research paper on gender discrimination in education

• Reference Manager
• Simple TEXT file

People also looked at

Editorial article, editorial: gender equality and women’s empowerment in education.

• 1 Department of Specific Didactics, Faculty of Education, University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain
• 2 Department of Educational Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Editorial on the Research Topic Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Education

Current scholarly literature shows that gender inequalities are still present in the process of curricular decision making and teacher practices. These inequalities are expressed through the selection of educational content, the application of methodological strategies, the selection of teaching resources, interpersonal relationships, specific task assignments, or even seating choices within the classroom. These ongoing gender-related issues drive the need for teachers to receive specific and transversal training in this area. Such trainings should be aimed at revealing gender relations as a type of power relationship for the promotion of social change.

The literature in the field of teacher training indicates that the maintenance of gender stereotypes and biases in teacher discourses and practices reinforces the sex-gender system and, consequently, inequalities. Further research is therefore still needed to study the discourses that emerged from the teaching practices around gender. Moreover, research in this field should encourage critical reflection on teacher training plans and the teaching curriculum itself.

The adoption of coeducational approaches and the promotion of education in and for gender equality entails transforming the traditional teaching curriculum to overcome the androcentric constructive bases of historical, social, and literary knowledge. Such transformation would also motivate the incorporation of “polysemic views” in the understanding and interpretation of social reality. Even today, it is common to recognize in mainstream social communication discourses, such as advertising or audio-visual artistic expressions, clear imagery of unquestionable, allegedly identarian gender cultural patterns. The overcoming or relativization of these patterns should necessarily go through the reexamination of curricular content.

The eradication of gender inequalities requires not only the integration of all the voices that have built social knowledge but also the overcoming of gender stereotypes within the education system. It is thus essential to identify the shortcomings of teachers’ training and encourage gender studies as a requisite for their curricula in order to achieve inclusive, plural, and diverse models for teaching practices.

This Research Topic includes 15 manuscripts, from nine prestigious international academic institutions (Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Finland, Germany, Spain, and Sweden) on important topics related to the inclusion of gender inequalities in teacher training, and the analysis of this concept in the official school curriculum, materials, and teacher practices.

The experiences and socio-cultural constructions of the concept of gender constitute the explanatory core of the research problem addressed in “ The Challenge of Women’s Inclusion for Novel Teachers. Case Study in a Teacher Educator Public University ”. This research analyzes the representations of novice teachers of History and Social Sciences on the presence and absence of women’s historical experience in their teaching practices. The research demonstrates the permanence of positivist and androcentric epistemological approaches in the teaching of History, and highlights the urgency of addressing gender inequalities as one of the most pressing social problems of our contemporaneity. In this vein, “ Classical Sociology Through the Lens of Gendered Experiences ” seeks to promote discussion on the mediating role of gendered experiences in classical sociology’s theories of the move towards modern society. This study evidences the constructive relativity of social knowledge and its consequences for sociological teaching and learning.

From the conception of a socio-constructive nature of sexism, the research “ Intersections Around Ambivalent Sexism: Internalized Homonegativity, Resistance to Heteronormativity and Other Correlates ” explores the levels of internalized sexism and homonegativity, and the resistance to heteronormativity of Spanish psychology students. Its results are consistent with those obtained in the study “ Evaluation of Sexist and Prejudiced Attitudes Toward Homosexuality in Spanish Future Teachers: Analysis of Related Variables ”, focused on the analysis of sexist and prejudiced attitudes toward homosexuality of future Spanish teachers. Both studies show the influence of factors such as political ideology, gender identity and sexual orientation on students’ beliefs and perceptions. They also point out the need to advance in the eradication of discrimination based on sex and sexual diversity in the training of future professionals, and the implementation of intersectional approaches to understand the sexist construct.

The consequences of the invisibility of female referents in education and, therefore, of models on which to build plural and empowered identities, derives from the limitations inherent in traditional gender expectations and attributions. The educational hegemony of these attributions, the basis of the study “ Nine Contradictory Observations About Girls’ and Boys’ Upbringing and Education—The Strength-Based Approach as the Way to Eliminate the Gender Gap ”, continue to limit the potential expectations and talents of girls. Through “nine contradictory observations”, this article directs its proposal towards a “strength-based approach” as a way to eradicate the gender gap. Along these lines, “ Mindfulness and Empathy: Mediating Factors and Gender Differences in a Spanish Sample ” highlights the lack of studies aimed at analyzing the potential moderating role of gender in the development of empathic skills.

The research production around the gender gap and gender-segregated differentiation seems not to have received the desired impact in educational social spaces. From this perspective, on the one hand, the article “ Differentiations in Visibility-Male Advantages and Female Disadvantages in Gender-Segregated Programmes ” starts from the differential articulation of inter- and intra-group visibility, by gender, in students, underrepresented in their programmes. On the other hand, the works “ Distributing Feedback Wisely to Empower Girls in STEM ” and “ Girls in STEM: Is It a Female Role-Model Thing? ” highlight the still distant presence of women in the development of STEM professions, a circumstance originating in the educational context and influenced, therefore, by traditional gender models and by social factors that have an impact on the construction of personal identities, as also evidenced by the work “ What Dominates the Female Class Identification? Evidence From China ”.

These constructed identities are revealed in the underestimation of the self-efficacy of secondary school students regarding their competences in STEM subjects, as shown in the work “ Parent and Teacher Depictions of Gender Gaps in Secondary Student Appraisals of Their Academic Competences ”. Consequently, the analysis of self-efficacy, expectations of results, interest in STEM areas and the intervention in the classrooms of plural female role models are proposed as necessary working spaces to redirect this trend. These results are completed with the analysis of the potential influence of gender stereotypes in biased student evaluations of teaching in “ Gender Stereotypes in Student Evaluations of Teaching ”.

From the area of Brazilian physical education, “ Gender Participation and Preference: A Multiple-Case Study on Teaching Circus at PE in Brazilians Schools ” reports on the elective influence of Primary Education teachers in the assignment of circus physical activities according to gender, extensible to the sports activities of traditional teaching. In order to advance in critical and emancipatory training proposals in gender equality in this area, “ Breaking Cultural ‘Taboos’ About the Body and Gender: Brazilian Students’ Emancipation From a Thematic Perspective of School Physical Education ” stresses the importance of teaching programs oriented to the cultural construction of the differential concept of the body. From this perspective, the work “ REFLECT—A Teacher Training Program to Promote Gender Equality in Schools ” emphasizes the hegemonic role of socializing agents in maintaining the status quo of gender stereotypes in education and in the future professional development of men and women. As a response to the permanence of the sex-gender system, and to the evidence of the influence of teachers’ attitudes and practices in the promotion of truly coeducational educational environments, this program, aimed at future teachers of Secondary Education, aims to contribute, in a sustainable way, to gender equality from the educational spaces of subjective action (such as self-efficacy), and objective action (teaching methods and knowledge).

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

This Research Topic was completed with the main support of the Research Group Recognized in Didactics of History and Social Sciences (DHISO) (cod. 137), directed by Prof. Dr. Delfín Ortega-Sánchez (University of Burgos, Spain). Likewise, it has also been carried out within the framework of the projects Teach and learn to interpret contemporary problems and conflicts. What do social sciences contribute to the formation of a critical global citizenship? (EDU2016-80145-P), financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spanish Government), and Future Education and Democratic Hope. Rethinking Social Studies Education in changing times (PID2019-107383RB-I00), financed by the Ministry of Science, and Innovation (Spanish Government).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Keywords: gender equality, teacher training, gender representation, gender stereotypes, higher education, primary and secondary education, early childhood education

Citation: Ortega-Sánchez D, Sanz de la Cal E, Ibáñez Quintana J and Borghi B (2022) Editorial: Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Education. Front. Educ. 7:833977. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.833977

Received: 12 December 2021; Accepted: 10 January 2022; Published: 26 January 2022.

Edited and reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Ortega-Sánchez, Sanz de la Cal, Ibáñez Quintana and Borghi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Delfín Ortega-Sánchez, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Education

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List

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

• 2020 GEM REPORT
• Inclusion and education
• Monitoring SDG 4
• Recommendations
• 2020 Webpage
• Press Release
• RELATED PUBLICATIONS
• Gender Report
• Youth Report
• Latin America and the Caribbean
• Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia
• Background papers
• Statistical Tables
• 2019 Report
• 2017/8 Report
• 2016 Report

A new generation: 25 years of efforts for gender equality in education

2020 Gender Report

Credit: Johanna de Tessières / HI

KEY MESSAGES

Over the past 25 years, girls’ access to education has dramatically improved, closing a four percentage point gap in enrolment ratios. In addition, girls have reached or overtaken boys in terms of learning outcomes in reading and mathematics.

However, girls, particularly those with intersecting disadvantages in terms of poverty or disability, still face the worst forms of acute exclusion in the world’s poorest countries.

Education is a critical lever for women’s rights. A focus on education, particularly that of girls, can break the cycle of disadvantage between generations, as children tend to acquire more education than their parents. At the same time, the extent to which parental education determines children’s education, while declining slowly, is still high,which calls for interventions to prevent inequality from persisting.

Gender equality in education cannot be achieved by the education sector alone.Residual negative gender norms in society bring gender bias in education, influencing teachers’ attitudes, subject and career choices, and affect women’s opportunities later in life.

Countries need to focus on making schools more inclusive for all students, whatever their background, ability or identity. This requires better sanitation facilities in schools,greater attention to school-related gender-based violence, including online, and policies encouraging pregnant girls to go back to school. The message of inclusion resonates strongly at a time when COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality.

Inside the Report

• Introduction
• Laws and Policies
• Partnerships

Key findings

There has been a generational leap in access to education for girls over the past 25 years.„.

• Since 1995, the number of girls enrolled in primary and secondary school has risen by 180 million.„
• Globally, equal numbers of girls and boys were enrolled in primary and secondary education in 2018, whereas in 1995 around 90 girls were enrolled for every 100 boys; significant increases in Southern Asia, and India in particular, drove this growth.„
• Female enrolment tripled in tertiary education; at the country level, gender disparity at men’s expense exists in 74% of the countries with data.„
• Between 1995 and 2018, the percentage of countries with gender parity in education rose from 56% to 65% in primary, from 45% to 51% in lower secondary and from 13% to 24% in upper secondary education.„
• Among the 56 countries with data for 2000–18, primary completion rates improved faster for girls than boys. In one-third of the 86 countries with 2013–18 data, girls were more likely to complete primary school than boys.

Girls’ learning outcomes are improving faster than boys’, but new gender gaps are developing in digital literacy skills and a majority of illiterate adults are still women.„

• Girls’ advantage over boys in reading widened in more than half of the 38 countries and territories that took part in PISA in both 2000 and 2018. Girls now perform as well as boys in mathematics in over half of countries and do better than boys in one-quarter of countries.„
• Disparity in ICT skills is emerging. Among 10 low- and middle-income countries with detailed data, women are less likely to have used a basic arithmetic formula in a spreadsheet in the 7 poorest countries, while parity exists in the 3 richest countries.„
• The share of women among illiterate youth has decreased since around 2005, especially in Eastern and South-eastern Asia. But the share of illiterate adult women has remained constant for the past 20 years at around 63%. And in 2018, fewer than 80 adult women were literate for every 100 adult men in 12 countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite progress, girls continue to face the worst forms of exclusion.„

• Globally, three-quarters of children of primary school age who may never set foot in school are girls.„In 2018, fewer than 90 girls were enrolled for every 100 boys in 7 countries in primary, 14 countries in lower secondary and 23 countries in upper secondary education.„
• Fewer than 80 girls for every 100 boys completed primary in 4 countries, lower secondary in 15 countries and upper secondary in 22 countries.

Gender interacts with other disadvantages to exacerbate exclusion from education.„

• In at least 20 countries, hardly any poor, rural young woman complete upper secondary school.„
• In 24 countries participating in PISA 2018, over 70% of poor boys did not achieve the minimum reading proficiency level.„
• The most disadvantaged women are further left behind in terms of literacy skills. In 59 countries, women aged 15 to 49 from the poorest households are 4 times more likely to be illiterate than those from the richest households.„
• Women with disabilities tend to be particularly disadvantaged. In Mozambique, 49% of men with disabilities can read and write, compared with 17% of women with disabilities.

Some subjects are still male-dominated, which affects equality in work and adult learning opportunities.„

• Globally, the share of females in TVET enrolment declined from 45% in 1995 to 42% in 2018.
• Globally, the percentage of females studying engineering, manufacturing and construction or ICT is below 25% in over two-thirds of countries.„
• Gender segregation by field of study constrains girls’ choice of career. In OECD countries only 14% of girls who were top performers in science or mathematics expected to work in science and engineering, compared with 26% of top-performing boys. Women account for less than 1% of the applicant pool for technical jobs in artificial intelligence and data science in Silicon Valley.„
• Previous learning experience, personal disposition towards learning, life circumstances and structural barriers all have an impact on whether adults participate in education. Women in European countries are almost twice as likely as men not to participate in adult education for family-related reasons.

Policy interventions can reduce the chance of education disadvantage being passed to the next generation.„

• The gender gap in the share of children who have attained a higher education level than their parents – absolute intergenerational mobility – decreased for each 10-year cohort born from the 1940s to the 1980s. Globally, a slightly higher percentage of daughters (52%) than sons (51%) had higher education levels than their parents in the 1980s cohort, although mobility is still lower for girls in low- and lower-middle income countries.
• Children’s education relies less and less on the education of their parents – relative intergenerational mobility – although girls’ years of schooling are still more aligned to their parents’ than boys’, and particularly to that of their mothers.„
• Girls are more influenced by their mothers’ than their fathers’ education in low- and middle-income countries. In the cohort of girls born in the 1980s, an extra year of maternal education leads to seven extra months of education in low-income countries.„
• Policy interventions can reduce the extent to which education disadvantage is passed on to the next generation. Potentially successful interventions include quotas in tertiary enrolment for vulnerable groups, scholarships and cash transfers, and removal of user fees in primary education. The correlation between mothers’ education and their children’s fell by 12.5% when user fees were lifted.

Increasing numbers of laws and policies promotes gender equality in education on paper, but still often fails in practice.„

• Globally, 105 countries have ratified the 1960 UNESCO Convention Against Discrimination in Education and 23 have signed since 1995.„
• Education ministries have sponsored laws promoting gender equality in 50% of countries and policies to that effect in 42%. About 46% of countries have legislation and 58% policies promoting gender equality in education under other ministries’ leadership.

Strong political commitment has reduced early pregnancy rates and provided education for pregnant girls and young parents.„

• The prevalence of early pregnancy fell by one-third between 1995 and 2020, from some 60 to 40 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19. „The share of women aged 20 to 24 who married before age 18, a factor contributing to early pregnancy, fell from 25% in 1995 to 20% in 2013–19.
• „In Argentina, a holistic approach combining two laws, flexible learning programmes, nurseries in schools, re-entry programmes for vulnerable children and non-formal alternative secondary education programmes has helped protect pregnant girls’ and young parents’ right to education; meanwhile the adolescent fertility rate fell from 61 in 1995 to 49 in 2018.
• Activism and accountability mechanisms can help protect pregnant girls’ right to go to school. In Sierra Leone, official policy in 2015 banned pregnant girls from school. In 2019, after several years of activism, the ban was ruled discriminatory by the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States and was lifted.„
• Multisectoral cooperation and ties between government departments help address the intersecting needs of many girls and young women of child-bearing age. In the United Kingdom, measures to address these needs included a protective legal framework, a teenage pregnancy unit and strategy, better childcare, awareness-raising programmes, advocacy aimed at young men, and support from the non-government sector. These measures helped reduce the number of conceptions per 1,000 15- to 17-year-olds from 42 to 18 between 1995 and 2017.

The prevalence of early pregnancy can be linked to lack of access to sexual and reproductive health education.„

• Ambiguous language in laws and weak accountability in enforcement can enable schools to avoid teaching comprehensive sexuality education. Argentina made the subject compulsory in 2006, but only 16 out of 23 provinces adhered to the policy or passed their own legislation on the subject, likely because of opposition among religious schools.
• „In Sierra Leone, the number of married and sexually active 15- to 19-year-old women using contraception doubled from 10% to 20% between 2008 and 2013, but dropped to just 14% in 2019, possibly due to a 2008 decision to end comprehensive sexuality education in schools.„
• Clear guidance on sexuality education can help. In the United Kingdom, relationship and sex education was made compulsory in all secondary schools from 2019. Guides were published to help schools inform and work with parents to overcome resistance.

Gender-responsive school counselling could improve gender balance in subject choices.

• „Counsellors often promote gender stereotypes, which affect students’ education and career choices. A survey of secondary school counsellors in the US state of Wisconsin found that, even though school counsellors believed female students were more likely to succeed in mathematics than males, they were less likely to recommend mathematics over English to female students.„
• Clear gender-responsive strategies are needed to redress the balance. Botswana has a comprehensive guidance and counselling programme and a Gender Reference Committee but lacks an overall framework on ways to help girls and women who wish to pursue TVET and STEM subjects.„
• A lack of gender-specific measures in counselling and career advice at the state level in Germany means the increase of the share of girls in STEM subjects between 1999 and 2017 is more likely related to an online information hub on STEM for girls and collaboration between ministries of women, youth, labour and social affairs.„
• National strategies on TVET and STEM in the United Arab Emirates make no reference to gender or gender-responsive counselling practices and women are still under-represented in these fields of study.

Countries still produce textbooks with gender-based stereotypes and limited references to women and girls.„

• The share of females in secondary school English language textbook text and images was 44% in Malaysia and Indonesia, 37% in Bangladesh and 24% in Punjab province, Pakistan.„
• Partnerships and participatory processes at all phases of textbook development and delivery need to be in place for successful reform.
• „In Comoros, textbooks still contain gender stereotypes, partly because textbook developers have not received training or sensitization.„
• Ethiopia has shown commitment to gender equality in education, including through textbook revision. Yet stereotypes remain, which can be attributed to women being excluded from textbook review and development, lack of training on processes, and insufficient commitment from authorities in challenging discriminatory norms.„
• Nepal has made materials more gender-sensitive by introducing guidance for gender-responsive learning materials and a gender expert to review content, as well as gender audits and formal reviews of all materials every five years, although some of these measures have not been fully implemented.„
• In Europe, 23 out of 49 countries do not address sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly in their curricula.

Gender inequality exists in teacher recruitment and promotion to leadership, and more gender-sensitive teacher education is needed.„

• Women make up 94% of teachers in pre-primary, 66% of teachers in primary, 54% in secondary and 43% in tertiary education.„
• There is a glass ceiling for women trying to attain leadership positions. In a case study of schools in Brasilia, Brazil, 75% had only male candidates for school leadership positions. For the past 25 years, all federal education ministers have been men. In Bulgaria, just 5 of 96 education ministers in 140 years have been women.„
• Teachers still expect girls and boys to have different academic abilities, which affects academic outcomes. In Italy, girls assigned to teachers with implicit gender bias underperformed in mathematics and chose less demanding secondary schools, following teachers’ recommendations.

Millions of schools are not inclusive, often due to poor infrastructure and unsafe learning environments.„

• Globally, over a fifth of primary schools had no single-sex basic sanitation facilities in 2018. Some 335 million girls attend primary and secondary schools lacking facilities essential for menstrual hygiene.„
• Even when single-sex sanitation facilities exist, they may not be accessible to all students: less than 1 in 10 schools with improved sanitation had accessible facilities for students with disabilities in El Salvador, Fiji, Tajikistan, the United Republic of Tanzania and Yemen.

School-related gender-based violence impedes inclusive education of good quality.„

• Girls are more likely to experience verbal and sexual harassment, abuse and violence, while boys are more often subject to physical violence.„
• Violence is often directed at those whose gender expression does not fit binary gender norms. In the United Kingdom, 45% of lesbian, gay and bisexual students and 64% of transgender students were bullied in schools.„
• The rapid advancement of technology has increased risks of threats, intimidation and harassment. In European Union countries, one in five 18- to 29-year-olds reported having experienced cyber-harassment.

Change in education will not happen until unequal gender norms in society are stamped out.„

• Gender discrimination was considered the most important global problem by 8% of adults in the latest World Values Survey. A return to traditional values is an increasing threat to women’s rights. The proportion of people with moderate and intense bias against gender equality increased between 2005–09 and 2010–14 in 15 of 31 countries surveyed.„
• Attitudes towards female foeticide have not improved with education. In urban India, the male to female child sex ratio is inversely associated with female education.„
• Gender discrimination is a threat to inclusive education. In 11 former republics of the Soviet Union and in Mongolia, the level of discrimination in social institutions is 24%, on average, which has reduced women’s average years of schooling by 16%.„
• Parents’ gender stereotypes can stand in the way of inclusion. In Sokoto, Nigeria, some parents believe access to secondary school would prevent girls from marrying. In Fiji, parents expect boys to assist with cash crop farming, which can lead them to disengage with school.

Social media resources

Advertisement

Systematic literature review of digital resources to educate on gender equality

• Published: 02 February 2023
• Volume 28 , pages 10639–10664, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Alma Gloria Barrera Yañez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9879-2111 1 ,
• Cristina Alonso-Fernández 2 &
• Baltasar Fernández-Manjón 1  

2756 Accesses

2 Citations

6 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Violence and discrimination against women are serious problems that affect today's society regardless of culture or social environment. Educational and government programs addressing these gender issues are difficult to scale up, insufficient or, in some cases, nonexistent. Digital resources can contribute to address discrimination against women and different technological initiatives are being carried out around the world. Videogames and digital resources have proven their effectiveness as tools to educate, prevent and raise awareness about social problems. This article presents a systematic literature review of digital resources such as videogames, apps and simulations that address gender issues including violence and stereotypes. Throughout the review, we analyze multiple characteristics of the resources found (development tools, platforms, location, target audience) to classify the studies found. The main goal of this review is to present the status of gender-focused digital resources, their evaluation studies, including the metrics used and samples, as well as the acceptance and impact of their application. Most of the studies reviewed aimed to raise awareness about gender-based violence using serious games targeted at teenagers. For the resources evaluated, pre-post questionnaires were commonly used. However, many of the projects reviewed did not have evaluation studies or the resources were not openly available, thus limiting their massive application and their potential impact on society. We consider that our results provide a starting point to better understand the role of digital resources in raising awareness about gender issues, highlighting their current limitations, and providing recommendations for future research in gender-based digital resources.

Similar content being viewed by others

Know Me: Promoting Gender Equality in Education Through an Interactive Digital Narrative

Fighting the Gender Gap in ICT

Digital games pre-schoolers play: parental mediation and examination of educational content

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Gender stereotypes, gender violence and discrimination against women are serious societal problems frequently ignored or not adequately addressed nowadays. Among the different types of discrimination that exist (United Nations, 2022 ), this work focuses on discrimination against women, due to its social relevance and prevalence among different countries and cultures. This is a type of discrimination of large reach, as women roughly represent half of the world’s population, and time span, as it is not of recent appearance. These sexist behaviors are present in all cultures and social environments. These issues are especially serious in educational institutions, which commonly lack effective protocols to address them (Bailey & Graves, 2016 ).

Gender stereotypes are social and cultural constructs that assign specific characteristics to individuals, based on their sex and the attitudes historically associated with it. For females, stereotypes generally reduce social value and attack the individual's self-esteem. The so-called gender roles refer to the roles assigned by society and establish the norm of how an individual should act, depending on his or her sex. These roles depend on stereotypes and aim to regulate the associated or expected behaviors of an individual, as well as the interactions with other members of society (Heilman, 2012 ).

Among the many gender issues that women face, violence is one of the most alarming. In its multiple forms (sexual, economic, physical, labor, institutional, etc.), it attacks different aspects of the victims, including their physical and mental health, economy, dignity, ability to make decisions for themselves, and self-esteem. According to WHO figures in its 2002 World Report on Violence and Health, with surveys conducted in 48 countries, up to 69% of the women interviewed had been physically assaulted by an intimate partner at some point in their lives (Krug et al., 2002 ). UN Women, the United Nations organization dedicated to promoting gender equality and women's empowerment, estimates that 736 million women globally (nearly one in three) have been subjected to intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their lifetime and less than 40 percent of women who experience violence seek help (UN Women, 2021 ). Gender-based violence can also escalate due to external circumstances; for example, because of the quarantine measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, cases of gender-based violence rose considerably (Pastor-Moreno & Ruíz Pérez, 2021 ).

Gender-related discrimination and violence additionally have a serious impact on children’s development, mainly on those of primary school age, whose formative years define and ingrain the individual's future values, beliefs, and behaviours in society. Gender stereotypes and violence faced daily especially by girls in environments such as school can have detrimental effects including school dropout, depression, low performance, or substance abuse, and even permanent effects on their psychosocial and learning development (OHCHR, 2021 ). Constant exposure to the media (music, television, social networks) and its hypersexualization only aggravate this problem (Trekels et al., 2018 ). Regardless of women’s age and circumstances, gender-based issues are prevalent and widespread, and need to be made visible and effectively addressed.

Digital resources such as serious games, virtual reality simulations or mobile apps can contribute to address these gender issues, mainly for prevention and awareness. For instance, the mobile application "Girl Rising Footnote 1 " addresses the difficulties girls face when attending school in India, while the app "Sheboard Footnote 2 " uses the predictive text of mobile keyboards to educate on the use of inclusive and gender-neutral language. Both initiatives have proven to have a positive impact among their users (Vyas et al., 2020 ).

Serious games are designed with a formative and educational purpose beyond the playful purposes typically associated with videogames (Djaouti et al., 2011 ; Zhonggen, 2019 ). A wide range of serious games have been effectively used in education, scientific (biotechnology, STEM), medical (health professionals, CPR training), political, or historical domains. Videogames provide an interactive environment that allows serious messages to be conveyed through platforms commonly used by children and teenagers, enriching opportunities for interaction, engagement, and active learning (Horban & Maletska, 2019 ). NGO examples such as Project Tomorrow Footnote 3 reported that in the USA, during 2021, 67% of primary and secondary school principals considered the use of serious videogames and digital tools as an indispensable part of their curricula. Footnote 4 Considering their multiple benefits, once validated, serious games can be effectively used in educational settings (e.g., schools) and can be easily scaled up to obtain a bigger impact than traditional non-digital resources (Boyle et al., 2016 ).

This article presents a systematic literature review of studies presenting serious games and other digital resources addressing gender issues (including stereotypes, violence, etc.). The review studies the educational resources to analyze their characteristics and assess their impact on players. The main goals of this review are:

To present a compilation of existing works on games and interactive digital resources that address gender issues, describing their main characteristics and, if applicable, the evidence on their effectiveness.

To present the current state of research to set an academic and informative precedent for those who are developing or researching games and digital resources to address gender issues.

The rest of the article is structured as follows: Section  2 reviews some related works and the background of the review; Section  3 describes the methodology used for the systematic literature review; Section  4 presents the results obtained which are discussed in Section  5 ; Section  6 states the limitations; and finally, Section  7 summarizes the main conclusions of the literature review.

2 Related work

Multiple types of serious games have been used to address different educational or social problems. There are many examples of serious games created to train or educate in various domains (e.g., STEM, business, health) (Eid et al., 2014 ). Other kinds of serious games are used to address complex scientific problems by transforming the problem into a game, so users contribute to solve the problem simply by playing (e.g., Foldit to find new medicines) (Kleffner et al., 2017 ). Serious games have also been used to increase students' awareness of various social problems (e.g., cyberbullying) (Calvo-Morata et al., 2019 ) or even to change complex behaviors such as prejudice or bias (Gertner et al., 2016 ). However, despite the great variety of existent serious games, we have identified an important gap concerning gender education and we have not found any specific review on the topic.

Regarding gender issues, technology has been used mainly for informative purposes, while there are few interactive or playful approaches that could foster connection or increase participants' interest in these topics. There are mainly awareness campaigns and other actions to combat sexism, counteract gender stereotypes or make women's rights more visible (Sabri et al., 2022 ). Those campaigns are usually funded or supported by NGO or non-profits organizations. For example, "Alerta Machitroll" by the Karisma Foundation (Naranjo Ruiz & Ospina Álvarez, 2021 ) in Spain to visibilize the digital gender-based violence suffered by women, or the "Centro Especializado de Atención a la Violencia" of the DIARQ Foundation in Mexico (Weinstein, 2020 ) aims at the prevention, detection and care of family and gender-based violence. Another example of a non-profit company is John Snow Inc. (JSI) that provides governments around the world with technical and management assistance for different initiatives, including the prevention and awareness of gender violence. Footnote 5

Recently some serious games and other digital resources have started to be used to address gender-based violence and gender-related issues. A relevant initiative is the one of "Jennifer Ann's Group" a non-profit specialized in educating and preventing dating violence (Crecente, 2014 ). They have created and promoted many digital resources (mainly serious games) to raise awareness about dating violence, including titles like Honey Moon, Footnote 6 Another Chance Footnote 7 and Grace's Diary. Footnote 8 Other initiatives addressing gender issues are "Ni más ni menos Footnote 9 (Spain)" or "Spotlight Footnote 10 (worldwide)" that use different approaches, such as trivia to test the user's knowledge on gender issues, usually combined with more traditional approaches, such as community work, fostering independent associations and civil society, or providing support services to victims of gender violence. Another relevant initiative is "Afroes games", a project developed in Africa that uses digital tools to address violence and inequality (Fisher, 2016 ). For instance, they created the videogame "Moraba", Footnote 11 a digital tool that aims to raise awareness about gender violence on the continent (Fisher, 2017 ).

Games to address gender issues may incorporate all features, techniques, and mechanics of serious games in general, to increase empathy, or raise awareness about gender differences like other social issues covered in serious games. While a priori, gender issues can be addressed through serious games like any other, some factors may need to be considered. A potential difference when addressing gender issues may appear from the perspective followed in the game: first-person games may rely on the identification of the player with the game’s character (Dillon, 2013 ) and, if the gender of the game character is different to that of the player, it may cause a lack of identification that affects the game’s purpose. The same may occur if all members of one gender are oversimplified in the game (e.g., women depicted as victims, men as villains), potentially drifting those players away from the game by causing an initial rejection, instead of engaging both male and female players (Sadati & Mitchell, 2021 ). While there also may be potential differences in the preferences between male and female regarding videogame genres, the stereotype that females do not play videogames is not valid (Rugelj & Lapina, 2019 ), therefore, a well-designed game-based approach could be equally effective for both male and female players.

An important issue regarding gender-related serious games and digital resources is that in most cases these resources have not been scientifically validated, and there are no related scientific articles presenting these resources or providing evidence on their effectiveness. To cope with this problem and find such resources, in a previous study a search of general gaming websites was conducted to locate serious games that aimed to educate on a variety of gender topics (Barrera et al., 2020 ). Some of the example games and applications mentioned in this paper come from that general search. Even though multiple resources were found in that study, we still confirmed that most of them did not have related publications validating the resources and/or providing evidence of their effectiveness. Therefore, we decided to carry out this systematic literature review, to find such validated and tested games and digital resources addressing gender issues.

3 Methodology

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on serious games and digital resources that address gender issues, with goals such as awareness, visibility, or support for a more egalitarian gender education, describing their effectiveness and validity. This methodology is based on the PRISMA 2020 protocol (Page et al., 2021 ). The review was performed independently by the authors of this review to try to minimize any possible bias (every result was reviewed by at least 2 researchers).

In this review, we aim to determine the described benefits and identified challenges of using digital resources (e.g., serious games, mobile apps) to raise awareness of gender-related issues (e.g., gender stereotypes, gender inequality, gender-based violence). For that, we analyze the type of resources and mechanics used to address these gender issues, as well as their target audience (e.g., age, socio-cultural context). Regarding the studies concerning their validation or effectiveness, we further analyze the characteristics of such studies including the number of users with whom these games are evaluated, and the accessibility of these tools and their social impact.

3.1 Research questions

To obtain that information, we propose the following research questions:

RQ1. What gender issues are addressed in existing digital resources?

RQ2. What are the target audience and platform of the digital resources?

RQ3. What are the types of digital resources and their characteristics (e.g., mechanics) used to identify and counteract the issues addressed?

RQ4. What instruments are used to conduct the impact analysis of the digital resources Footnote 12 ?

RQ5. What are the characteristics of the samples used in the studies (sample size, ages, geographic location, social context, etc.)?

RQ6. What results have been obtained in the studies?

RQ7. What are the limitations of the studies?

3.2 Data collection

We followed a standard systematic literature review methodology, using a fixed set of queries in a previously identified list of bibliographic databases and clear inclusion/exclusion criteria.

3.2.1 Databases used

We identified and consulted 16 different databases, including some of the main research-oriented databases and specific databases chosen based on their relevance, academic validation, and number of results. The databases consulted are Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Cambridge Journals Online, CIEG UNAM, Dialnet, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Frontiers, IEEE Computer Society Digital Library (CDSL), IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, Oxford University Press (journals), Science Direct, Scopus, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Web of Science and Wiley Online Library. The databases CIEG UNAM and Dialnet were included to consider possible relevant results in Spanish, which is pertinent due to the high rate of gender issues present in Spanish-speaking countries, especially in Latin America (Pérez-de-Guzmán et al., 2019 ). In the specific case of CIEG we considered it relevant since it is a database focused on gender issues. Footnote 13

3.2.2 Search terms

Our search scope is articles written in English or Spanish, so we initially proposed two alternative searches with terms in both languages. The queries include terms related to the digital resource (serious game, and alternative terms for digital resources) combined with terms related to gender-related issues. All searches, when allowed by the database search, are limited to the title, abstract and keywords. In databases that did not allow this filtering automatically, it was performed manually by the authors. All searches were conducted in May 2021.

English search terms:

(“videogame” OR “serious game” OR “educational game” OR “video game” OR “mobile app” OR “educational app” OR “simulation” OR “virtual environment” OR “m-learning” OR “mobile learning” OR “e-learning” OR “game-based learning” OR “digital resource”)

(“gender equality” OR “gender education” OR “gender stereotypes” OR “gender violence” OR “gender roles” OR “gender inequality” OR “gender gap” OR “gender discrimination” OR “gender issues”)

Spanish search terms:

(“videojuego” O “juego serio” O “juego educativo” O “video juego” O “aplicación móvil” O “app educativa” O “simulación” O “realidad virtual” O “aprendizaje móvil” O”aprendizaje electrónico” O “aprendizaje basado en juegos”)

("igualdad de género" O "educación de género" O "estereotipos de género" O "violencia de género" O "roles de género" O "desigualdad de género" O "brecha de género" O “discriminación de género”)

3.2.3 Selection of studies

While several games and digital resources may exist that address gender issues, this review focuses only on those resources described in scientific publications or with some type of academic or formative validation, to ensure that they provide sufficient evidence for analysis. To this end, we established the following inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Inclusion criteria:

Articles published in scientific journals or at research conferences.

Articles that include empirical evidence from studies that evaluate serious games or digital resources on gender-related issues (even if the resource is not available).

Exclusion criteria:

Publications whose full text is not available.

Publications whose language is not English or Spanish.

Publications that focus on gender differences in videogame use (e.g., gender differences playing non-serious videogames).

All searches and study selection were conducted by at least two of the authors independently, and the results were compared to ensure both an adequate search of the different databases and an adequate selection of relevant studies.

3.2.4 Data analysis and extraction

For each of the articles included in the review, we collected the specific data to address each of the proposed research questions, and then conducted a mapping study to categorize the results obtained. Any additional information provided in the studies and considered relevant to the literature review was also collected. We classified the data from the selected studies according to the following measures:

Focus and approach to the gender issue (addressing RQ1)

Target audience and platform (addressing RQ2)

Type of digital resources and features/mechanics (addressing RQ3)

Instruments used to study the impact of the resources, such as pre-post questionnaires (addressing RQ4)

Sampling used in the studies, including sample size, ages, geographic location, social context (addressing RQ5)

Results obtained from the studies (addressing RQ6)

Limitations of the studies (addressing RQ7)

4.1 Studies identified by search terms

The studies were retrieved in May 2021 using the search queries. Some of the selected databases (e.g., Dialnet, JSTOR) did not support the full query, so it was necessary to split it into separate searches and then combine the results. Other databases did not work correctly with the AND and OR operators, so we had to double-check the presence of the terms in the studies.

The total number of studies obtained in the searches performed in the different databases was 6669 articles. Some databases did not provide any results (IEEE Xplore and CIEG UNAM).

4.2 Studies identified by inclusion criteria

The selection of studies was carried out by reviewing the obtained 6669 articles. Although the search yielded many articles, most of them did not meet the inclusion criteria. One of the reasons was the confusion between "gender" and "genre" (referring to videogame genres like shooters, sports, role-playing games / RPGs, etc.) in the results. This was solved (in the absence of adequate filters in the databases) by reviewing each result individually and discarding those with topics unrelated to this research. Another issue was the high number of articles that studied gender differences when using videogames. These articles appeared in the search results as they included terms such as "videogame" and "gender roles” but were discarded because the games did not address any aspect of gender; instead, the gender perspective was only included to measure differences between female and male users when playing the games.

After reading the titles and abstracts of the articles obtained, 188 were selected as possible candidates. Removing the articles that were duplicated in different databases, we obtained 119 unique articles that were subjected to scrutiny to determine their full relevance (or lack thereof). After reading the full text of these articles, the final set of articles included in our literature review contains 36 studies (Fig.  1 ).

Systematic literature review search process

The 36 studies included in the final set were reread and analyzed according to the criteria established in Section  3.2.4 Data analysis. The following section presents the results obtained from that analysis, answering the research questions.

4.3 Analysis results

All selected studies were recent (publication years ranged from 2014 to 2021). The selected articles had been published in journals (22 studies), conferences (12) and workshops (2) and were written in English, except for one that was written in Spanish.

Serious games and digital resources addressing gender issues are primarily aimed at raising awareness (13 studies, including (Fonseca et al., 2018 )), changing player behavior (13, including (Jouriles et al., 2016a )), and teaching or training skills (10, including (Potter et al., 2021 )).

Gender-specific issues addressed by digital resources can be broadly categorized within the theme of gender-based violence (28 studies) and gender stereotypes (8). Gender-based violence aspects considered in the studies included domestic violence (Smith et al., 2017 ), gender violence (Aguilar et al., 2019 ) or sexual violence (Gilliam et al., 2016 ). Gender stereotypes are considered in studies like (Muller et al., 2017 ) or (Hagerer et al., 2020 ). In particular, the specific gender-related issues addressed by the resources are shown in Fig.  2 , along with the number of tools that mention each issue. Some resources cover more than one gender-related topic.

Specific gender-related issues addressed in the games

The target audience of the games and resources reviewed are mainly adolescents (18 studies, such as (Gilliam et al., 2016 )), followed by youth and university students (8 studies, such as (Do et al., 2021 )). Only 3 studies targeted younger participants in elementary school (Andrade et al., 2019 ; Boduszek et al., 2019 ; Scholes et al., 2014 ). 5 studies targeted participants of any age, and 2 did not specify any age, but a specific profession (health care providers and professionals), thus targeting adults in those fields (Almeida et al., 2018 ; Mason & Turner, 2018 ). Notice that the resources in some studies targeted multiple age ranges (e.g., high school and college students).

Regarding the platform of use of the games (Fig.  3 ), most can be played online on websites (13), while others mention specific platforms or operating systems: Android (7), iOS (4), Windows (4), MAC (1), and headsets/virtual reality goggles (4). The remaining 3 studies do not mention platform of use.

Platforms and operating systems used in the games

RQ3. What are the types of digital resources and their characteristics (e.g., mechanics) used to identify and counteract the problems addressed?

The tools included in the studies are mainly videogames and serious games (25 studies), followed by virtual reality environments (6) and apps (5).

The mechanisms used to identify and counteract the gender-related issues addressed are varied. Most games and tools (17 studies) expose players to different situations to promote reflection and learning. Through this "situation exposure", players can learn by observing the actions and experiences of other people (indirect learning): both the player's avatar and other NPCs. To further promote these reflections, games include different mechanics, such as allowing interactions with some characters in the game (Pabón-Guerrero et al., 2019 ), conversations, challenges and multiple-choice options to act in response to the story (Navarro-Pérez et al., 2019 ), observing actions and their consequences (Sygel et al., 2014 ). With these mechanics, games aim to make players question socially accepted beliefs, identify negative messages or problematic scenarios, or explore gender stereotypes.

Some of these studies (3) specify that players are exposed to a story that follows the life of a woman: one story involves a mother and her child, who live with the mother's partner who has violent tendencies (Boduszek et al., 2019 ); another story features a woman recalling a past experience of sexual assault (Gilliam et al., 2016 ); and the third story follows a female character and her experiences of intimate partner violence in her relationships (Pearson et al., 2020 ).

Another large group of games and tools (11 studies) uses perspective-taking to address gender issues. In most cases, players take the perspective of the victim of one of the gender issues (dating violence, domestic violence, sexual harassment, discrimination in the workplace) (Ugolotti et al., 2020 ). In some of those situations, players can respond to change the story or observe the consequences. Some tools allowed players to take different points of view in the story (a friend of the main female character (Cabrera-González & Florido, 2020 ), female or male avatar to compare stereotypes (Beltran et al., 2021 ), or both first and third person perspectives (Muller et al., 2017 )). This perspective-taking approach appears in studies using virtual reality environments, 4 of which included an actor to play the role of the male avatar in the simulation. Some studies mention that instructors can use supplemental teaching materials to then discuss in small groups in class the gender issues covered in the resources (Lee et al., 2019 ).

RQ4. What instruments are used to conduct the impact analysis of the digital resources?

27 of the 36 selected studies (75%) present assessment of the games, but not all studies used similar instruments to analyze the impact of their respective games. Most studies used pre-post questionnaires (13 studies, like (Jozkowski & Ekbia, 2015 )), while some authors choose to apply only post-game questionnaires (e.g., (Sygel et al., 2014 )). Some studies included control groups (e.g., (Rowe et al., 2015 )), focus groups (e.g., (Debnam & Kumodzi, 2021 )) or follow-ups (e.g., (Ugolotti et al., 2020 )). All methods contained in the evaluation studies are shown in Fig.  4 .

Tools and methods used in evaluation studies

Of the total of 36 studies, only 26 provided information on the population used in the evaluation studies. One additional study described the use of pre- and post-questionnaires, but did not detail validation samples (Lee et al., 2019 ). Of the 26 studies that did present information on the population used, the mean sample size used was 443 participants (SD = 1735). This result is altered by an outlier of one study with almost 9000 participants (Mason & Turner, 2018 ). Without this outlier, for the remaining 25 studies the mean sample size falls to 103 participants (SD = 103, median = 71 and mode = 32), with a minimum value of 7 participants (Pearson et al., 2020) and a maximum of 369 participants (Navarro-Pérez et al., 2019 ). Figure  5 provides the boxplot of the sample size of the studies.

Sample size of the studies

Regarding the age of participants, most of the 26 studies presenting population information (19), were applied with adolescents and college-aged participants (aligning with the target ages of the resources), while only 4 were tested with adults. 3 studies did not provide information on the age of the participants.

Of the 22 studies that reported the location of participants, most studies were conducted in the American continent, followed by Europe (Fig.  6 ).

Studies found by continent

Figure  7 presents the studies by country that provide information on the samples. It is important to note that although the American continent yielded the most studies, it is the United States that contributed most of these articles and digital tools (11), with studies like (Potter et al., 2019 ) or (Sargent et al., 2020 ). The remaining studies were conducted in Spain (Aguilar et al., 2019 ; Navarro-Pérez et al., 2019 , 2020 ), United Kingdom (Bowen et al., 2014 ; Pearson et al., 2020 ), Barbados (Boduszek et al., 2019 ), Canada (Mason & Turner, 2018 ), Netherlands (Muller et al., 2017 ), Sweden (Sygel et al., 2014 ), two of Brazil (Fonseca et al., 2018 ), one of them in collaboration with Portugal (Andrade et al., 2019 ).

Studies by country that include sample information

Some studies mentioned additional characteristics about the participants. In most studies, participants were university or college students (8) or primary and secondary school students (4). Health professionals were the subject of 2 studies (Almeida et al., 2018 ; Mason and Turner, 2018 ). Other studies included additional eligibility criteria. For example, one study included public school students with a substance abuse or intimate partner violence risk criterion (criteria included being pregnant, being a parent, or having failed two or more core classes) (Elias-Lambert et al., 2015 ). Other studies indicated that participants were recruited through local community service organizations (Debnam & Kumodzi, 2021 ) or reception centers (Navarro-Pérez et al., 2020 ). One study was tested with a group of male offenders and a control group of non-offender males (Sygel et al., 2014 ).

Of the 27 studies analyzed that contained an evaluation of the games, 18 reported positive results, while 5 obtained mixed results and 4 stated that were still in the analysis process at the publication time.

The positive results obtained included measures of effectiveness and impact of the tools applied. The game "Behind Every Great One" effectively conveyed benevolent sexism and increased empathy toward victims (Ugolotti et al., 2020 ). The game "Pandora's Caixa" positively impacted players, with 80% of participants increasing their awareness about domestic violence against women after the game (Almeida et al., 2018 ). The initial application of the game "Ines & Us" indicates that it can influence adolescents and adults to combat critical social scenarios in their region regarding, among others, violence against women (Andrade et al., 2019 ). With the "Choices & Consequences" game, participants increased their learning about gender violence and believed that the game can help prevent violence in relationships (Elias-Lambert et al., 2015 ). The use of the "Campus Craft" game increased students' learning about different prevention concepts related to sexual consent and rape culture, while participants also enjoyed various aspects of the game (Jozkowski & Ekbia, 2015 ).

Several studies also reported positive outcomes of the resources compared to control groups. The mobile app "Liad@s" had two studies that showed that the application of the app reduced adolescent sexism significantly by 6% to 12% (Navarro-Pérez et al., 2019 ) and that the reduction in all dimensions (sexism, prejudice towards men, romantic love myths) was linked to the prevention of teen dating violence. In that second study, the experimental group had a greater effect than the control group, and no differences were found by sex of the participants (Navarro-Pérez et al., 2019 ). The results of the application of the videogame "Jesse" showed that participants in the experimental condition, but not in the control condition, increased affective responsiveness toward victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) at the end of the intervention (Boduszek et al., 2019 ). Users of a conversational interface also reported feeling more engaged with the situation and more comfortable discussing the topic of sexual harassment than those in the control group who read the same vignette online (Do et al., 2021 ).

Virtual reality (VR) environments also elicited positive effects on players. The virtual reality "Through Pink and Blue Glasses" had a positive effect, with more than half of the participants feeling moved, involved in the character's feelings, and with new insights after seeing things from another perspective (Muller et al., 2017 ). Another VR obtained scores on four simulations that correlated, as expected, with self-report measures of dating violence perpetration, among other issues (Sargent et al., 2020 ). The VR environment presented by Jouriles had two studies, the results of which showed that bystander behavior in simulations correlated with all measures of responsibility to intervene, effectiveness to intervene, intention to intervene, and self-reported bystander behavior (Jouriles et al., 2016a ), and that effectiveness to intervene correlated with observed bystander behavior in dating violence situations at 1-week and 6-month assessments (Jouriles et al., 2016b ). In a virtual work environment, comparing positive and negative work scenarios, and female and male avatars, the largest effect was found for participants with a female avatar in the negative environment, who significantly reduced their implicit gender bias (Beltran et al., 2021 ).

In health applications, the "Responding to Domestic Violence in Clinical Settings" program to increase knowledge and competence in assisting victims of intimate partner violence was positively received by both health professionals and students, and was perceived as engaging and clear (Mason & Turner, 2018 ). Also, the "Reactions to Display/Intimate Partner Violence (RoD/IPV)" computer simulation was well received and understood by both offender and non-offender male groups. Results showed that offenders who had not undergone the Integrated Domestic Abuse Program showed a tendency to make more violent decisions in the simulation (Sygel et al., 2014 ).

Some of the analyzed articles also obtained positive results in follow-up studies. The games "Mindflock" and "Ship Happens" had two studies. In the first, both the question-and-answer game (Mindflock) and the interactive scenario game (Ship Happens) had a positive impact, while the interactive scenario game was especially effective in increasing male attitudes towards bystander intervention. This increased effect was obtained in the posttest and in the follow-up study (Potter et al., 2019 ). The second study with these games found an increase in bystander efficacy (confidence in knowledge about the intervention) and bystander attitude (perceived intention to intervene) in both the trivia and adventure game conditions, but not in the control group (Potter et al., 2021 ). The game “Lucidity” was first tested with a focus group in which participants gained new knowledge and approved the game. In follow-up interviews, nearly all participants had initiated a conversation with a parent, peer, or teacher about sexual violence, and reported that the game increased their knowledge and awareness of a variety of health and sexual violence issues (Gilliam et al., 2016 ).

Some studies presented mixed results in their findings. Basically, these results included some possible improvements discovered during the evaluation studies and some limitations found in the resources. Two studies reported limitations and frustrations with functionality (Bowen et al., 2014 ), and the need to simplify the instructions and clarify the language to make it more familiar to the young target audience (Aguilar et al., 2019 ). Two studies had poor results in follow-up interventions: one reported an effect in only 12 participants (Rowe et al., 2015 ), while the other reported changes that only held for females in one of the game conditions (Potter et al., 2021 ). Participants in one study had positive attitudes but still reiterated gender stereotypes (Fonseca et al., 2018 ).

Other studies reported work in progress: a study with preliminary evaluation results yet to be analyzed of a game to increase awareness of gender-based violence (Pabón-Guerrero et al., 2019 ); a discussion between game designers and participants about the characteristics (characters, environments, story, etc.) of a game to increase awareness of intimate partner violence (Pearson et al., 2020 ); a preliminary evaluation with a focus group to provide feedback (e.g., should clarify signs of abusive relationships, provide resources for immediate help) on an app for safety planning and teen dating violence (Debnam & Kumodzi, 2021 ); and a theoretical framework that uses empathy and creativity to design serious games, illustrated with an example of a serious game to raise awareness of domestic violence (Marda et al., 2018 ).

Additionally, the 9 studies that did not contain game evaluation described different phases of the life cycle of the games: the background that led to the creation of the game (e.g., interviews with victims of teen dating violence), the design, development, and implementation of the games, and/or general description of the games (Alonso-Garcia et al., 2020 ; Cabrera-González & Florido, 2020 ; Crecente, 2014 ; Fisher, 2017 ; Hagerer et al., 2020 ; Hosse et al., 2015 ; Lee et al., 2019 ; Scholes et al., 2014 ; Smith et al., 2017 ).

Some additional findings were presented in the studies. Positive features of the games were highlighted, including the possibility of being able to change gender, which helped in identification (Muller et al., 2017 ) and the use of first person, which made the narrative realistic and relatable (Do et al., 2021 ). Interactivity was also a major strength of the tools (Mason & Turner, 2018 ). The virtual reality simulations yielded high-impact results and provided an additional method relevant to self-reports for assessing responses in different situations (Sargent et al., 2020 ). Finally, young participants stated that they preferred games to traditional learning methods, as they are more engaging, interactive, and combine learning in formal and informal settings (Elias-Lambert et al., 2015 ).

The limitations found in the studies included small sample size (9 studies), other limitations in the sample (6 studies), technical problems (8) and other limitations in the game (8), the lack of follow-up studies (6), and the lack of results (5).

Regarding the sample size, it was a limitation of several studies for replicability and generalizability of the results (Aguilar et al., 2019 ). Some other limitations in the samples used are that are not representative of the users, either not belonging to the target population, being from a single school or not being sufficiently diverse (e.g., the game “Papo Reto” was tested in just one school, during a short period of time (Fonseca et al., 2018 )). In the experiments conducted in presence of members of the design team, a possible positive bias may arise from participants trying to behave in a socially desirable manner (Jouriles et al., 2016a ) or when expressing their opinion in front of the developers (Elias-Lambert et al., 2015 ).

Technical problems and other game limitations were also present in several studies. Technical limitations included requirements for Internet connectivity in schools, games were too slow, or the screen would freeze. Some of these technical problems occurred when the studies were conducted with prototypes, while their final versions were still being developed at the time of the studies. Other limitations found in the games included unclear instructions, resulting in players needing help to navigate the game, some buttons (e.g., the help button) not being clearly visible, a limited range of interactions, and other improvements found in playability and user experience. For instance, “Green Acres High” had issues with frozen screens and non-visible parts of the game, along with unclear instructions (Bowen et al., 2014 ). An additional limitation in the studies that applied VR environments was the requirement of specific personnel (players and observers/coders) that increased costs, time, and labor, even more than traditional self-diagnostic questionnaires, so the use of such resources may not be feasible in large-scale evaluations.

Another limitation noted in some studies was the lack of follow-up studies to measure the long-term effects of the resources or to compare their efficacy with more traditional methods (Cabrera-González & Florido, 2020 ). A final limitation was that some studies did not include results of the validation of the games, but only a simple description of their characteristics (Pabón-Guerrero et al., 2019 ). The latter happens with different games that, although they have significant investments, seem to have neglected the studies or simply decided not to make them public.

5 Discussion

Gender-themed digital resources were scarce and difficult to locate. Most of the results found are written in English, and we only located one in Spanish (Cabrera-González & Florido, 2020 ). Although there may be more results in other languages, those results should be not very relevant, as most databases automatically translate search terms and article titles delivering results in different languages. This led us to find less than a dozen results in languages such as Chinese, Portuguese and German, most of which were translated versions of articles already found.

Aligning with their development in English, most resources found in the review came from the USA. This may be related to the significant budget of the Office of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment, Footnote 14 the office in charge of gender issues in the USA, which through US AID, has access to some percentage (not specified) of the $19.6 billion dollars that this agency receives on average annually (US AID, 2021 ). Footnote 15 Considering Europe some games developed in this continent are used as a support tool in other less developed countries. A relevant example is Jesse, a 3D game developed by "None in Three", a project led by the University of Huddersfield (UK), in conjunction with the Global Challenges Research Fund (UK). This game is primarily oriented to young people living in the Caribbean region (Barbados) to educate and raise awareness about domestic violence (Smith et al., 2017 ).

Regarding evaluation methodologies, results show a strong tendency towards pre- and post-game questionnaires. This may be since, compared to post-questionnaire interviews, or the applicator's annotations of each of the digital resources, the conjunction of pre- and post- questionnaires makes it possible to quantify the impact of the tools. Unlike these pre-post questionnaires, the tools that only use post-game questionnaires have nothing to contrast the results with and could lose valuable information on the change in participants’ perception of the topics addressed. In this regard, a very relevant option for future research is the use of Learning Analytics (Papamitsiou & Economides, 2014 ) collected from players’ interactions, even combined with the data previously obtained (questionnaires, annotations), to obtain more detailed information about players. At the same time, the collection of data about players' actions would allow researchers to detect areas of opportunity regarding the development and playability of digital resources (Alonso-Fernández et al., 2019 ).

The results obtained clearly show the need for more research on tools for gender issues, as the results of our search were scarce. The lack of scientific validation studies, follow-up studies, funding, the disappearance of companies or individuals sponsoring the initiatives, and even public health issues (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) result in the loss of important tools for education and awareness about gender violence and stereotypes. Such is the case of Chuka, Footnote 16 a serious game designed and developed to teach children in Mexico to address child sexual abuse with 5.4 million cases per year (OECD Footnote 17 , 2017 ). The game, developed in Mexico in collaboration with OHCHR, has reached more than 200,000 users since its public release, and yet it does not have any type of related scientific study, which does not allow us to know the impact it has had on its users. Although the tool may be functional within its own scope, it lacks impact, for instance, to help in the implementation of other similar digital tools, as they do not inform of the methodology used to reach that many users. Another relevant aspect to consider is distribution. Even when digital tools can be very useful in different contexts, many of them remain within their local application (provinces, states, and even educational campuses, such as Campus Craft), depriving people in other socio-cultural contexts of their contribution.

The significant gap found between the high relevance of the social problem and the scarcity of resources for its treatment is also present in other fields: such is the case of cyberbullying, a relatively recent problem but of great impact on both the physical and emotional health of the victims (Kim & Leventhal, 2008 ) for which there are also very few digital resources that address the issue. In particular, a literature review on games to prevent and detect bullying and cyberbullying found only 33 relevant resources (Calvo-Morata et al., 2020 ).

While a certain level of satisfaction can be noted in the discussions and conclusions of the studies, it is not clear whether the resources used were as effective as expected. An in-depth analysis of which digital resource better promotes learning would be required. Although it is difficult to determine which kind of digital resource is the most effective, we perceive an inclination of the authors of these resources towards videogames. By playing a videogame, users’ interest and motivation increases and learning becomes active and abiding (Cóndor-Herrera et al., 2021 ). Creating attractive tools like videogames, they can be used as playful applications and be well accepted for their entertainment, without neglecting the educational part or being considered a mandatory activity (Jozkowski & Ekbia, 2015 ).

6 Limitations

As in any other literature review, our work is limited by the selected search terms. We tried to minimize the limitations, regarding the databases, by including a wide range of alternative terms (for both gender issues and digital resources) and modifying the query according to the needs of each database. The choice of languages is an additional limitation: our results are restricted only to works published in English or Spanish.

Additionally, some of the resources found were not scientifically validated. It would be worthwhile to perform a further review of these games without validation, to try to determine whether they serve their purpose, even without a solid scientific basis. A possible reason to explain the lack of associated scientific studies is the need for more economic support, since this situation occurs more frequently in resources developed in countries that are not considered to be of high or very high human development, according to the United Nations Development Program. Footnote 18

As a final limitation, the diversity and variety of the tools and results of the studies included in our review limits the possibility to issue definitive general conclusions. Even if comparing different tools merely related to the gender issues addressed by them is complicated, we have drawn some general conclusions that allow us to provide an overview of the (already scarce) resources that focus on gender-related issues.

7 Conclusions

The results obtained in the review are heterogeneous but can open a relevant analysis, as gender issues are increasingly visible and new tools are being developed to address them, particularly, digital resources like serious games. As previously mentioned, we found no other systematic literature reviews regarding games and digital resources to address gender issues. Therefore, as few studies have addressed this topic, we considered it particularly important to recover what has been advanced on the subject, as well as to create a baseline for future research. It is noteworthy the acceptance of digital resources over other types of learning scenarios (classroom, workshops, courses, etc.), due to their popularity among the young adult population (Jozkowski & Ekbia, 2015 ).

Most of the studies found aimed to raise awareness or change players’ behaviors about gender-based violence by using serious games targeted at teenagers or young adults. The use of digital tools has multiple advantages over face-to-face courses on gender issues, which are taught in some higher education institutions. School-based courses require a lot of time and resources and, if made mandatory to reach a broad number of students, it would only increase the use of resources, which in many cases are severely limited. To reach a broader student body, it is suggested that Sexual Assault Prevention Education Programs appeal to the target population (Jozkowski & Ekbia, 2015 ). We consider that the popularity of videogames and digital resources among teenagers and young adults may be key to address this factor.

The evaluation studies carried out with the digital resources were varied, including the use of pre- and post-game questionnaires to provide a means to measure the effect of each intervention. Control groups were also applied in many of the studies; we recommend the use of a control group together with the application of pre-post questionnaires, which will allow us to perform an in-depth analysis of both the immediate effect of the digital tool as well as its impact compared to more traditional approaches (e.g., lectures). To obtain resources with long-term impact, we also recommend adding a follow-up sometime after the application of the tool to ensure that the immediate effects of its application are sustained over time. Finally, it is also necessary to promote that the developed resources are openly available to increase their reach and impact in the society, together with the information and tools to adequately measure their effectiveness and impact on players. The availability of open code validated projects could help other researchers and developers to produce better games or to adapt those games according to cultural differences to be used in other parts of the world (e.g., Playmint.) (Hagerer et al., 2020 ).

While the number of articles found may be limited, this is not unexpected. The limitations encountered in our review, including the lack of initiatives with scientific/academic validations and follow-ups, or the lack of budget, restrict the possible impact of the few developed resources. Further research is needed regarding digital resources for gender education, validating the resources developed and establishing clear means to assess the impact they may have on their target players. These requirements would ensure that the benefits of games and digital resources for learning and awareness are adequately translated into their application in the field of gender equality education.

Data availability

Authors can confirm that all relevant data are included in the article and/or its supplementary information files.

https://girlrising.org/

https://www.sheboard.com/en/

https://tomorrow.org/

https://tomorrow.org/speakup/pdfs/2020%20Speak%20Up%20National%20Report.pdf

https://www.jsi.com/preventing-and-responding-to-gender-based-violence/

https://playhoneymoon.com/

https://jagga.me/anotherchance.html

https://jag.itch.io/graces-diary

http://carei.es/igualdad-de-genero/

https://www.spotlightinitiative.org/es/lo-que-hacemos

https://afroes.com/moraba

It is of utmost importance to consider that we cannot give a single definition for "instruments", as these will change based on each of the documents reviewed, therefore, one study may have pre/post application questionnaires of the digital resource as an instrument, while another may opt for quantitative analysis based on its own indicators.

CIEG: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género / Center for Research and Gender Studies.

https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment

https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1881/FY2021_Budget_FactSheet.pdf

http://www.chukagame.com/blog/chuka-el-juego-que-esta-ayudando-a-miles-de-ninas-y-ninos-a-enfrentar-el-abuso-infantil

https://www.oecd.org/about/secretary-general/presentacion-del-estudio-ocde-sobre-politicas-de-genero-en-mexico.htm

https://www1.undp.org/content/undp/es/home/

References marked with an asterisk indicate studies included in the review.

*Almeida, L. R., Machado, L. S., Medeiros, A. T., Coelho, H. F. C., Andrade, J. M., & Moraes, R. M. (2018). The Caixa de Pandora Game: Changing behaviors and attitudes toward violence against women. Computers in Entertainment, 16 (3), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3236493

Article   Google Scholar  

Alonso-Fernández, C. Ana., Cano, Rus, Calvo-Morata, Antonio, Freire, Manuel, Martínez-Ortiz, Iván., & Fernández-Manjón, Baltasar. (2019). Lessons learned applying learning analytics to assess serious games. Computers in Human Behavior, 99 , 301–309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.05.036

Alonso-García A., Ayala Ramírez A., Vázquez Navarrete L., Abascal-Mena R. (2020) Habitar: A Collaborative Tool to Visualize, Distribute, Organize and Share Domestic Tasks Towards Reducing the Gender Gap in Household Labor. In: Agredo-Delgado V., Ruiz P. H., Villalba-Condori K. O. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. HCI-COLLAB 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science,  vol 1334, pp. 136–145. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66919-5_14

*Aguilar, A. A. Á., Ortega, B. C., Loranca, I. A. J., & Olmos, L. E. A. (2019). Enredados: an analogue-digital board game to rethink gender violence in social networks. In Proceedings of the IX Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction (pp. 1–6). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3358961.3358994

*Andrade, V., De Barros, M. A., Vieira, F., De Sousa, R. B., & De Sousa Almeida, L. (2019). INES&Us: Endless love alternate reality game to build utopic new worlds. In CSEDU 2019 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education. https://doi.org/10.5220/0007770405650572

Bailey, E. & Graves, K. (2016). Gender and education. In American educational research association, review of research in education , March 2016, Vol. 40 (pp. 682–722). https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X16680193

Barrera Yañez, A. G., Alonso-Fernandez, C., & Fernandez Manjon, B. (2020). Review of serious games to educate on gender equality. Eighth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality . https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436592

*Beltran, K., Rowland, C., Hashemi, N., Nguyen, A., Harrison, L., Engle, S., & Yuksel, B. F. (2021). Reducing implicit gender bias using a virtual workplace environment. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–7). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451739

*Boduszek, D., Debowska, A., Jones, A. D., Ma, M., Smith, D., Willmott, D., … Kirkman, G. (2019). Prosocial videogame as an intimate partner violence prevention tool among youth: A randomised controlled trial. Computers in Human Behavior, 93 , 260–266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.12.028

*Bowen, E., Walker, K., Mawer, M., Holdsworth, E., Sorbring, E., Helsing, B., … Jans, S. (2014). “It’s like you’re actually playing as yourself”: Development and preliminary evaluation of ‘Green Acres High’, a serious game-based primary intervention to combat adolescent dating violence+. Psychosocial Intervention, 23 (1), 43–55. https://doi.org/10.5093/in2014a5

Calvo-Morata, A., Alonso-Fernández, C., Freire, M., Martínez-Ortiz, I., & Fernández-Manjón, B. (2020). Serious games to prevent and detect bullying and cyberbullying: A systematic serious games and literature review. Computers & Education . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103958

Calvo-Morata, A., Freire-Morán, M., Martínez-Ortiz, I., & Fernández-Manjón, B. (2019). Applicability of a cyberbullying videogame as a teacher tool: Comparing teachers and educational sciences students. IEEE Access, 7 (2019), 55841–55850.

Cóndor-Herrera, O., Acosta-Rodas, P., & Ramos-Galarza, C. (2021). Gamification teaching for an active learning. In Intelligent human systems integration (pp 247–252). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68017-6_37

*Crecente, D. (2014). Gaming against violence: A grassroots approach to teen dating violence. Games for Health Journal, 3 (4), 198–201. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2014.0010

*Debnam, K. J., & Kumodzi, T. (2021). Adolescent perceptions of an interactive mobile application to respond to teen dating violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 36 (13–14), 6821–6837. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260518821455

Djaouti, D., Alvarez, J., Jessel, J. P., & Rampnoux, O. (2011). Origins of serious games. In Serious games and edutainment applications (pp. 25–43). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2161-9_3

*Do, H. J., Yang, S. H., Choi, B.-G., Fu, W. T., & Bailey, B. P. (2021). Do you have time for a quick chat? Designing a conversational interface for sexual harassment prevention training. In 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 542–552). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397481.3450659

Eid, M., El Saddik, A., Laamarti, F. (2014). An overview of serious games. Hindawi Publishing Corporation. International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2014 . https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/358152

*Elias-Lambert, N., Boyas, J. F., Black, B. M., & Schoech, R. J. (2015). Preventing substance abuse and relationship violence: Proof-of-concept evaluation of a social, multi-user, tablet-based game. Children and Youth Services Review, 53 , 201–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.04.007

Boyle, E. A., Hainey, T., Connolly, T. M., Gray, G., Earp, J., Ott, M., Lim, T., Ninaus, M., Ribeiro, C., & Pereira, J. (2016). An update to the systematic literature review of empirical evidence of the impacts and outcomes of computer games and serious games. Computers & Education, 94 , 178–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.11.003

Dillon, R. (2013). Serious Games And Fun : An Analysis. International Journal of Innovative Research & Development, 2 (5).

Fisher, J. (2016). Toward a political economic framework for analyzing digital development games: A case study of three games for Africa. Communication, Culture & Critique, 9 (1), 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12128

*Fisher, J. (2017). Digital games, African development, and gender equality: A comparative analysis of family values and Moraba. Studies in Comparative International Development, 52 (2), 155–173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-017-9244-z

*da Fonseca, R. M. G. S., dos Santos, D. L. A., Gessner, R., Fornari, L. F., de Oliveira, R. N. G., & Schoenmaker, M. C. (2018). Gender, sexuality and violence: Perception of mobilized adolescents in an online game. Revista Brasileira De Enfermagem, 71 (suppl 1), 607–614. https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7167-2017-0561

Gertner, A., Zaromb, F., Schneider, R., Roberts, R., & Matthews, G. (2016). Development and evaluation of an assessment instrument for the measurement of cognitive bias (16–0956).  https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/publications/pr-16-0956-the-assessment-of-biases-in-cognition.pdf . Accessed March 2021

*Gilliam, M., Jagoda, P., Jaworski, E., Hebert, L. E., Lyman, P., & Wilson, M. C. (2016). “Because if we don’t talk about it, how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity, a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence. Sex Education, 16 (4), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1123147

*Cabrera-González, M. Á. C., & Florido, B. P. (2020). “Diana frente al Espejo”: Una Propuesta de Videojuego para la Prevención de la Violencia de Pareja entre jóvenes. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

*Hagerer, I., Treffers, T., Hoffmann, A., Richly, C., Baier, S., & Welpe, I. M. (2020). PlayMINT - Still playing or already leading? Design of a digital learning game to promote female STEM Students’ innovative work behavior and digital leadership. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Game Based Learning, ECGBL 2020. https://doi.org/10.34190/GBL.20.177

Heilman (2012). Gender stereotypes and workplace bias. Research in Organizational Behavior, 32 , 113–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2012.11.003

Horban, O., Maletska, M. (2019). Videogames as means of increasing students’ motivation. In The Modern Higher Education Review № 4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.28925/2518-7635.2019.4.8

Hosse, I. R., & Zuanon, R. (2015). Games for change: The strategic design of interactive persuasive systems (pp. 442–453). International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20684-4_43

*Jouriles, E. N., Kleinsasser, A., Rosenfield, D., & McDonald, R. (2016a). Measuring bystander behavior to prevent sexual violence: Moving beyond self reports. Psychology of Violence, 6 (1), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038230

*Jouriles, E. N., Rosenfield, D., Yule, K., Sargent, K. S., & McDonald, R. (2016b). Predicting high-school students’ bystander behavior in simulated dating violence situations. Journal of Adolescent Health, 58 (3), 345–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2015.11.009

*Jozkowski, K. N., & Ekbia, H. R. (2015). “Campus Craft”: A game for sexual assault prevention in universities. Games for Health Journal, 4 (2), 95–106. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2014.0056

Kim, Y. S., & Leventhal, B. (2008). Bullying and suicide. A review. International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, 20 (2), 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1515/IJAMH.2008.20.2.133

Kleffner, R., Flatten, J., Leaver-Fay, A., Baker, D., Siegel, J. B., Khatib, F., & Cooper, S. (2017). Foldit Standalone: A videogame-derived protein structure manipulation interface using Rosetta. In Bioinformatics, 33 , 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btx283

Krug, E. G., Dahlberg, L. L., & Mercy, J. A. (2002). Zwi Anthony and Lozano Rafael . World Health Organization.

*Lee, T. Y., Shek, D. T. L., Fan, C. L., Kwok, R. K. H., Cheng, C., Tsang, J. W. S., & Lau, R. K. L. (2019). Reducing gender stereotypes through a digital positive youth development game. International Journal on Disability and Human Development .

*Marda, M., Economou, D., & Bouki, V. (2018). Enhancing deeper learning using empathy and creativity in serious games role-play simulations. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Games-based Learning.

*Mason, R., & Turner, L. (2018). Serious gaming: A tool to educate health care providers about domestic violence. Health Care for Women International, 39 (8), 859–871. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399332.2018.1464572

*Muller, D. A., van Kessel, C. R., & Janssen, S. (2017). Through pink and blue glasses: Designing a dispositional empathy game using gender stereotypes and virtual reality. In Extended abstracts publication of the annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play (pp. 599–605). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3130862

Naranjo Ruiz, M., & Ospina Álvarez, J. S. (2021). Prácticas y performances postdigitales del ciberfeminismo en Colombia. Esferas, 20 , 10. https://doi.org/10.31501/esf.v0i20.12383

*Navarro-Pérez, J. J., Carbonell, Á., & Oliver, A. (2019). The effectiveness of a psycho-educational App to reduce sexist attitudes in adolescents. Revista De Psicodidáctica (english Ed.), 24 (1), 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psicoe.2018.07.002

*Navarro-Pérez, J. J., Oliver, A., Carbonell, Á., & Schneider, B. H. (2020). Effectiveness of a mobile app intervention to prevent dating violence in residential child care. Psychosocial Intervention . https://doi.org/10.5093/pi2020a3

OECD Review of Gender Policies in Mexico (2017). https://www.oecd.org/about/secretary-general/presentacion-del-estudio-ocde-sobre-politicas-de-genero-en-mexico.htm . Accessed March 2021

OHCHR, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2021).  https://www.ohchr.org . Accessed March 2021

*Pabón-Guerrero, A., Tobar-Munozt, H., & Gonzalez, C. (2019). Tsiunas: A videogame for increasing gender-based violence awareness. In 2019 International Conference on Virtual Reality and Visualization (ICVRV) (pp. 189–192). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICVRV47840.2019.00044

Page, M. J., McKenzie, J. E., Bossuyt, P. M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T. C., Mulrow, C. D., Shamseer, L., Tetzlaff, J. M., Akl, E. A., Brennan, S. E., Chou, R., Glanville, J., Grimshaw, J. M., Hróbjartsson, A., Lalu, M. M., Li, T., Loder, E. W., Mayo-Wilson, E., McDonald, S., … Moher, D. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ . https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71

Papamitsiou, Z., & Economides, A. (2014). Learning analytics and educational data mining in practice: A systematic literature review of empirical evidence. Educational Tecnology & Society., 17 (4), 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858796.2858798

Pérez-de-Guzmán, V., Bas-Pena, E. & Machado-Casas, M. (2019). Gender Issues in Latin America and Spain. Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Peter Lang. ISBN: 978–1–4331–6102–5

Pastor-Moreno, G., & Ruíz, P. I. (2021). Medidas de contención de la violencia de género durante la pandemia de COVID-19. Gaceta Sanitaria, 35 (4), 389–394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaceta.2020.04.005

*Pearson, J., Wu, S., Royston, H., Smailes, H., Robinson, N., Cowell, A., & Jones, A. (2020). Designing a serious game to raise awareness of intimate partner violence among adolescents in the UK: The use of ‘Good Games’ principles for effective behavioural change (pp. 458–476). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53294-9_33

*Potter, S. J., Demers, J. M., Flanagan, M., Seidman, M., & Moschella, E. A. (2021). Can videogames help prevent violence? An evaluation of games promoting bystander intervention to combat sexual violence on college campuses. Psychology of Violence, 11 (2), 199–208. https://doi.org/10.1037/vio0000365

*Potter, S. J., Flanagan, M., Seidman, M., Hodges, H., & Stapleton, J. G. (2019). Developing and piloting videogames to increase college and university students’ awareness and efficacy of the bystander role in incidents of sexual violence. Games for Health Journal, 8 (1), 24–34. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2017.0172

Rowe, L. S., Jouriles, E. N., & McDonald, R. (2015). Reducing sexual victimization among adolescent girls: a randomized controlled pilot trial of my voice, my choice. Behavior Therapy, 46 (3), 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2014.11.003

Rugelj, J., & Lapina, M. (2019). Game design based learning of programming. international scientific conference innovative approaches to the application of digital technologies in education and research.  CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2494 .  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337199044_Game_Design_Based_Learning_of_Programming

Sabri, B., Sellke, R., Smudde, M., Bourey, C., & Murray, S. M. (2022). Gender-based violence interventions in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review of interventions at structural, community, interpersonal, individual, and multiple levels. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse , 152483802211261. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221126181

Sadati, S. M. H., & Mitchell, C. (2021). Serious game design as research-creation to address sexual and gender-based violence. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20 . https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069211046130

*Sargent, K. S., Jouriles, E. N., Chmielewski, M., & McDonald, R. (2020). Using virtual reality to create an observational assessment of adolescent resistance to antisocial peer pressure. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 49 (2), 178–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2018.1504296

*Scholes, L., Jones, C., Stieler-Hunt, C., & Rolfe, B. (2014). Serious games for learning: Games-based child sexual abuse prevention in schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 18 (9), 934–956. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2013.860195

*Smith, D., Ma, M., Jones, A., & Unver, E. (2017). None in three: The design and development of a low-cost violence prevention game for the caribbean region. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70111-0_24

*Sygel, K., Kristiansson, M., Furberg, R., & Fors, U. (2014). Reactions on Display/Intimate Partner Violence (RoD/IPV)—A study of a new interactive computer simulation program for the treatment of men convicted of intimate partner violence. International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 13 (4), 369–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/14999013.2014.951104

Trekels, J., Karsay, K., Eggermont, S., & Vandenbosch, L. (2018). How social and mass media relate to youth’s self-sexualization: Taking a cross-national perspective on rewarded appearance ideals. Journal of Youth and Adolescence . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-018-0844-3

*Ugolotti, V. C., Brusk, J., & Engström, H. (2020). Crying in the Game- An inductive analysis of a game that portraits benevolent sexism. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Game Based Learning, ECGBL 2020. https://doi.org/10.34190/GBL.20.046

UN WOMEN. Facts and figures: Ending violence against women (2021).  https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures . Accessed July 2021

United Nations. Equality and Non-discrimination (2022).  https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/thematic-areas/human-rights/equality-and-non-discrimination/ . Accessed July 2022

US AID, U.S. Agency for International Development. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (2021).  https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment . Accessed July 2022

Vyas, A., Nagara, N., Genovese, J., Malhotra, G., Dubey, N., Hingorani, R., & Manning, L. (2020). The girl rising ‘We Dream, We Rise’ social media campaign in India: Reach, engagement and impact. Journal of Creative Communications, 15 (1), 106–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973258619878354

Weinstein, T. I. (2020). Expuestas: Laborious expectations and the plight of feminist art in contemporary Mexico. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45 (4), 903–929. https://doi.org/10.1086/707800

Zhonggen, Yu. (2019). A meta-analysis of use of serious games in education over a decade. Hindawi International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2019 , 4797032. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/4797032

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Complutense University of Madrid, C/ Profesor José García Santesmases, 9, 28040, Madrid, Spain

Alma Gloria Barrera Yañez & Baltasar Fernández-Manjón

Department of Computer Science Engineering, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Calle Francisco Tomás Y Valiente, 11, 28049, Madrid, Spain

Cristina Alonso-Fernández

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alma Gloria Barrera Yañez .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

• There are multiple digital tools (serious games, apps, etc.) to educate in equality.

• The found digital tools come from all over the world.

• Most gender education initiatives belong to private organizations and NGOs.

• Not all digital tools for educating in equality have related studies or follow-up.

• The reviewed digital resources can be used in different contexts (socioeconomic, geographic, etc.).

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Yañez, A.G.B., Alonso-Fernández, C. & Fernández-Manjón, B. Systematic literature review of digital resources to educate on gender equality. Educ Inf Technol 28 , 10639–10664 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11574-8

Download citation

Received : 18 September 2022

Accepted : 29 December 2022

Published : 02 February 2023

Issue Date : August 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11574-8

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Digital resources
• Gender equality
• Gender stereotypes
• Gender violence
• Serious games
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

How our education system undermines gender equity

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, and why culture change—not policy—may be the solution, joseph cimpian jc joseph cimpian associate professor of economics and education policy - new york university @joecimpian.

April 23, 2018

There are well-documented achievement and opportunity gaps by income and race/ethnicity. K-12 accountability policies often have a stated goal of reducing or eliminating those gaps, though with questionable effectiveness . Those same accountability policies require reporting academic proficiency by gender, but there are no explicit goals of reducing gender gaps and no “hard accountability” sanctions tied to gender-subgroup performance. We could ask, “Should gender be included more strongly in accountability policies?”

In this post, I’ll explain why I don’t think accountability policy interventions would produce real gender equity in the current system—a system that largely relies on existing state standardized tests of math and English language arts to gauge equity. I’ll argue that although much of the recent research on gender equity from kindergarten through postgraduate education uses math or STEM parity as a measure of equity, the overall picture related to gender equity is of an education system that devalues young women’s contributions and underestimates young women’s intellectual abilities more broadly.

In a sense, math and STEM outcomes simply afford insights into a deeper, more systemic problem. In order to improve access and equity across gender lines from kindergarten through the workforce, we need considerably more social-questioning and self-assessment of biases about women’s abilities.

As soon as girls enter school, they are underestimated

For over a decade now, I have studied gender achievement with my colleague Sarah Lubienski, a professor of math education at Indiana University-Bloomington. In a series of studies using data from both the 1998-99 and 2010-11 kindergarten cohorts of the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, we found that no average gender gap in math test scores existed when boys and girls entered kindergarten, but a gap of nearly 0.25 standard deviations developed in favor of the boys by around second or third grade.

For comparison purposes, the growth of the black-white math test score gap was virtually identical to the growth in the gender gap. Unlike levels and growth in race-based gaps, though, which have been largely attributed to a combination of differences in the schools attended by black and white students and to socio-economic differences, boys and girls for the most part attend the same schools and come from families of similar socio-economic status. This suggests that something may be occurring within schools that contributes to an advantage for boys in math.

Exploring deeper, we found that the beliefs that teachers have about student ability might contribute significantly to the gap. When faced with a boy and a girl of the same race and socio-economic status who performed equally well on math tests and whom the teacher rated equally well in behaving and engaging with school, the teacher rated the boy as more mathematically able —an alarming pattern that replicated in a separate data set collected over a decade later .

Another way of thinking of this is that in order for a girl to be rated as mathematically capable as her male classmate, she not only needed to perform as well as him on a psychometrically rigorous external test, but also be seen as working harder than him. Subsequent matching and instrumental variables analyses suggested that teachers’ underrating of girls from kindergarten through third grade accounts for about half of the gender achievement gap growth in math. In other words, if teachers didn’t think their female students were less capable, the gender gap in math might be substantially smaller.

An interaction that Sarah and I had with a teacher drove home the importance and real-world relevance of these results. About five years ago, while Sarah and I were faculty at the University of Illinois, we gathered a small group of elementary teachers together to help us think through these findings and how we could intervene on the notion that girls were innately less capable than boys. One of the teachers pulled a stack of papers out of her tote bag, and spreading them on the conference table, said, “Now, I don’t even understand why you’re looking at girls’ math achievement. These are my students’ standardized test scores, and there are absolutely no gender differences. See, the girls can do just as well as the boys if they work hard enough.” Then, without anyone reacting, it was as if a light bulb went on. She gasped and continued, “Oh my gosh, I just did exactly what you said teachers are doing,” which is attributing girls’ success in math to hard work while attributing boys’ success to innate ability. She concluded, “I see now why you’re studying this.”

Although this teacher did ultimately recognize her gender-based attribution, there are (at least) three important points worth noting. First, her default assumption was that girls needed to work harder in order to achieve comparably to boys in math, and this reflects an all-too-common pattern among elementary school teachers, across at least the past couple decades and in other cultural contexts . Second, it is not obvious how to get teachers to change that default assumption. Third, the evidence that she brought to the table was state standardized test scores, and these types of tests can reveal different (often null or smaller) gender achievement gaps than other measures.

On this last point, state standardized tests consistently show small or no differences between boys and girls in math achievement, which contrasts with somewhat larger gaps on NAEP and PISA , as well as with gaps at the top of the distribution on the ECLS , SAT Mathematics assessment, and the American Mathematics Competition . The reasons for these discrepancies are not entirely clear, but what is clear is that there is no reason to expect that “hardening” the role of gender in accountability policies that use existing state tests and current benchmarks will change the current state of gender gaps. Policymakers might consider implementing test measures similar to those where gaps have been noted and placing more emphasis on gains throughout the achievement distribution. However, I doubt that a more nuanced policy for assessing math gains would address the underlying problem of the year-after-year underestimation of girls’ abilities and various signals and beliefs that buttress boys’ confidence and devalue girls, all of which cumulatively contributes to any measured gaps.

More obstacles await women in higher education and beyond

Looking beyond K-12 education, there is mounting evidence at the college and postgraduate levels that cultural differences between academic disciplines may be driving women away from STEM fields, as well as away from some non-STEM fields (e.g., criminal justice, philosophy, and economics). In fact, although research and policy discussions often dichotomize academic fields and occupations as “STEM” and “non-STEM,” the emerging research on gender discrimination in higher education finds that the factors that drive women away from some fields cut across the STEM/non-STEM divide. Thus, while gender representation disparities between STEM and non-STEM fields may help draw attention to gender representation more broadly, reifying the STEM/non-STEM distinction and focusing on math may be counterproductive to understanding the underlying reasons for gender representation gaps across academic disciplines.

In a recent study , my colleagues and I examined how perceptions on college majors relate to who is entering those majors. We found that the dominant factor predicting the gender of college-major entrants is the degree of perceived discrimination against women. To reach this conclusion, we used two sources of data. First, we created and administered surveys to gather perceptions on how much math is required for a major, how much science is required, how creative a field is, how lucrative careers are in a field, how helpful the field is to society, and how difficult it is for a woman to succeed in the field. After creating factor scales on each of the six dimensions for each major, we mapped those ratings onto the second data source, the Education Longitudinal Study, which contains several prior achievement, demographic, and attitudinal measures on which we matched young men and women attending four-year colleges.

Among this nationally representative sample, we found that the degree to which a field was perceived to be math- or science-intensive had very little relation to student gender. However, fields that were perceived to discriminate against women were strongly predictive of the gender of the students in the field, whether or not we accounted for the other five traits of the college majors. In short, women are less likely to enter fields where they expect to encounter discrimination.

And what happens if a woman perseveres in obtaining a college degree in a field where she encounters discrimination and underestimation and wants to pursue a postgraduate degree in that field, and maybe eventually work in academia? The literature suggests additional obstacles await her. These obstacles may take the form of those in the field thinking she’s not brilliant like her male peers in graduate school, having her looks discussed on online job boards when she’s job-hunting, performing more service work if she becomes university faculty, and getting less credit for co-authored publications in some disciplines when she goes up for tenure.

Each of the examples here and throughout this post reflects a similar problem—education systems (and society) unjustifiably and systematically view women as less intellectually capable.

Societal changes are necessary

My argument that policy probably isn’t the solution is not intended to undercut the importance of affirmative action and grievance policies that have helped many individuals take appropriate legal recourse. Rather, I am arguing that those policies are certainly not enough, and that the typical K-12 policy mechanisms will likely have no real effect in improving equity for girls.

The obstacles that women face are largely societal and cultural. They act against women from the time they enter kindergarten—instilling in very young girls a belief they are less innately talented than their male peers—and persist into their work lives. Educational institutions—with undoubtedly many well-intentioned educators—are themselves complicit in reinforcing the hurdles. In order to dismantle these barriers, we likely need educators at all levels of education to examine their own biases and stereotypes.

Related Content

Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero

July 10, 2018

Jaymes Pyne

July 30, 2020

Tom Loveless

March 24, 2015

Education Access & Equity Higher Education K-12 Education

Governance Studies

Brown Center on Education Policy

June 20, 2024

Modupe (Mo) Olateju, Grace Cannon, Kelsey Rappe

June 14, 2024

Jon Valant, Nicolas Zerbino

June 13, 2024

Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies

• For Readers
• For Authors
• For Librarians

• Announcements
• SUBMISSIONS
• FOCUS and SCOPE
• EDITORIAL TEAM
• ADVISORY BOARD
• SPECIAL ISSUE

A Descriptive Literature Review: Scrutinizing Gender Sensitisation In Education Sector

Abrahams, F. F., & Sommerkorn, N. I. (1995). Promoting Gender Awareness in the Classroom: An

Example from Germany. Wilfried Bos, Rainer H. Lehmann (éd.), Reflections on Educational

Achievement–Papers in Honour of T. Neville Postlethwaite., 8-24.

Alba, R. J. (2019). Attitude towards gender equality and coeducation among Secondary School teachers: a

case study in Madrid, Spain. Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 19(13), 491-508.

Anita, A., Nargis, A., & Yasmin, S. (2010). Gender in Academic Settings: Role of Teachers. International

journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, 1(4), 343-348.

Annetta, A. L., Slykhuis, D., & Wiebe, E. (2007). Evaluating Gender Differences of Attitude and Perception

Towards Powerpoint for Pre service science teachers. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science, &

Technology Education, 3(4), 297-304.

Ara, N., & Malik, K. S. (2012). Gender Discrimination in Education- A barrier in Development of Female

Education at Higher Secondary Level. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business,

(5), 330-339.

Barodia, S. (2015). Gender Sensitization and Education. International Journal of Interdisciplinary and

Multidisciplinary Studies, 2(4), 107-113.

Baviskar, S. G. (2016). Role of Teacher in Gender Sensitivity. International Journal of Social Science &

Scientific Research, 02(1).

Dr. Divya Kalra / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 17(2), 1316-1327; 2021

© 2021 JLLS and the Authors - Published by JLLS.

Bhattacharya. (2017). Gender Representation in English Textbooks used in Grade Eight under National and

State Boards, India. Language in India, 17(6), 410-432.

Chaven, P. (2016). Gender Sensitisation Strategies In Education. International Journal of Social Science &

Scientific Research, 02(1), 47-51.

Cheag, S. G., & Yuen, W. C. (2016). A Review of Research on Child Abuse in Malaysia. Medical journal

of Malaysia, 71(1), 87-99.

Dash, H. K., KrIshna, S., & Sadangi, B. (2008). Gender Sensitization: Role in Reforming the society.

National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture.

Dawar, T., & Anand, S. (2017). Analysis of Primary Level textbooks from Gender Lens. 3(1), 115-118.

Deore, V. K. (2016). Awareness of Gender Sensitization Through Education. International Journal of Social

Science & Scientific Research, 02(1), 81-86.

Deshmukh, D. S. (2016). Gender, Gender Sensitisation And Eduaction. International Journal of Social

Science & Scientific Research, 02(1), 33-36.

Erden, T. F. (2009). A Course on Gender Equity in education: Does it affect gender role attitudes of preservice teachers? Teacher and Teacher Education, 409-414.

Esteves, M. (2018). GENDER EQUALITY IN EDUCATION: A CHALLENGE FOR POLICY MAKERS.

International Journal of Social Sciences, 4(2), 893-905.

Frawley, T. (2005). Gender Bias in the Classroom. Journal of Childhood Education, 81(4).

Ghatvisave, S. (2016). To Study the perception level of Pre-Service Secondary Teachers towards Gender

Sensitivity. International Journal of Social & Scientific Research, 2, 22-24.

Gibson, E. L., & Leitenberg, H. (2000). CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE PREVENTION PROGRAMS: DO

THEY DECREASE THE OCCURRENCE OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE? Child Abuse & Neglect, 24(9),

Gul, S., Khan, B. M., Mughal, S., Rehman, U. S., & Saif, N. (2012). Gender Stereotype and Teachers

Perceptions (The Case of Pakistan). Information and Knowledge Management, 2(7), 17-28.

Gure, S. G. (2016). GENDER SENSITISATION: SIGNIFICANCE OF EDUCATION. International

Educational & Research Journal, 2(12), 117-119.

Ifegbesan, A. (2010). Gender Stereotyp: The Nigerian Post- Primary School Teacherse Belief and practices

in the classroom. Global Journal of Human Science, 10(4), 29-35.

Jackson, Emerson & Jackson, Judith. (2020). Global Perspectives on Gender Sensitivity and Economic

Benefits. 10.1007/978-3-319-70060-1_61-1.

Kale, P. (2016). A Study of the English Textbook in Relation to Gender Sensitivity. International Journal

of Social & Scientific Research, 02(1), 43-46.

Kenny, C. M. (2001). Child Abuse Reporting: Teachers Perceived Deterrents. Child abuse & neglect 25,

(1), 81-92.

Dr. Divya Kalra / Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 17(2), 1316-1327; 2021 1326

Kesici, S. (2008). Democratic Teacher Beliefs according to the Teachers Gender and Locus of control.

Journal of Instructional Psychology, 35(1), 62-69.

Kumar, A., Pathak, A., Kumar, S., Rastogi, P., & Rastogi, P. (2012). The Problem of Child Sexual Abuse

in India Laws, Legal Lacuna and the Bill- PCSOB- 2011. J Indian Axad Forensic Med, 34(2), 170-175.

Kumar, N. (2016). Strategies for Gender Sensitisation at Work Place. International Journal of Social &

Scientific Research, 2(1), 67-70.

Kumar, R. (2013). The Role of Education Sector in Removing Gender Inequality.

Kute, P. M. (2016). Role of Education in Gender Sensitivity. International Journal of Social & Scientific

Research, 2, 10-11.

Lumadi, W. M., & Shongwe, S. S. (2010). The Need for Training Gender Sensitive Teachers: Adressing

Education Challenges for Gender sensitive National Development. Contemporary issues in Education

Research, 3(3), 41-49.

Marshall, S. C., & Reinhartz, J. (2012). Gender Issues in the Classroom. A Journal of Educational Strategies

, Issuesand Ideas, 7o(6), 333-337.

Meyer, J. E. (2008). Gendered Harassment in secondary Schools; Understanding Teachers (non)

interventions. Gender and Education, 20(6), 555-570.

Mittal, R., & Kaur, J. (2019). Gender Sensitization for Women Empowerment: A Review. Indian Journal

of Economics and Development, 15(1).

Naraynrao, A. S., & Gingine, A. (2016). Role of Teacher in Gender Sensitivity. International Journal of

Social Science & Scientific Research, 02(1), 12-16.

Nayak, K. R. (2014). Gender Sensitization and Role of Education: An Introspection.

Obiunu, J. J. (2013). The Effect of Gender Sensitivity on Discrimination among Secondary School Students.

Journal of Emerging Trends in Educational Research and Policy Studies, 4(6), 888-894.

Panigrahi, S. B. (2016). Eliminating Gender Discrimination In Academic Settings : The Influence of

Teachers. International Journal of Social Science & Scientific Research, 02(1), 57-61.

Patel, A. S., & Shaikh, A. M. (2016). Gender Sensitisation in the school and strategies for improvement.

International Journal of Social & Scientific Research, 2(1), 87-90.

Raina, S. (2012). Gender Bias in Education. International Journal of Research Pedagogy and Technology

in Education, 1(2), 37-47.

Ranganath, S., Rao, A. K., & Srinivas, N. (2011). Gender Equality in Education. International Journal of

Multidisciplinart Research, 1(6), 325-332.

Sadker, D., & Zittleman, K. R. (2007). Teachers, Schools and Society: A brief Introduction to Education.

Sebastian, V. (2016). Role Of Teachers In Gender Sensitivity: Perception of B.Ed. Students Related To

Gender Roles In Society. International Journal of Social Science & Scientific Research, 02(1), 76-80.

Sharma, B. (2016). An Attempt of Gender Sensitizing through Analysis of School Textbook. Imperial

Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 2(9), 511-515.

Sharma, R. (2017). Gen der Sensitization: An Appraisal of the Roles of Teachers and Educational

Institutions. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Intervention, 6(6), 38-40.

Shukla, S. (2016). Our Primary Level Textbooks and Social Constructs about Gender. An International,

Open Access, Peer Reviewed, Refereed E -Journal in English, 2(1), 93-101.

Tatar, M., & Emmanuel, G. (2001). Teachers Perceptions of their Students Gender Roles. The Journal of

Educational Research, 94(4), 215-224.

Thomas, S. (2016). Women Empoernment and Gender Sensitivity. International Journal of Social Science

& Scientific Research, 02(1), 118-121.

Thosare, T. A. (2016). Gender Inequality & Reasons: Need for Gender Sensitive Approaches. International

Journal of Social & Scientific Research, 52-55

• There are currently no refbacks.

Dirty data: an opportunity for cleaning up bias in AI

Haewon Jeong , an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, experienced a pivotal moment in her academic career when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. She was investigating how machine learning (ML) models can discriminate against students in education-related applications. Discrimination, or bias, occurs when a model used to train algorithms makes incorrect predictions that systematically disadvantage a group of people. Bias in ML models can lead to inaccurate or unfair predictions, which can have serious consequences in fields such as healthcare, finance and criminal justice. For example, an unfair model that relies on historical data reflecting systematic social and economic inequities could result in mortgage applications being rejected more often for women than for men, or skin cancer being detected more for white patients than for Black patients, who might be denied treatment.

“I was working with education-related datasets collected by my collaborator, and I realized there was a lot of missing data,” Jeong recalled.

Concerned about adding to the bias in the data, she searched for research papers on how to avoid adding more bias when substituting missing entries with new values, a process called imputation . That was when she made a shocking discovery.

“No one had studied the fairness aspect of imputation before, which was surprising because missing data is such a prevalent problem in the real world,” she said. “Nearly all of the research at the time centered around developing better training algorithms to eliminate bias, but not many people thought about addressing the bias that happened during data collection.”

That realization provided the framework for Jeong’s novel approach to identifying and mitigating the ever-evolving ethical challenges presented by AI-powered systems, launching her study of how various steps in the data-preparation pipeline can introduce bias or fairness.

“People in my field say, ‘Bad data in, bad algorithm out. Biased data in, biased algorithm out,’” said Jeong, “but I have proposed that if we focus on cleaning the bad data, we could reduce the bias from the start.”

As a testament to the potential impact of her proposed research, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted Jeong an Early CAREER Award, the federal agency’s most highly regarded honor for junior faculty. She said that the five-year, $558,000 grant provided a significant boost to her research group and to her, personally.

“I am honored and thrilled,” said Jeong. “This award has made me more confident that the direction of my research is meaningful and supported by the NSF.”

Her project, “From Dirty Data to Fair Prediction: Data Preparation Framework for End-to-End Equitable Machine Learning,” targets the data-preparation pipeline as a strategic opportunity for eliminating unwanted bias and bolstering desirable ethical objectives. Typically, Jeong said, data is “dirty” — missing values and entries, and including varying formats that require standardization. There are many steps required to prepare, or clean, the data, and underlying disparities can encode significant inaccuracies along the way. To mitigate the bias early in the process, Jeong has proposed a three-step process to insert fairness in, when addressing missing values, encoding data and balancing data.

“Right now, AI algorithms learn from examples, and algorithmic interventions can only do so much with the given data,” said Jeong, who earned her Ph.D. in ECE from Carnegie Mellon University. “I propose that supplying better examples and data to the algorithm will result in more fair and ethical learning.”

Datasets are often missing values. For example, when conducting a survey, some questions are not answered completely or are left empty. Before feeding any dataset into an ML algorithm, researchers have two main options for handling missing data: they can exclude the entries that contain missing data, or they can fill in the missing data with an estimate based on the other available information. Jeong’s prior work showed that both methods significantly increased bias. She was the first researcher to publish a paper calling attention to that problem.

“In that paper, we proposed a simple algorithm to deal with bias created through imputation, but it was not very efficient,” she said. “In this project, I want to dive deeper into the problem to investigate if there are more efficient ways to perform data imputation and consider fairness at the same time.”

The second thread that she will address is data encoding, which is the process of changing raw data into a numerical format than an algorithm can read and interpret. Returning to the survey example, some answers may range from zero to five, while others include text fields. Data encoding involves converting the words into numbers. Encoding also enables computers to process and transmit information that is not numerically based, such as text, audio, and video.

“The process of encoding text is already known to cause gender bias and perpetuate social stereotypes, but it’s unclear how these biases flow through the subsequent steps,” explained Jeong, who will rely on her training in information theory to address data encoding. “By looking at it from an information-theory perspective, we hope to develop a fairer algorithm to preserve useful information and suppress information related to bias.”

“People in my field say, ‘Bad data in, bad algorithm out. Biased data in, biased algorithm out.’ But I have proposed that if we focus on cleaning the bad data, we could reduce the bias from the start.”

The third step involves increasing fairness when balancing data, which is the process of ensuring that a ML dataset represents the real-world population from which it is drawn. Having an uneven number of observations among different groups significantly impacts an ML models predictive performance and fairness. This particular thrust is driven by an experiment with education data that Jeong performed as a postdoctoral fellow. In the project, she grouped students into Black/Hispanic/Native American (BHN) and White/Asian (WA). The data was imbalanced, and a majority of the students were in the WA group. Seeking the best way to balance the data and mitigate bias, Jeong varied the proportion of the groups in the training set while keeping the size of the set constant. By varying the percentage of the BHN student data in the training set to range from zero to one hundred percent, she made a surprising discovery. 

“One might intuitively think that the mix of fifty-fifty or one that aligns with national demographics would yield the most equitable model, but it did not,” she explained. “We found that fairness increased most when we included more data points in the set from the majority group and fewer from the minority group.”

As part of her NSF project, Jeong wants to explore what causes the counterintuitive results and establish guidelines for data scientists on the optimal demographic mixture to use. She believes that the amount of noise in the data plays a role in how the data should be balanced. Noise here means inaccuracies in the data, such as people not answering surveys truthfully, giving incorrect answers, or problems created by a language barrier. Jeong hypothesizes that the fairest and least-biased mixture includes more data from the group having the lowest noise level.

Through her novel three-pronged approach to attacking real-world dataset issues, Jeong hopes to create guidelines and best practices in data preparation for equitable and fair ML. Given the skyrocketing use of ML and AI in nearly every sector of society, she believes that her work has significant real-world implications.

“Data and computer scientists want AI to embody and promote essential societal values, like fairness and diversity, not stereotypes,” said Jeong. “Removing unwanted bias and inserting ethical objectives into the data-preparation pipeline could make that possible.” 

The end goal of Jeong’s project is to develop a software library that any data scientist or AI developer can use for fairness-aware data preparation. The library would include her group’s fair-imputation methods, bias-flow measurement toolkit and algorithms.

Jeong also proposed an educational agenda that prioritizes the attraction and retention of talented female students to the study of AI. Research shows that only 12% of AI researchers and a mere 6% of professional software developments in the AI field are women. Jeong plans to design and host the “Girls’ AI Bootcamp,” which will be specifically tailored to engaging female high school students and introducing them to the exciting possibilities within CS and AI.

“I have experienced firsthand the challenges of being in the minority in this field, and I am personally committed to closing the gender gap,” said Jeong. “I not only want to pique the interest among female high school students, but also instill self-confidence in them that they can be leading innovators in the fields of AI and CS.”

Sonia Fernandez Senior Science Writer (805) 893-4765 [email protected]

Share this article

About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Related Stories

June 13, 2024

A conservation market could incentivize global ocean protection

June 12, 2024

With the clock winding down on his doctoral degree, Satish Kumar scores a prestigious research fellowship

June 7, 2024

How a passion for math drove this College of Creative Studies grad to distinction

June 6, 2024

A novel approach to tracking conservation reveals more areas may be conserved than currently accounted for

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Biden Administration’s New Title IX Rules Are Blocked in Six More States

Conservative groups and Republican attorneys general have argued that the protections for transgender students come at the expense of others’ privacy and conflicts with a number of state laws.

By Zach Montague

Reporting from Washington

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations in six more states as Republicans and conservative groups try to overturn a policy that expanded protections for L.G.B.T.Q. students.

In a 93-page opinion , Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that the Education Department had overreached in expanding the definition of “sex” to include gender identity.

Judge Reeves halted the regulations in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia just days after a federal judge made a similar ruling for Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho.

Title IX, which was passed in 1972, prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. The new regulations broadened the scope of the law to prohibit unequal treatment of pregnant students and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

But a coalition of conservative and Christian advocacy groups, as well as attorneys general in Republican states, have argued that the protections for transgender students like access to locker rooms and bathrooms matching their gender identity come at the expense of others’ privacy and conflict with a number of state laws.

More than 20 Republican states are petitioning to block the rules from taking effect as scheduled on Aug. 1. A spokesman for the Education Department said the agency was tracking 10 lawsuits challenging the rules.

Echoing other recent rulings against the new regulations, Judge Reeves rejected the Education Department’s central rationale: that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County — which found that gay and transgender workers are protected from workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act — justified extending those protections to students under Title IX.

Opponents of the rules have argued, and Judge Reeves agreed in his ruling, that separating students based on sex on sports teams and in facilities like dormitories and bathrooms was integral to Title IX’s purpose of ensuring equal opportunities for women when it was passed in 1972, and that the Biden administration’s interpretation confused that intent.

“In essence, the final rule accommodates a reality in which student housing remains sex-segregated while students are free to choose the bathrooms and locker rooms they use based on gender identity,” he wrote.

Judge Reeves also pushed back on the rule on First Amendment grounds, questioning whether teachers who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns could be looked into for sexual harassment under the rule, even if using pronouns “consistent with a student’s purported gender identity” violated their religious or moral beliefs.

Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts. More about Zach Montague

A lawsuit alleging Central Bucks underpaid more than 350 female teachers is nearing trial. Here’s what to know.

The women — current and former district teachers — are claiming gender discrimination, saying they were hired at lower pay rates than their years of teaching experience warranted.

Four years after their legal battle started, some of the more than 350 women suing the Central Bucks School District over unequal pay are headed to court Tuesday to address a key question underlying their allegations: Which male teachers did the district favor compared to them?

The women — current and former district teachers — say they were hired at lower pay rates than their years of teaching experience warranted under the district’s salary schedule. In contrast, they point to male teachers who were credited with their full years of experience — and in some cases, with additional experience they didn’t have.

But the district is arguing the plaintiffs have cherry-picked teachers and have made unfair comparisons. Instead of compiling a group of men that have been treated more favorably, as the teachers have done, the district says each plaintiff needs to identify a particular male teacher hired in the same year as her, with equivalent skills and responsibilities.

The two sides, who will meet for a hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, have not been able to reach agreement on claims that could cost the district more than $100 million. The case is scheduled for trial July 22 and is being closely watched by other school districts, amid ongoing teacher shortages that have led some school systems to hire teachers for hard-to-fill positions at higher-than-normal steps on their salary scales.

‘A lot of the women feel really disrespected’

Rebecca Cartee-Haring, an English teacher who sued the district in 2020, reviewed close to 500 personnel files provided by the district for male teachers, dating back to 1988.

Of the 338 female plaintiffs for which the district supplied personnel files, 54 had four or more years of teaching experience and were placed at step one — the lowest step on the district’s salary scale, Cartee-Haring said. Of those 54 women, 20 had 10 or more years of experience, and were still placed at step one, she said.

But of the 500 men, no man with eight or more years of experience was placed at step one, Cartee-Haring said. There was one man who had seven years of experience and was placed at step one, while two had five years and were put at step one, she said.

Meanwhile, 23 men received credit for years they never taught — including seven who had no prior teaching experience, Cartee-Haring said. She found no examples of women who received similar treatment.

The definition of each step can vary from year to year, but according to the district’s latest filing, since 2014, step one is for teachers with zero to two years’ experience.

Cartee-Haring’s lawsuit was followed a year later by a second from another English teacher, Dawn Marinello. That second case was certified as a collective action, with women who taught in the district as far back as 2000 allowed to opt in as plaintiffs.

“A lot of the women feel really disrespected,” said Cartee-Haring, who was placed on the fifth step when she was hired in 2007 after teaching high school English for nine years in Hatboro-Horsham. She earned $54,100, but should have been placed on the tenth step, with a salary of $66,650, according to her lawsuit — which says that in contrast, a male teacher hired to teach high school social studies in 2010 with 14 years of teaching experience was placed at the 16th step, with a salary of $101,810.

“You think this couldn’t possibly have occurred, but it’s literally all there in black and white,” Cartee-Haring said of the pay disparities.

Cartee-Haring said the school board has refused to hear a presentation from her and Marinello’s lawyer, despite a judge recommending it do so.

Karen Smith, the school board president, said the board was advised by lawyers that hearing a presentation would be a “very odd situation” and that it could violate the open-meetings law, if it did so in an executive session.

The pay-equity cases became a political football ahead of the November school board elections when the district’s lawyer, Michael Levin, made a public presentation to the then-Republican-led school board.

During his presentation, Levin said that if the district accepted a $119 million settlement demand from the plaintiffs, it would increase the average tax bill by $3,500 — a 50% increase — or require deep cuts to school staff and services.

Republicans then accused Democratic candidates — including Rick Haring, Cartee-Haring’s husband — of seeking to impose massive tax increases . Democrats, who swept the elections , said Levin’s presentation was misleading and noted that Pennsylvania’s Act 1 index limits school district tax increases; the coming year’s limit is 5.3%.

Haring said he’s had “zero involvement” on the board with the pay equity cases, and hasn’t participated in any board discussions on the matter.

What the sides are arguing

So far, the new board has not moved to settle the case. “We can’t afford” a $100 million settlement, Smith said last week.

She also rejected the idea the district has been discriminating against female teachers. “I don’t believe there’s been a pattern of discrimination, no,” Smith said.

Levin didn’t respond to requests for comment. The district also recently hired lawyers with the Cozen O’Connor firm in preparation for a possible appeal.

(Haring said he disagrees with the board’s approach to the issue: “I do not want to be viewed as sharing the same sentiment,” he said.)

In a Friday court filing, lawyers for the district said that plaintiffs had failed to show valid comparisons between teachers in a chart that lists most of the plaintiffs, along with 122 male teachers. The chart — prepared by plaintiffs as a summary intended to prevent every teacher from having to testify at trial — lists the years of experience each teacher had before being hired by Central Bucks, what step the teacher was placed at, and whether the placement was higher or lower than the district’s hiring guidelines.

The chart contains numerous errors, including incorrectly counting the years of experience some teachers had, the district said. It also doesn’t distinguish between teaching specialties — like kindergarten compared to high school mathematics — or note that some of the men had certifications in hard-to-fill positions, including industrial technology, German, and physics, the district said.

The district also says its hiring guidelines have changed over time, with different recommended placements based on years of experience.

Under the Equal Pay Act, it’s the district’s burden to prove that a factor other than gender resulted in a decision to compensate men and women differently, “so clearly that no juror would believe otherwise,” said Ed Mazurek, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. That’s a higher standard for the employer to meet than for other discrimination cases, Mazurek said.

While the district argues that the Equal Pay Act requires plaintiffs to each identify a male comparator, “to us, it’s very clear under the law all teachers are comparators to each other based on their jobs,” Mazurek said.

Mazurek said plaintiffs are seeking $102 million in back pay and damages. That doesn’t include attorneys’ fees that could be awarded at trial; Mazurek said awards in other equal pay cases have ranged from 20% to 45% of damages. Plaintiffs are also seeking an order that the district pay the female teachers at higher rates going forward.

The president of the district’s teachers union didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.

Cartee-Haring — whose lawsuit also accuses the district of discrimination and retaliation in ending her lacrosse coaching contract — worries that if the case goes to trial, the district will invoke “stereotypes” about different teaching specialties, like that teaching kindergarten doesn’t require as much preparation as high school history.

“That’s going to divide the community, in many ways,” she said.

Biden’s Title IX Transgender Rights Rule Blocked in More States

By Peter Hayes

A second federal trial court on Monday preliminarily blocked an Education Department rule that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools that receive federal funding.

The preliminary injunction, issued by Judge Danny C. Reeves of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, is limited to the plaintiff states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, and West Virginia.

The rule has now been blocked for 10 states as last week the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction against its enforcement in Louisiana, Mississippi, Idaho, and Montana.

Conservative litigators have targeted certain states and trial court districts to bring cases where they hope to obtain favorable rulings. Reeves, who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2001, struck down a law last year that would bar individuals under domestic violence orders from buying a gun.

The ruling marks a setback for the Biden Administration’s efforts to expand transgender rights and raises the stakes for the other states where litigation over the rule is moving ahead.

An injunction is warranted because the states are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim “that the Department exceeded its statutory authority in redefining ‘on the basis of sex’ for purposes of Title IX,” Reeves said.

“The Department’s interpretation conflicts with the plain language of Title IX and therefore exceeds its authority to promulgate regulations under that statute,” Reeves said.

SCOTUS Precedent

Reeves rejected the department’s reliance on the US Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton Cnty ., in which the court found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Bostock doesn’t extend to Title IX, Reeves said, because the case “was explicitly limited to the context of employment discrimination under Title VII.”

The Trump administration published a memorandum just days before he left office stating that the Bostock holding didn’t apply to Title IX.

The Biden administration reversed course, stating that there is “textual similarity between Title VII and Title IX,” and that the Supreme Court in Bostock “ concluded that discrimination based on sexual orientation and discrimination based on gender identity inherently involve treating individuals differently because of their sex.” Although Bostock involved sex discrimination in employment, the administration said, “courts rely on interpretations of Title VII to inform interpretations of Title IX.”

Rejecting this argument, Reeves said, the majority in Bostock said “its decision did not ‘sweep beyond Title VII to other federal or state laws that prohibit sex discrimination.’”

Reeves also cited a 2023 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit allowing Kentucky and Tennessee to enforce bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors until questions over the laws’ constitutionality are resolved. The Sixth Circuit found that Bostock is limited to Title VII claims, Reeves said.

The final rule also has “serious First Amendment implications,” Reeves said. Teachers “likely would be required to use students’ preferred pronouns regardless of whether doing so conflicts with the educator’s religious or moral beliefs,” Reeves said. “A rule that compels speech and engages in such viewpoint discrimination is impermissible,” he said.

Efforts to target transgender rights have grown since the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges , which held that states can’t deny same-sex couples the right to marry. Since then, conservative states have passed bathroom bans, transgender athlete bans, and targeted gender-affirming care for children.

The Supreme Court in January declined to consider whether transgender students have a legal right to use school bathrooms that match their gender identity.

The case is Tennessee v. Cardona , E.D. Ky., No. 24-cv-00072, 6/17/24.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Hayes in Washington at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Carmen Castro-Pagán at [email protected]

Learn more about Bloomberg Law or Log In to keep reading:

Learn about bloomberg law.

AI-powered legal analytics, workflow tools and premium legal & business news.

Already a subscriber?

Log in to keep reading or access research tools.

Plan International's websites

Find the Plan International website you are looking for in this list

G7 leaders commit to tackle gender discrimination but fail to call out adolescent girls

G7 leaders have committed to address the rollback on rights including gender inequality, climate change, hunger and conflicts, however adolescent girls and G7 Leaders’ involvement in the Summit of the Future are omitted despite being crucial to much needed progress.

We welcome G7 Leaders’ commitment to address some of the world’s most pressing issues including gender inequality, climate change, access to sexual, reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and education, conflicts, and hunger crisis. However, we note the lack of commitment to adolescent girls, the omission of last year’s explicit commitment to ensuring access to safe abortion, and the lack of concrete steps, sufficient investments, and accountability mechanisms in translating commitments into action.  

Gender equality, disability inclusion and rollback on rights  

We welcome G7 Leaders’ commitment to implement gender transformative and multi-sectoral approach to foreign policy, humanitarian aid and development cooperation. This is crucial in tackling the root causes of the barriers faced by girls from fully enjoying their rights. Plan International implements the same approach in all its work which challenges discriminatory gender norms and unequal power relations.  

We commend G7 for the creation of the first Disability Inclusion Ministers Conference. This is a necessary step towards equality and social inclusion, and achieving the goal of leaving no one behind. We also welcome commitments to full economic empowerment of all girls and women, and elimination of sexual and gender-based violence including in humanitarian contexts. In line with this, we are pleased with the commitment to advance the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, and the empowerment and full and equal participation of girls and women, in all their diversity with the USD 20 billion investment to boost women’s empowerment and pledge to collectively increase G7 ODA for gender equality, particularly in Africa. Plan International also affirms the strengthened work of the Gender Equality Advisory Council (GEAC) and the updated G7 Dashboard on Gender Gaps but calls for increased participation of civil society and youth-led groups, for effective implementation of recommendations.  

Further, we call on G7 to create actions specific to adolescent girls. We expressed this urgency in a letter to G7 in April 2024 . Adolescent girls are at risk of being left behind. They continue to be invisible in global policymaking and development agendas. The Summit of the Future can be an opportunity to do this. We believe that G7 can be an influential force in the Summit to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, shape the post-2030 development framework, and champion adolescent girls’ agenda as reflected in Plan International’s Girls’ Pact for the Future . 

We share the same concern over the roll back of the rights of girls, women, and LGBTQIA+ people around the world. We therefore look forward to the implementation of its commitment to work with global partners to advance gender equality in multilateral forums, and call on G7 Leaders to be more pro-active in protecting the progress made in global, regional and domestic policies on gender equality and human rights against anti rights actors. In line with this, the commitment to parenthood protection should be implemented consistent with human rights and gender equality principles that recognise girls’ and women’s bodily autonomy, diverse family structures, and children’s best interests and evolving capacities.   

Universal health coverage and SRHR  

We are pleased to see the commitment to further promote comprehensive SRHR for all and to advance maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health, especially for the most vulnerable. However, we regret the lack of explicit language on last year’s commitment to ensuring access to safe and legal abortion and post abortion care.  Abortion is a human right and lifesaving healthcare, and provision of services for safe abortion should be available and accessible to all girls and women. We therefore call on G7 to retain this as part of its current commitment on comprehensive SRHR.

In addition, we call on G7 leaders to step up efforts to ensure SRHR are prioritised and funded in humanitarian settings. We also welcome the commitment to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) and promoting equitable access to quality health services as well as the commitment to invest in resilient health services, primary healthcare service delivery and a skilled health workforce. In this regard, we call on G7 leaders to give greater priority to ensuring adolescent health and wellbeing in line with commitments made at the Global Forum for Adolescents. We encourage governments to invest in and ensure age and gender-responsive health services that meet the needs of adolescent girls, free from violence, discrimination, coercion or stigma and eliminate barriers to access including third party consent.  

Education and unpaid care work  

We affirm G7 Leaders’ continued support to quality education for all girls and recognising it as the best predictor for future levels of equality by promoting access to safe, inclusive, and equitable quality education for all. We also welcome its commitment to enhance partnership with African countries on girls’ education, including the redoubling of efforts to meet the G7 Girls Education targets by 2026. Early this year, Plan International played an active role in the AU Summit calling for gender responsive education systems.

G7, however, should complement these efforts through prioritising, protecting, and increasing education financing, both Official Development Assistance and domestic budgets, and ensuring that global initiatives are fully funded. Further, we call on G7 Leaders to explicitly recognise the return on investment for early childhood education, both in terms of economic and social benefit, and as an entry point for advancing gender equality.  

We also welcome G7 Leaders’ commitment to address unpaid care burdens and to increase provision of childcare, recognising the positive impacts on economic independence and empowerment of women. However, we call for G7 leaders to specifically recognise and address the impact of unpaid care work on the aspirations, education, and agency of girls. G7 leaders must work through policies, systems, and programs to address the unequal gender norms, roles, and stereotypes which mean that girls are expected to take on unpaid care and household responsibilities from a young age, beginning in early childhood.  

Climate change and humanitarian   crises

Plan International welcomes G7 Leaders’ recognition of the disproportionate impact of climate change on women, youth, and indigenous peoples, and their critical role in addressing this crisis. We are pleased to see G7 Leaders’ recognition of the role of young generations to promote not only climate action but also drive a more sustainable future. We look forward to how G7 Leaders will implement their commitment to amplify youth-led initiatives. In line with this, we call on G7 Leaders to explicitly consider the intergenerational impacts of the climate crisis specifically for children, adolescent girls and future generations when creating climate-related policy, financing and adaptation plans. We also call on G7 to report on last year’s commitment to providing over $21 billion to the worsening humanitarian and food crises, and for increased investment in addressing these issues.   

Plan International welcomes the demand from the G7 that all parties to conflict in Gaza comply with their obligations under international law in all circumstances, especially International Humanitarian Law (IHL). We continue to call with our humanitarian peers for unhindered and safe humanitarian access, an end to the targeting of humanitarian workers and aid, as well as an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire. The G7 and all member states around the world have a responsibility to immediately cease the transfer of arms while there is a risk they will be used to commit violations of IHL and to ensure accountability for violations against children and all civilians. It is too late for the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed or maimed, with entire families decimated, but for those who survive, the G7 must bring their suffering to an immediate end.  

Plan International looks forward to how the G7 will sustain and report on its previous and current commitments especially those that relate to girls’ rights, and accelerate actions and investments during Canada’s G7 Presidency in 2025. For this, we shall work with the government of Canada through our Canada National Office and other relevant offices, various engagement groups, government champions, and civil society partners.   

Related pages

Social-norms-change approach for end fgm/c programmes, context analyses on child marriage in crises and forced displacement settings.

SOGIESC Policy Position

Cookie preferences updated. Close