in male evaluators. This tendency automatically indicates the association of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ and divided along gendered norms, but also expresses Impact in monetary terms;

‘ Something that went into a patient or the company has pronounced with…has spun out and been taken up by a commercial entity or a clinical entity ’ (Panel 3, Outputs and Impacts, Male) , as well as impacts that are marketised; ‘ A new antimicrobial drug to market ’. (Panel 6, Outputs and Impact, Male) .

There was also the perception that female academics would be better at engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ) due to its link with notions of ‘ duty ’ (as a mother), ‘ engagement ’ and ‘ public service ’ are reflected in how female evaluators were also more open to the idea that excellent Impact is achieved through productive, ongoing partnerships with non-academic stakeholders. Here, the reflections of ‘duty’ from the evaluators was also mirrored by in interviews with researchers. Indeed, the researchers merged perceptions of parenthood, an academic career and societal impact generation. One female researcher drew on her role as a mother as supportive of her ability to participate in Impact generation, ‘ I have kids that age so… ’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . Indeed, parenthood emerged from researchers of both genders in relation to the Impact agenda. Two male participants spoke positively about the need to transfer knowledge of all kinds to society referencing their role as parents: ‘ I’m all for that. I want my kids to have a rich culture when they go to school ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E2) , and ‘ My children are the extension of my biological life and my students are an extension of my thoughts ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E1) . One UK female biologist commented that she indeed enjoys delivering public engagement and outreach and implies a reference to having a family as enabling her ability to do so: ‘ It’s partly being involved with the really well-established outreach work ,’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) .

For the evaluators, the idea that ‘public service’ as second nature for female academics, was reflected in how female evaluators perceived the long, arduous and serendipitous nature of Impact generation, as well as their commitment to assessing the value of Impact as a ‘pathway’ rather than in line with impact as a ‘product’. Indeed, this was highlighted by one male evaluator who suggested that the measurement and assessment of Impact ‘ …needs to be done by economists ’ and that

‘ you [need] to put in some quantification one everything…[that] puts a negative value on being sick and a positive large value on living longer. So, yeah, the greatest impact would be something that saves us money and generates income for the country but something broad and improves quality of life ’. (Panel 2, Impacts, Male)

Since evaluators tend to exercise cognitive bias in evaluative situations (Langfeldt, 2006 ), these preconceived ideas about Impact, its generation and the types of people responsible for its success are also likely to permeate the evaluative deliberations around Impact during the peer review process. What is uncertain is the extent that these messages are dominant within the panel discourse, and therefore the extent that they influence the formation of a consensus within the group, and the ‘dominant definition’ of Impact (Derrick, 2018 ) that emerges as a result.

Notions of gender from the evaluators post-evaluation

Similar notions of gender-roles in academia pertaining to notions of scientific productivity were echoed by academics who were charged with its evaluation as part of the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Interviews with evaluators revealed not only that the panel working-methods and characteristics about what constituted a ‘good’ evaluator were implicitly along gendered norms, but also that the assumed credit assumptions of performativity were also based on gender.

In assessments of the Impact criterion, an assessment that is not as amenable to quantitative representation requiring panels to conceptualise a very complex process, with unstandardised measures of significance and reach, there was still a gendered perception of Impact being ‘women’s work’ in academia. This perception was based on the tendency towards conceptualising Impact as ‘slightly grubby’ and ‘not very pure’, which echoes previously reported pre-REF2014 tensions that Impact is a task that an academic does when they cannot do real research (de Jong et al., 2015 );

But I would say that something like research impact is — it seems something slightly grubby. It’s not seen as not — by the academics, as not very pure. To some of them, it seems women’s work. Talking to the public, do you see what I mean? (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, gendered roles also relate to how the panel worked with the assessment of Impact. Previous research has outlined how the equality and diversity assessment of panels for REF2014 were not conducted until after panellists were appointed (Derrick, 2018 ), leading to a lack of equal-representation of women on most panels. Some of the female panellists reflected that this resulted not only in a hyper-awareness of one’s own identity and value as a woman on the panel, but also implicitly associating the role that a female panellist would play in generating the evaluation. One panellist below, reflected that she was the only female in a male-dominated panel, and that the only other females in the room were the panel secretariat. The panellist goes further to explain how this resulted in a gendered-division of labour surrounding the assessment of Impact;

I mean, there’s a gender thing as well which isn’t directing what you’re talking about what you’re researching, but I was the only woman on the original appointed panel. The only other women were the secretariat. In some ways I do — there was initially a very gendered division of perspective where the women were all the ones aggregate the quantitative research, or typing it all up or talking about impact whereas the men were the ones who represented the big agenda, big trials. (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, evaluators expressed opinions about what constituted a good and a bad panel member. From this, the evaluation showed that traits such as the ability to work as a ‘team’ and to build on definitions and methods of assessment for Impact through deliberation and ‘feedback’ were perceived along gendered lines. In this regard, women perceived themselves as valuable if they were ‘happy to listen to discussions’, and not ‘too dogmatic about their opinion’. Here, women were valued if they played a supportive, supplementary role in line with Bellas ( 1999 ), which was in clear distinction to men who contributed as creative thinkers and forgers of new ideas. As one panellist described;

A good panel member is an Irish female. A good panel member was someone who was happy to — someone who is happy to listen to discussions; to not be too dogmatic about their opinion, but can listen and learn, because impact is something we are all learning from scratch. Somebody who wasn’t too outspoken, was a team player. (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Likewise, another female evaluator reflected on the reasons for her inclusion as a panel member was due to her ‘generalist perspective’ as opposed to a perspective that is over prescribed. This was suggestive of how an overly specialist perspective would run counter to the reasons that she was included as a panellist which was, in her opinion, due to her value as an ethnic and gender ‘token’ to the panel;

‘ I think it’s also being able to provide some perspective, some general perspective. I’m quite a generalist actually, I’m not a specialist……So I’m very generalist. And I think they’re also well aware of the ethnic and gender composition of that and lots of reasons why I’m asked on panels. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Women perceived their value on the panel as supportive, as someone who is prepared to work on the team, and listen to other views towards as a generalist, and constructionist, rather than as an enforced of dogmatic views and raw, hard notions of Impact that were represented through quantitative indicators only. As such, how the panel operated reflects general studies of how work can be organised along gender lines, as well as specific to workload and power in the academy. The similarity between the gendered associations towards conceptualising Impact from the researchers and evaluators, combined with how the panel organises its work along gendered lines, suggests how panel culture echoes the implicit tendencies within the wider research community. The implications of this tendency in relation to the evaluation of non-academic Impact is discussed below.

Discussion: an Impact a-gender?

This study shows how researchers and evaluators in two, independent data sets echoed a gendered orientation towards Impact, and how this implies an Impact a-gender. That gendered notions of Impact emerged as a significant theme from two independent data sets speaks to the importance of the issue. It also illustrates the need for policymakers and funding organisations to acknowledge its potential effects as part of their efforts towards embedding a more inclusive research culture around the generation and evaluation of research impact beyond academia.

Specifically, this paper has identified gendered language around the generation of, and evaluation of Impact by researchers in Australia and the UK, as well as by evaluators by the UK’s most recent Research Excellence Framework in 2014. For the UK and Australia, the prominence of Impact, as well as the policy borrowing between each country (Chubb, 2017 ) means that a reliable comparison of pre-evaluation perceptions of researchers and evaluators can be made. In both data sets presumptions of Impact as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ by both researchers and evaluators were found to be gendered. Whereas it is not surprising that panel culture reflects the dominant trends within the wider academic culture, this paper raises the question of how the implicit operation of gender bias surrounding notions of scientific productivity and its measurement, invade and therefore unduly influence the evaluation of those notions during peer-review processes. This negates the motivation behind a broad Impact definition and evaluation as inclusive since unconscious bias towards women can still operate if left unchecked and unmanaged.

Gendered notions of excellence were also related to the ability to be ‘competitive’, and that once Impact became a formalised, countable and therefore competitive criterion, it also become masculine where previously it existed as a feminised concept related to female academic-ness. As a feminised concept, Impact once referred to notions of excellence requiring communication such as public engagement, or stakeholder coordination—the ‘softer’ impacts. However, this association only remains ‘soft’ insofar as Impact remains unmeasurable, or more nuanced in definition. This is especially pertinent for the evaluation of societal impact where already conceived ideas of engagement and ‘ women’s work ’ influence how evaluators assess the feasibility of impact narratives for the purposes of its assessment. This paper also raises the question that notions of gender in relation to Impact persist irrespective of the identities assumed for the purposes of its evaluation (i.e., as a peer reviewer). This is not to say that academic culture in the UK and Australia, where Impact is increasingly being formalised into rewards systems, is not changing. More that there is a tendency in some evaluations for the burden of evidence to be applied differently to genders due to tensions surrounding what women are ‘good’ at doing: engagement, versus what ‘men’ are good at doing regarding Impact. In this scenario, quantitative indicators of big, high-level impacts are to be attributable to male traits, rather than female. This has already been noted in student evaluations of teaching (Kogan et al., 2010 ) and of academic leadership performance where the focus on the evaluation is on how others interpret performance based on already held gendered views about competence based on behaviours (Williams et al., 2014 ; Holt and Ellis, 1998 ). As such, when researchers transcend these gendered identities that are specific to societal impact, there is a danger of an Impact-a-gender bias arising in the assessment and forecasting of Impact. This paper extends this understanding and outlines how this may also be the case for assessments of societal impact.

By examining perceptions, as well as using an inductive analysis, this study was able to unearth unconsciously employed gendered notions that would not have been prominent or possible to pick up if we asked the interviewees about gender directly. This was particularly the case for the re-analysis of the post-evaluation interviews. However, future studies might consider incorporating a disciplinary-specific perspective as although the evaluators were from the medical/biomedical disciplines, researchers were from a range of disciplines. This would identify any discipline-specific risk towards an Impact a-gender. Nonetheless, further work that characterises the impact a-gender, as well as explores its wider implications for gender inequities within HE is currently underway.

How research evidence is labelled as excellent and therefore trustworthy, is heavily dictated by an evaluation process that is perceived as impartial and fair. However, if evaluations are compounded by gender bias, this confounds assessments of excellence with gendered expectation of non-academic impact. Consequently, gendered expectations of excellence for non-academic impact has the potential to: unconsciously dissuade women from pursuing more masculinised types of impact; act as a barrier to how female researchers mobilise their research evidence; as well as limit the recognition female researchers gain as excellent and therefore trustworthy sources of evidence.

The aim of this paper was not to criticise the panellists and researchers for expressing gendered perspectives, nor to present evidence about how researchers are unduly influenced by gender bias. The results shown do not support either of these views. However, the aim of this paper was to acknowledge how gender bias in research Impact generation can lead to a panel culture dominated by academics that translate the implicit and explicit biases within academia that influence its evaluation. This paper raises an important question regarding what we term the ‘Impact a-gender’, which outlines a mechanism in which gender bias feeds into the generation and evaluation of a research criterion, which is not traditionally associated with a hard, metrics-masculinised output from research. Along with other techniques used to combat unconscious bias in research evaluation, simply by identifying, and naming the issue, this paper intends to combat its ill effects through a community-wide discussions as a mechanism for developing tools to mitigate its wider effect if left unchecked or merely accepted as ‘acceptable’. In addition, it is suggested that government and funding organisations explicitly refer to the impact a-gender as part of their wider EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) agendas towards minimising the influence of unconscious bias in research impact and evaluation.

Data availability

Data is available upon request subject to ethical considerations such as consent so as not to compromise the individual privacy of our participants.

Change history

19 may 2020.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

For the purposes of this paper, when the text refers to non-academic, societal impact, or the term ‘Impact’ we are referring to the change and effect as defined by REF2014/2021 and the larger conceptualisation of impact that is generated through knowledge exchange and engagement. In this way, the paper refers to a broad conceptualisation of research impact that occurs beyond academia. This allows a distinction between Impact as central to this article’s contribution, as opposed to academic impact, and general word ‘impact’.

Impact scholars or those who are ‘good at impact’ are often equated with applied researchers.

One might interpret this as meaning ‘economic impact’.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leaders Programme (ES/K008897/2). We would also like to acknowledge their peers for offering their views on the paper in advance of publication and in doing so thank Dr. Richard Watermeyer, University of Bath, Professor Paul Wakeling, University of York and Dr. Gabrielle Samuel, Kings College London.

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Chubb, J., Derrick, G.E. The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation. Palgrave Commun 6 , 72 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0438-z

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5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

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Opinion | This Women’s History Month, let’s invest in…

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Opinion | This Women’s History Month, let’s invest in gender equality

Today, nearly 2.4 billion women do not have the same economic rights as men. progress is long overdue..

On International Women’s Day, March 8, the United Nations called for the world to “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress” as the best way to increase economic growth and build more prosperous, equitable societies.

The U.N. challenged its members, starting this week, to fully fund their commitments on gender equality. “We cannot continue to miss out on the gender-equality dividend. “More than 100 million women and girls could be lifted out of poverty if governments prioritized education and family planning, fair and equal wages, and expanded social benefits,” according to the U.N. “And closing gender employment gaps could boost gross domestic product per capita by 20 percent across all regions.”

Gender equity and women’s financial inclusion and growth also are keys to reducing global poverty. In today’s world, 700 million people live in extreme poverty — surviving on less than $2.15 per day. More than half are children. One in every 10 women lives in such severe conditions. The U.N. warns that “immediate action is crucial” to prevent over 342 million women and girls living in poverty by 2030.

Many local nonprofits are taking that immediate action, as part of an ambitious global effort to eliminate extreme poverty. COVID-19 and climate shocks have set back progress toward that goal, but the goal remains, and should be achievable in our lifetimes. Sounds improbable? So did the successful 1990-2013 worldwide effort to cut extreme poverty in half. That enabled 1 billion people to escape extreme poverty.

Such profound poverty is a worldwide problem. It’s poignantly evident in San Diego’s tent encampments, but much of our local poverty is invisible. One in 10 San Diegans — 335,000 people — lives below the poverty line, according to a 2023 San Diego Foundation report. That includes about 86,000 children— enough to fill 3,000 classrooms. Every day, close to 277,000 San Diegans struggle to put their next meal on the table.

Solutions are available. According to the World Bank, “In the long term, jobs and employment are the surest way to reduce poverty and inequity.” But only 61 percent of women worldwide are in the labor force, versus 90 percent of men. Nearly 2.4 billion women do not have the same economic rights as men.

For 20 years, San Diego-based Women’s Empowerment International, or WE, has envisioned a world without poverty, in which women are empowered, uplifted and equal partners with their male counterparts. Toward that goal, WE has funded over $2.5 million in effective poverty-alleviation projects in 10 countries, including the U.S.

WE partners with nonprofits whose projects are well designed and managed, with documented impact. WE-funded grants help women qualify for jobs and start businesses, primarily through modest loans and training. Repaid loans are reissued, so each loan can benefit hundreds of hardworking women who seek opportunity, not charity.

Women typically invest a higher proportion of earned income into their families, households and communities, compared to men. And, as she moves up the economic ladder, a mother’s investment in her family’s health, education and nutrition can help break a multigenerational cycle of poverty.

From Honduras to Uganda, Haiti to Puerto Rico, and in Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador, a $150 loan can launch successful in-home grocery stores, textile weaving, roadside food stalls, livestock businesses and small farms. Reliable income from employment and sustainable businesses gives families the financial security they need, as one client framed it, “to live under the umbrella of constant chaos.” It is that chaos — and lack of opportunity — that drive people from their homelands.

Locally, WE has partnered with five nonprofits to help women and girls build financial security. For example, WE’s funding to the International Rescue Committee in San Diego has helped women, primarily from immigrant and refugee communities, launch and expand over 1,300 local businesses.

Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva, the World Bank’s global director of Poverty and Equity, says, “Countries cannot adequately address poverty and inequality without also improving people’s well-being, including more equitable access to health, education, and basic infrastructure. Empowering women, girls and youth will maximize impact across communities and generations.”

He concludes, “A world free of poverty on a livable planet is in our line of sight. But it can only happen if we take action now.” San Diego nonprofits have stepped up to this challenge. Please support them.

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Thailand’s Legislature Approves Same-Sex Marriage

The bill, which needs the king’s endorsement to become law, underscores Thailand’s status as a relative haven in Asia for L.G.B.T.Q. people.

By Pirada Anuwech and John Yoon

Pirada Anuwech reported from Bangkok.

Lawmakers in Thailand voted on Tuesday to approve a marriage equality bill, a move that puts the country on a clear path to becoming the first in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.

Thailand’s Senate passed the bill by 130 votes to 4, with some abstentions, on Tuesday afternoon. It was approved by the House of Representatives in March. The legislation would become law after it is reviewed by a Senate committee and the Constitutional Court and receives royal assent from the king , a formality that is widely expected to be granted.

“After 20 years of trying to legalize this matter,” the activist Plaifa Kyoka Shodladd, 18, said in the Senate chamber after the vote, “finally, love wins.”

The bill’s passage underscores Thailand’s status as a relative haven for gay couples in Asia. Only Taiwan and Nepal have legalized same-sex marriage.

While India came close to doing so last year, the Supreme Court deferred the decision to Parliament. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken strongly against legalizing gay marriage.

In some Asian countries, gay sex is a criminal offense. Indonesia, where gay marriage is illegal, made extramarital sex illegal in 2022. In 2019, Brunei made gay sex punishable with death by stoning . It later said it would not carry out executions , after widespread international protest.

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New 2X Challenge announces US$20 billion target for investments for women

A multilateral coalition of public and private sector investors yesterday pledged to invest US$20 billion in women’s economic empowerment over the next three years, under the 2X Challenge.

The announcement came at the close of the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Italy, with the official communique  affirming support from among the grouping’s development and multilateral finance institutions:

“Recognising the success of the 2X Challenge, we welcome the new collective commitment by our Development and Multilateral Finance Institutions and other members of 2X Global, to invest at least USD 20 billion in gender lens investing in developing countries, encouraging investments at the nexus of gender and climate finance.

We call upon other public and private actors to join the next three-year 2X Challenge, advancing measurable changes and financing directed to women’s empowerment.”

This will be the third edition of the 2X Challenge, which was first launched at the G7 Summit 2018 in Canada, as a commitment from the G7 development finance institutions (DFIs) to mobilise US$3 bn in gender lens investments between 2018 to 2020.

The first Challenge significantly surpassed that target, raising more than US$11 bn. A new target of US$15 bn was set at the G7 Summit 2021 in the United Kingdom and was also subsequently surpassed with US$16.3 bn raised between 2021 to 2022. As of 2024, more than US$33.6 bn in gender lens investments have been mobilised under the 2X Challenge.

The 2X Challenge 2024-2027 marks the first time that private investors will be a part of the initiative, which has expanded to include the full spectrum of capital providers.

Seven private sector participants have already committed to the 2X Challenge - they are: Deetken Impact, the Global Innovation Fund, I&P Investisseurs & Partenaires, Developing World Markets (DWM), Advance Global Capital, Global Gender-Smart Fund (GGSF), run by Innpact and Sarona Asset Management.

Jessica Espinoza, Chief Executive Officer of 2X Global , the independent organisation which runs the Challenge, hailed this new phase in the initiative: “This is really a significant milestone in the journey of the 2X Challenge - something which we’ve hoped for and worked towards making a reality. Having both public and private capital providers on board for the Challenge represents an extraordinary opportunity to mobilise even more gender-smart capital for women, unlocking their potential and driving economic growth. Combining the resources and expertise from both the public and private sectors means we can amplify our impact as we strive to close the gender gap in finance.”

EIB Group President Nadia Calviño said: “ The 2X Challenge's success proves the power of gender-smart investing in building a fairer and more prosperous society for all. I'm proud that the European Investment Bank Group led the way as the first Multilateral Development Bank to adopt these criteria.  It's inspiring to see other, especially now private partners too, follow suit. With our new ambitious target, I look forward to driving more investments that empower women and promote gender equality."

A range of DFIs and MDBs have pledged their support for the 2X Challenge 2024-2027. They are:

• Asian Development Bank
• British International Investment (United Kingdom)
• Belgian Investment Company for Developing countries (Belgium)
• CDP Development Finance (Italy)
• DEG - Deutsche Investitions- Und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (Germany)
• U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (United States)
• European Investment Bank - EIB
•  FinDev Canada (Canada)
• Finnfund (Finland)
• FMO Entrepreneurial Development Bank (Netherlands)
• International Finance Corporation
• Investment Fund for Developing Countries (Denmark)
• Japan Bank for International Cooperation (Japan)
• Japan International Cooperation Agency (Japan)
• Norfund (Norway)
• Development Bank of Austria - OeEB (Austria)
• Proparco (France) and;
• Swedfund (Sweden)
• Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets (SIFEM)

Under the 2X Challenge, investments are qualified using the 2X Criteria, the framework which underpins the Challenge and which has become widely used as the global industry standard for GLI. Participating investors submit their qualified gender lens investments through the Challenge platform, powered by Equilo .

The Case for Investing in Women

• If women and men were to simply participate equally as entrepreneurs,  global GDP could rise by 3-6% , boosting the world economy by US $2.5-5 trillion.
• The European Investment Bank estimates that greater gender diversity in the workforce could lead to a  potential increase of 26% of annual global GDP and US $160 trillion of human capital wealth, and could enhance business performance by 15%.
• Over 10 years of investing, companies with a female founder performed 63% better than those with all-male founding teams.
• In a study of Russell 1000 companies , Glenmede Investment Management found that firms with greater gender diversity (defined as: female CEO or Chair; greater than 20% women on the board; and greater than 25% women in management) outperformed with greater return and less risk.

Background information

The European Investment Bank (ElB) is the long-term lending institution of the European Union, owned by its Member States. It finances sound investments that contribute to EU policy objectives . EIB projects bolster competitiveness, drive innovation, promote sustainable development, enhance social and territorial cohesion, and support a just and swift transition to climate neutrality.

The EIB Group aims to embed gender equality and in particular women’s economic empowerment in its business model and is also committed to driving gender equality in its workplace. The EIB financed a total of 63 projects across the globe in 2023 that significantly contributed to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment, providing €5.8 billion of investment, more than half of which also supported climate action.

About 2X Global

2X Global  is a membership and field-building organisation focused on unlocking gender-smart capital at scale. We engage the full spectrum of investment actors, capital providers, and intermediaries working in public and private markets, across both developed and emerging economies towards this mission. Through a broad and diverse set of activities we activate and engage our global community to advance intersectional investment agendas, scale the field, shift mindsets, and facilitate capital deployment.

About the 2X Challenge

The 2X Challenge was founded by the G7 Development Finance Institutions as a call to action to shift more capital towards investments that empower women in developing countries to access entrepreneurship and leadership opportunities, quality jobs, and products and services that enhance their economic participation.

Related pages

• Gender equality and women’s economic empowerment

Anne-Laure Gaffuri

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More press releases

The eib adopts the 2x challenge criteria to increase its impact on gender equality.

The EIB has today signed up to endorsing the 2X Challenge, a commitment from the development finance institutions (DFIs) of the G7 to mobilise $3 billion by 2020 in investments that contribute to women’s economic empowerment in developing countries.

Boosting gender equality around the world: EIB expands SheInvest initiative and strengthens cooperation with Development Bank of Rwanda

Speaking at the Finance in Common Summit in Abidjan, Thomas Östros, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank (EIB), announced the extension of the Bank’s SheInvest initiative to mobilise another €2 billion of gender-responsive investment across Africa, Asia and Latin America. In less than three years since the launch of SheInvest at the end of 2019, the EIB has mobilised a total of €2 billion of investment to boost gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in Africa, together with its partners on the continent and through Team Europe.

SheInvest - new initiative to mobilise EUR 1 billion for women across Africa

The EIB has launched SheInvest, a new initiative to boost gender equality and female economic empowerment. The aim is to mobilise EUR 1 billion of investment that can benefit millions of women across Africa with better access to finance and by making sustainable infrastructure services and products work for them. This initiative was launched simultaneously at the Africa Investment Forum in Johannesburg and at the EIB headquarters in Luxembourg.

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To celebrate the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3 December, the EIB organises a full week of events to promote exchanges on disability inclusion with staff and expert guests. Diversity is the essence of humanity and a core value of the European Union. As the EU bank, we are committed to promote diversity and inclusion in everything we do.

United Nations

Unodc rosaf.

Ensuring justice is truly fair: First symposium in Mozambique on gender mainstreaming in the justice system

©  Centre for Legal and Judicial Training

Maputo (Mozambique), 12 June 2024  – “ The justice system is where one expects there to be no injustice, ” stressed Elisa Boerekamp, Director of the Centre for Legal and Judicial Training Centre of Mozambique (CFJJ).

Under this principle, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and CFJJ, together with other international partners, hosted the first-ever symposium on mainstreaming gender in the justice system in Mozambique.

From 10-12 June 2024, over 150 representatives from diverse sectors – including judges, prosecutors, police officers, criminal investigators, lawyers, prison officials, public defenders, activists, researchers, and academics – gathered in Maputo for this capacity-building event.

" Adjudicating with a gender perspective means understanding and considering the inequalities and discrimination that affect women, ensuring that justice is truly fair and accessible to all, without exception,” said H.E. Minister of Justice of Mozambique, Helena Kida, who opened the event.

“On several occasions, cases of domestic violence and inheritance disputes have been adjudicated in ways that not only perpetuate discrimination against women, but also jeopardize their physical and moral integrity. This tells us that we have not yet achieved equality, ” warned Kida, calling for joint efforts to eliminate inequalities in treatment and to ensure access to legal services.

Panellists, among which international experts from UNODC, presented on a wide range of issues. These included the impact of stereotypes in judicial proceedings, the intersection of gender and human trafficking, challenges in addressing domestic violence and sexual harassment, and the gendered dimensions of corruption and organized crime, among many others.

A prosecutor working in Pemba, in northern Mozambique, presented a dilemma: “ Let’s look at women involved in terrorism acts in Cabo Delgado . S ome might say , ‘They committed the crime’ , but others argue that they can, in fact,  be victims , because many times these women join terrorist groups not of their own free will, but because they were kidnapped . If they  are held criminally responsible, are we revictimi zing  these victim s ? ” The symposium provided a crucial platform to discuss overcoming such legal and judicial paradoxes.

The event also served as a platform to raise awareness about the specific vulnerabilities and needs of female inmates and the importance of rehabilitation and resocialization programs, featuring a performance by a musical group from the National Prison Service of Mozambique, who also actively contributing to the discussions – an important resocialization initiative in itself. Representatives of the LGBTQIA+ community also attended, performing a cultural show at the symposium's launch.

The symposium concluded on a high note with the adoption of a proposal urging standardized judicial procedures for cases involving women and girls, to be submitted for approval by the Supreme Court.

Additionally, the Centre extended a public invitation to both speakers and attendees to submit essays for an upcoming book on the topic, consolidated insights and perspectives shared throughout the event.

CFJJ hopes that this symposium will be the first of many, serving as a permanent platform for monitoring progress and trends and to continuously improve practices and methodologies.

“ The quality of the discussions and the level of engagement by stakeholders over the past three days have been truly encouraging. This demonstrates that  mainstreaming gender in Mozambique’s justice system is not only possible but also attainable ,” congratulated Antonio de Vivo, Head of the UNODC Office in Mozambique, at the event’s close.

“ As UNODC, we remain committed to supporting our partners in achieving this important goal .”

More information

This activity was made possible thanks to the generous funding of the Kingdom of Norway.

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