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5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Essay on Gender Equality: Break Stereotypes

• Updated on  
• Feb 19, 2024

Gender equality refers to equal opportunities for both men and women. It is the state of having equal access to resources for everyone regardless of their sex. There is a huge disparity in the number of opportunities available for men and women. Gender equality is an important social issue which requires an adequate amount of attention from everybody.

Social issue topics like gender equality are often part of academic writing, most importantly essay writing. Students are given the task of writing an essay on gender equality, where their understanding of the topic and proficiency in English are measured. So, to help students with their essays on gender equality, we have listed down some essay samples. These essays on gender equality samples will provide you with creative ideas, that you can add to your essay topics.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Also Read: Essay on Women Empowerment: Samples & Useful Tips

Table of Contents

• 1 Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 100 words
• 2 Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 200 words
• 3 Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 300 words
• 4 Gender Equality Paragraph

Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 100 words

‘Gender equality is the cornerstone of a progressive society. It grants everyone the same rights and opportunities irrespective of gender. Gender discrimination continues to limit the potential of countless individuals all over the world. To overcome gender-based discrimination that limits the potential of an individual, society must recognize that every person, regardless of gender, possesses unique talents and abilities that deserve equal recognition and opportunities. In a world where diversity is celebrated, gender should be no exception. By overcoming gender bias we pave the way for a more inclusive, progressive, and harmonious world.’

Also Read:   Women’s Equality Day 2023: History, Theme, Significance

Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 200 words

‘Gender equality is a fundamental human right that should be embraced by all. It goes beyond mere parity between men and women; it encompasses the elimination of stereotypes, biases, and discrimination that hinder anyone from realizing their full potential. Achieving gender equality is not just a moral imperative; it also benefits society as a whole. When women and men have equal opportunities in education, employment, and leadership roles, economies thrive, communities prosper, and peace prevails.

Gender equality extends beyond basic rights; it embodies the struggle for a world where gender ceases to be a determining factor in one’s opportunities or treatment. It’s a call to arms against harmful stereotypes and prejudices that persist in our societies. It’s about nurturing an environment where everyone, regardless of gender, can thrive, pursue their ambitions, and contribute their talents to the fullest.

The fight for gender equality is far from over. Unequal pay, underrepresentation of women in leadership roles, and gender-based violence are stark reminders of the challenges we face. We must dismantle these barriers, foster inclusivity, and promote diversity in all aspects of life.’

Also Read: What are Human Rights?

Sample Essay on Gender Equality in 300 words

‘Gender equality is not just an abstract concept; it’s a critical aspect of human rights that affects individuals’ daily lives. Achieving gender equality necessitates systemic changes across society, politics, and the economy. It begins with recognizing that gender disparities are deeply rooted in our history, culture, and institutions, and it requires a concerted effort to uproot them.

To bridge the gender gap, we must first address the root causes of inequality. Stereotypes that dictate traditional gender roles must be challenged. Education plays a pivotal role in this endeavour, as it equips individuals with the knowledge and critical thinking skills to question existing norms. Moreover, it empowers women and men to make informed choices about their lives and careers.

One of the most urgent challenges is combatting gender-based violence. Millions of women and girls worldwide suffer from physical, sexual, or psychological violence simply because of their gender. Achieving gender equality means creating a world where no one lives in fear or faces violence due to their gender identity.

Gender equality encompasses not only equal rights but also equal opportunities, respect, and the freedom to express one’s identity without fear or prejudice. The fight for gender equality is a collective responsibility. It requires dismantling patriarchal norms and embracing diversity. It requires a shift in mindset, proactive policies, and unwavering commitment. When we embrace gender equality, we unlock the full potential of half the world’s population, creating a brighter, fairer future for all.

In conclusion, gender equality is not just a lofty ideal but an urgent necessity. It’s about reshaping our world into one where every individual, regardless of their gender, has the same rights and opportunities. Achieving gender equality requires a collective effort to change not only policies but also attitudes, cultures, and social norms.’

Gender Equality Paragraph

Ans. 1 One example of Gender equality is receiving equal pay for equivalent work, irrespective of one’s gender. It also involves ensuring that women do not face repercussions upon their return to work after taking maternity leave, for instance.

Ans. 2 India has supported Sustainable Development Goals and one of the sustainable goals is Gender Equality. India as a country believes in Gender Equality and longs for an impartial and unbiased society. The government of India has also taken many initiatives like Beti Padhao Beti Bachao.

Ans. 3. Gender discrimination is an obstruction in the path of development. Hence becomes one of the challenges to gender equality. With this, child marriage, domestic violence, and sexual abuse are some more challenges to gender equality.

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A global story

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series . In this essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality 100 years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U.S. Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world.

The year 2020 will stand out in the history books. It will always be remembered as the year the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the globe and brought death, illness, isolation, and economic hardship. It will also be noted as the year when the death of George Floyd and the words “I can’t breathe” ignited in the United States and many other parts of the world a period of reckoning with racism, inequality, and the unresolved burdens of history.

The history books will also record that 2020 marked 100 years since the ratification of the 19th Amendment in America, intended to guarantee a vote for all women, not denied or abridged on the basis of sex.

This is an important milestone and the continuing movement for gender equality owes much to the history of suffrage and the brave women (and men) who fought for a fairer world. Yet just celebrating what was achieved is not enough when we have so much more to do. Instead, this anniversary should be a galvanizing moment when we better inform ourselves about the past and emerge more determined to achieve a future of gender equality.

Australia’s role in the suffrage movement

In looking back, one thing that should strike us is how international the movement for suffrage was though the era was so much less globalized than our own.

For example, how many Americans know that 25 years before the passing of the 19th Amendment in America, my home of South Australia was one of the first polities in the world to give men and women the same rights to participate in their democracies? South Australia led Australia and became a global leader in legislating universal suffrage and candidate eligibility over 125 years ago.

This extraordinary achievement was not an easy one. There were three unsuccessful attempts to gain equal voting rights for women in South Australia, in the face of relentless opposition. But South Australia’s suffragists—including the Women’s Suffrage League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, as well as remarkable women like Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Lee, and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls—did not get dispirited but instead continued to campaign, persuade, and cajole. They gathered a petition of 11,600 signatures, stuck it together page by page so that it measured around 400 feet in length, and presented it to Parliament.

The Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Bill was finally introduced on July 4, 1894, leading to heated debate both within the houses of Parliament, and outside in society and the media. Demonstrating that some things in Parliament never change, campaigner Mary Lee observed as the bill proceeded to committee stage “that those who had the least to say took the longest time to say it.” 1

The Bill finally passed on December 18, 1894, by 31 votes to 14 in front of a large crowd of women.

In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman to stand as a political candidate in South Australia.

South Australia’s victory led the way for the rest of the colonies, in the process of coming together to create a federated Australia, to fight for voting rights for women across the entire nation. Women’s suffrage was in effect made a precondition to federation in 1901, with South Australia insisting on retaining the progress that had already been made. 2 South Australian Muriel Matters, and Vida Goldstein—a woman from the Australian state of Victoria—are just two of the many who fought to ensure that when Australia became a nation, the right of women to vote and stand for Parliament was included.

Australia’s remarkable progressiveness was either envied, or feared, by the rest of the world. Sociologists and journalists traveled to Australia to see if the worst fears of the critics of suffrage would be realised.

In 1902, Vida Goldstein was invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt—the first Australian to ever meet a U.S. president in the White House. With more political rights than any American woman, Goldstein was a fascinating visitor. In fact, President Roosevelt told Goldstein: “I’ve got my eye on you down in Australia.” 3

Goldstein embarked on many other journeys around the world in the name of suffrage, and ran five times for Parliament, emphasising “the necessity of women putting women into Parliament to secure the reforms they required.” 4

Muriel Matters went on to join the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. In 1908 she became the first woman to speak in the British House of Commons in London—not by invitation, but by chaining herself to the grille that obscured women’s views of proceedings in the Houses of Parliament. After effectively cutting her off the grille, she was dragged out of the gallery by force, still shouting and advocating for votes for women. The U.K. finally adopted women’s suffrage in 1928.

These Australian women, and the many more who tirelessly fought for women’s rights, are still extraordinary by today’s standards, but were all the more remarkable for leading the rest of the world.

A shared history of exclusion

Of course, no history of women’s suffrage is complete without acknowledging those who were excluded. These early movements for gender equality were overwhelmingly the remit of privileged white women. Racially discriminatory exclusivity during the early days of suffrage is a legacy Australia shares with the United States.

South Australian Aboriginal women were given the right to vote under the colonial laws of 1894, but they were often not informed of this right or supported to enroll—and sometimes were actively discouraged from participating.

They were later further discriminated against by direct legal bar by the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, whereby Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were excluded from voting in federal elections—a right not given until 1962.

Any celebration of women’s suffrage must acknowledge such past injustices front and center. Australia is not alone in the world in grappling with a history of discrimination and exclusion.

The best historical celebrations do not present a triumphalist version of the past or convey a sense that the fight for equality is finished. By reflecting on our full history, these celebrations allow us to come together, find new energy, and be inspired to take the cause forward in a more inclusive way.

The way forward

In the century or more since winning women’s franchise around the world, we have made great strides toward gender equality for women in parliamentary politics. Targets and quotas are working. In Australia, we already have evidence that affirmative action targets change the diversity of governments. Since the Australian Labor Party (ALP) passed its first affirmative action resolution in 1994, the party has seen the number of women in its national parliamentary team skyrocket from around 14% to 50% in recent years.

Instead of trying to “fix” women—whether by training or otherwise—the ALP worked on fixing the structures that prevent women getting preselected, elected, and having fair opportunities to be leaders.

There is also clear evidence of the benefits of having more women in leadership roles. A recent report from Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) at King’s College London, shows that where women are able to exercise political leadership, it benefits not just women and girls, but the whole of society.

But even though we know how to get more women into parliament and the positive difference they make, progress toward equality is far too slow. The World Economic Forum tells us that if we keep progressing as we are, the global political empowerment gender gap—measuring the presence of women across Parliament, ministries, and heads of states across the world— will only close in another 95 years . This is simply too long to wait and, unfortunately, not all barriers are diminishing. The level of abuse and threatening language leveled at high-profile women in the public domain and on social media is a more recent but now ubiquitous problem, which is both alarming and unacceptable.

Across the world, we must dismantle the continuing legal and social barriers that prevent women fully participating in economic, political, and community life.

Education continues to be one such barrier in many nations. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women. With COVID-19-related school closures happening in developing countries, there is a real risk that progress on girls’ education is lost. When Ebola hit, the evidence shows that the most marginalized girls never made it back to school and rates of child marriage, teen pregnancy. and child labor soared. The Global Partnership for Education, which I chair, is currently hard at work trying to ensure that this history does not repeat.

Ensuring educational equality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality. In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes. Good intentions will not be enough to achieve the profound wave of change required. We need hard-headed empirical research about what works. In my life and writings post-politics and through my work at the GIWL, sharing and generating this evidence is front and center of the work I do now.

GIWL work, undertaken in partnership with IPSOS Mori, demonstrates that the public knows more needs to be done. For example, this global polling shows the community thinks it is harder for women to get ahead. Specifically, they say men are less likely than women to need intelligence and hard work to get ahead in their careers.

Other research demonstrates that the myth of the “ideal worker,” one who works excessive hours, is damaging for women’s careers. We also know from research that even in families where each adult works full time, domestic and caring labor is disproportionately done by women. 5

In order to change the landscape to remove the barriers that prevent women coming through for leadership—and having their leadership fairly evaluated rather than through the prism of gender—we need a radical shift in structures and away from stereotypes.

Other more subtle barriers, like unconscious bias and cultural stereotypes, continue to hold women back. We need to start implementing policies that prevent people from being marginalized and stop interpreting overconfidence or charisma as indicative of leadership potential. The evidence shows that it is possible for organizations to adjust their definitions and methods of identifying merit so they can spot, measure, understand, and support different leadership styles.

Taking the lessons learned from our shared history and the lives of the extraordinary women across the world, we know evidence needs to be combined with activism to truly move forward toward a fairer world. We are in a battle for both hearts and minds.

Why this year matters

We are also at an inflection point. Will 2020 will be remembered as the year that a global recession disproportionately destroyed women’s jobs, while women who form the majority of the workforce in health care and social services were at risk of contracting the coronavirus? Will it be remembered as a time of escalating domestic violence and corporations cutting back on their investments in diversity programs?

Or is there a more positive vision of the future that we can seize through concerted advocacy and action? A future where societies re-evaluate which work truly matters and determine to better reward carers. A time when men and women forced into lockdowns re-negotiated how they approach the division of domestic labor. Will the pandemic be viewed as the crisis that, through forcing new ways of virtual working, ultimately led to more balance between employment and family life, and career advancement based on merit and outcomes, not presentism and the old boys’ network?

This history is not yet written. We still have an opportunity to make it happen. Surely the women who led the way 100 years ago can inspire us to seize this moment and create that better, more gender equal future.

• December 7,1894: Welcome home meeting for Catherine Helen Spence at the Café de Paris. [ Register , Dec, 19, 1894 ]
• Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World , (Text Publishing, 2018).
• Janette M. Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman, (Melbourne University Press, 1993)
• Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, (Icon Books, 2010)

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series.  Learn more about the series and read published work »

About the Author

Julia gillard, distinguished fellow – global economy and development, center for universal education.

Gillard is a distinguished fellow with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is the Inaugural Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. Gillard also serves as Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, which is dedicated to expanding access to quality education worldwide and is patron of CAMFED, the Campaign for Female Education.

Read full bio

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Research Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

* E-mail: [email protected]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor: Elisa Ughetto, Politecnico di Torino, ITALY

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data collection

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

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

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

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Text processing and keyword extraction

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

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

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

Classification of research topics

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

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

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Evaluation of semantic importance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overview of main topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Compensation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision-making.

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

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

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

Career progression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization.

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

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

Human capital.

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

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

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

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

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

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

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

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

Research gaps and conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting information

S1 text. keywords used for paper selection..

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

Acknowledgments

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

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• Gender Equality
• Reference work
• © 2021
• Walter Leal Filho 0 ,
• Anabela Marisa Azul 1 ,
• Luciana Brandli 2 ,
• Amanda Lange Salvia 3 ,
• Tony Wall 4

European School of Sustainability Science and Research, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

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Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Faculty of engineering and architecture, the university of passo fundo, passo fundo, brazil, the university of passo fundo, passo fundo, brazil, international centre for thriving, university of chester, chester, uk.

• Fosters knowledge to support the Sustainable Development Goal to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Details research, projects, and practical action
• Provides a sound basis to promote sustainability efforts

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (ENUNSDG)

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Table of contents (276 entries)

Front matter, access to education and gender equality.

• Chhabi Kumar, Varun Pandey

Accessibility/Availability of Nutritious Food

Achieving sustainable development goals through women’s economic empowerment, adolescence empowerment, sustainability, and gender equality.

• Mohammed Asaduzzaman, Md. Asad Ud-Daula

Adolescent Reproductive Health in South Asia: Issues and Challenges

• Urmi Nanda Biswas

Affirmative Action Measures and Gender Equality: Review of Evidence, Policies, and Practices

• Uduak Archibong, Kingsley Udie Utam

Artificial Intelligence, Gender, and Oppression

• Alison Duncan Kerr

Bioethical Principles

Birth control, birth spacing: achieving gender equality under sustainable development goals.

• S. M. Haider Rizvi, Arpana N. Tirkey

Care Workers

• Gender Stereotypes
• Equal Opportunities
• Economic Security
• Empowerment
• Violence against Women
• Forced Marriage
• Genital Mutilation
• Participation in Parliament
• Reproductive Health Care
• gender, sexuality and law

About this book

The problems related to the process of industrialisation such as biodiversity depletion, climate change and a worsening of health and living conditions, especially but not only in developing countries, intensify. Therefore, there is an increasing need to search for integrated solutions to make development more sustainable. The United Nations has acknowledged the problem and approved the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. On 1st January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the Agenda officially came into force. These goals cover the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection.  

The Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals comprehensively addresses the SDGs in an integrated way. It encompasses 17 volumes, each devoted to one of the 17 SDGs. This volume addresses SDG 5, namely " Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls " and contains the description of a range of terms, which allows a better understanding and fosters knowledge. This SDG is considered by many as a pivotal goal since the significant role of women in achieving sustainable development has always been acknowledged in several official UN declarations. Yet gender disparity is still rampant under various guises in various countries. Women’s rights need to be strongly safeguarded through legislation to ensure equal opportunities.

Concretely, the defined targets are:

• End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
• Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation
• Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation
• Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate
• Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life
• Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences
• Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws 
• Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women
• Adopt and strengthensound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels

Editors and Affiliations

Walter Leal Filho

Anabela Marisa Azul

Luciana Brandli

Amanda Lange Salvia

About the editors

Walter Leal Filho (BSc, PhD, DSc, DPhil, DEd, DL, DLitt)  is a Senior Professor and Head of the Research and Transfer Centre "Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management” at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Chair of Environment and Technology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the initiator of the Word Sustainable Development Symposia (WSSD-U) series, and chairs the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme. Professor Leal Filho has written, co-written, edited or co-edited more than 400 publications, including books, book chapters and papers in refereed journals.

Anabela Marisa Azul  is a Researcher at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Coimbra (UC, Portugal). She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences, specializing in Ecology (2002, UC), and pursued her investigation on biology and ecology of fungi to pinpoint the role of mycorrhizal symbiosis for sustainability of Mediterranean forests under different land use scenarios at the Centre for Functional Ecology (CFE-UC), where she became an Associate Researcher (from 2009 to 2014). At CFE-UC, Marisa Azul developed a holistic approach that combined innovation in food production with sustainable development and public scientific awareness to multiple actors. At CNC, from 2014 on, Marisa Azul focuses her investigation on basic research and participatory research dynamics to pinpoint links between metabolism, health/disease, and sustainability. She has broad academic experience as a researcher working in participatory research and interdisciplinary that link biomedical and life/environmental sciences, social sciences, science education, science communication, and artistic forms. Her research interests also lie in bringing together the academy and social/economical players. She has been successful in attracting national and international funding, coordinating projects, and mentoring young researchers on the topics mentioned. She has co-authored over 40 scientific publications and book chapters, co-edited 4 books on Climate Change Management Series and 1 onWorld Sustainability Series published by Springer, co-authored 4 books for children and 2 comics, and co-produced 1 animation.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Gender Equality

Editors : Walter Leal Filho, Anabela Marisa Azul, Luciana Brandli, Amanda Lange Salvia, Tony Wall

Series Title : Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95687-9

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Earth and Environmental Science , Reference Module Physical and Materials Science , Reference Module Earth and Environmental Sciences

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-95686-2 Published: 10 January 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-95687-9 Published: 28 January 2021

Series ISSN : 2523-7403

Series E-ISSN : 2523-7411

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXIX, 1290

Number of Illustrations : 6 b/w illustrations, 40 illustrations in colour

Topics : Sustainable Development , Social Structure, Social Inequality , Diversity Management/Women in Business , Gender, Sexuality and Law , Politics and Gender

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26 Gender: A Historical Perspective

Paola Giuliano, University of California, Los Angeles

• Published: 06 September 2017
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Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. We also discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.

Social attitudes toward women and their role in society show remarkable differences across countries, including those with similar institutions or economic development. Standard economic variables such as the level of development, women’s education, fertility and marriage/divorce prospects, and the expansion of the service sector have been widely studied (see Goldin 1990 for a review). Some scholars have emphasized the role played by market prices, such as the decline in child care costs ( Attanasio, Low, and Sanchez-Marcos 2008 ), and by technological factors, such as the invention of baby formula ( Albanesi and Olivetti 2016 ). A recent literature has emphasized how this large variation could be the result of differences in cultural beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society ( Fernandez 2007 ; Fernandez and Fogli 2010 ; Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015 ). Several new contributions have started to study the deep historical roots of these cultural differences (see Nunn 2009 for a review).

This chapter will review the literature on the long-term historical origins of the differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies and how they are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We will review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms (such as the presence of the dowry vs. the bride price and differences in inheritance rules favoring women). 1

We will also discuss how relatively short-term historical shocks can help in understanding differences in gender roles across societies. Finally, we will discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.

Historical Origin of Gender Roles

In this section, we will look at seven important long-term historical determinants of gender roles: agricultural technology, language, geography, preindustrial societal characteristics, family structures, religion, and historical shocks.

Agriculture and Agricultural Technology

A recent literature has emphasized how differences in agricultural technology or, more simply, a long history of agriculture can have long-lasting effects on the evolution of gender role attitudes. Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) study the historical persistence of differences in female labor force participation. The hypothesis for their empirical analysis comes from the seminal work of Ester Boserup (1970) , in which she argued that differences in the role of women in societies originate in the different types of agricultural technology, particularly the differences between shifting and plough agriculture. Shifting agriculture, which uses hand-held tools like the hoe and the digging stick, is labor intensive, with women actively participating in farm work, while using a plough to prepare the soil is more capital intensive. Unlike the hoe or digging stick, the plough requires significant upper-body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it. Farming with the plough is also less compatible with child care, which is almost always the responsibility of women. As a result, men in societies characterized by plough agriculture tended to specialize in agricultural work outside the home, while women specialized in activities within the home. In turn, this division of labor generated a norm that the natural place for women is in the home. This belief tends to persist even if the economy moves out of agriculture, affecting the participation of women in activities performed outside the home, including market employment, entrepreneurship, and politics.

The authors document a very strong negative correlation between traditional use of the plough and female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies, using the Ethnographic Atlas , a dataset assembled by George Peter Murdock in 1967 and containing ethnographic information for 1,265 ethnic groups covering the whole world. To investigate whether plough-based agriculture correlates with lower female participation in all agricultural tasks or only in a few (such as soil preparation), the authors report results on specific activities carried out in the field or outside the home: land clearance, soil preparation, planting, crop tending, harvesting, caring for small and large animals, milking, cooking, fuel gathering, water fetching, burden carrying, handicraft production, and trading. Their empirical analysis carefully controls for other variables that could be correlated with plough use and gender roles: the presence of large domesticated animals, a measure of economic development, the fraction of land on which the ethnic group lives defined as tropical or subtropical, and the fraction of land that is defined as suitable for agriculture. Overall, the authors find that plough use is associated with less female participation in all agricultural tasks, with the largest declines in soil preparation, planting, crop tending, and burden carrying. But they find that plough use tends not to be significantly correlated with female participation in other activities. This interpretation of the correlations is fully consistent with Boserup’s hypothesis.

After looking at the correlation between agricultural technology and female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies, Alesina et al. (2013) study whether differences in agriculture technology still have an impact on female labor force participation today. A correlation between female labor force participation in agriculture and agricultural technology in the past does not necessarily imply that differences in historical agriculture technology affect female labor force participation today. Goldin and Sokoloff (1984) , for example, document that within the northeastern United States, the low relative productivity of women and children in agriculture (and their low participation in this sector) allowed them to participate in the manufacturing sector. In this setting, initial female labor force participation in agriculture is inversely related to subsequent participation in manufacturing, resulting in a lack of continuity of female labor force participation over time as industrialization occurred. An interpretation based on social norms could, however, help explain long-term persistence.

At the country level, 2 the authors look at differences in female labor force participation but also at two other measures that could reflect cultural attitudes and beliefs about the role of women in society: a measure of entrepreneurship (the share of firms with a woman among the principal owners) and a measure of the presence of women in national politics (the proportion of parliamentary seats held by women). In countries with a tradition of plough use, women are less likely to participate in the labor market, own firms, and participate in national politics. 3

To further limit endogeneity concerns, the authors also provide instrumental variable estimates. To construct their instrument, they exploit the variation in historic plough use that arose from differences in societies’ geo-climatic conditions, which affected whether crops that potentially benefited from the plough were cultivated. As Pryor (1985) explains, because of differences in the length of the cropping season, the amount of land required for cultivation, and the characteristics of the soil (slope, depth, rockiness, etc.), crops differ significantly in the extent to which the use of the plough improves productivity. In his study, Pryor identifies crops as being either plough positive (cultivation greatly benefits from the plough) or plough negative (cultivation benefits less from the plough). 4 The identification strategy relies on the assumption that, holding constant overall crop productivity (which they control for), the distinction between plough-positive and plough-negative geo-climatic environments only impacts gender roles through the plough. The primary concern with this strategy is that the difference between plough-positive and plough-negative environments may be correlated with geographic features that affect gender attitudes today through channels other than the plough. The authors check the robustness of their results to this concern by controlling for geographic characteristics that are potentially correlated with the suitability of the environment for plough-positive and plough-negative crops (terrain slope, soil depth, average temperature, and average precipitation of locations inhabited by each country’s ancestors). The IV estimates confirm the ordinary least squares results.

In addition to determining labor force participation, differences in agricultural technology can influence social norms more broadly. Boserup (1970) indeed hints at the possibility that plough societies developed different social norms and marital arrangements compatible with a different value of women in society. Her idea was not new, as anthropologists have long posited that the origins of household formation rules relate to both technology and productivity. According to Aberle (1961 , 725), “the origins of matrilineal systems are probably to be sought in technology, division of labour, types of subsistence activities and the ecological niches in which these activities occur.” Goody (1976) has linked the demand for wives to the productivity of women in agriculture: in female farming communities, a man with more than one wife can cultivate more land than a man with only one wife. Therefore, polygamy is expected to be more common in societies with shifting cultivation. Finally, in societies in which women do most of the agricultural work, it is the bridegroom who must pay bride-wealth, while in societies in which women are less engaged in agriculture, marriage payments usually come from the bride’s family.

To explore this hypothesis, Giuliano (2015) looks at the correlation between historical plough use and whether the dowry is the most prevalent mode of marriage, whether the inheritance rule in a society is matrilineal, and if polygamy is prevalent. 5 She finds that in societies that used the plough, (1) inheritance rules appear to be less favorable to women—as indicated by the fact that matrilineality is less common, (2) there is less polygamy, and (3) a dowry is paid by the bride’s family. After establishing a correlation for the past, the author shows that differences in agricultural technology have a persistent effect on social norms, lasting until today. Using data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Gender, Institutions, and Development Database, she finds that societies that historically used the plough are characterized by higher parental authority granted to the father, by inheritance rules that favor male heirs, and by less freedom for women to move outside the house. She also finds that, in these societies, women are more likely to wear a veil in public and polygamy is less accepted or illegal. 6

Various reasons could explain the persistent effect of differences in agricultural technology on gender outcomes today. For example, underlying cultural traits may be reinforced by policies, laws, and institutions that affect the benefits of beliefs about gender inequality. A society with traditional beliefs about gender inequality may perpetuate these beliefs by institutionalizing unequal property rights, voting rights, and so on. Beliefs about gender inequality may also cause a society to specialize in capital-intensive industries, which in turn decreases the relative cost of gender inequality norms, thereby perpetuating them. A third explanation is that cultural beliefs are inherently sticky. Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn ( 2011 , 2013 ) present evidence consistent with this last interpretation. Looking at children of immigrants in the United States and Europe, they test for a relationship between traditional plough agriculture and cultural beliefs while holding constant the external environment. They do find a high degree of persistence in cultural traits.

Additional evidence on how variation in agriculture could affect labor productivity and, subsequently, gender differences comes from Qian (2008) . She studies economic reforms in China in the late 1970s that made growing cash crops more lucrative. During the Maoist era, centrally planned production targets focused on staple crops. In the early reform era (1978–1980), reforms increased the return to cash crops, which included tea and orchards. Men and women specialize in the production of different crops: women have a comparative advantage in picking tea leaves, which are delicate and grow on short bushes, whereas men, due to their height and strength, specialize in picking fruit from trees. Qian (2008) compares the impact of the economic reforms in tea-growing regions, where female labor productivity, especially, should have risen, and in regions specializing in fruit orchards, where male labor productivity should have risen most. In tea-growing regions, the reforms led to fewer so-called missing girls, consistent with families having fewer sex-selective abortions of female fetuses or engaging in less neglect and infanticide of girls. The mechanism Qian puts forward is that when women’s share of household income increases, their gender preferences have a higher weight in household decision making.

Rather than looking at differences in type of agriculture, Hansen, Jensen, and Skovsgaard (2015) make a more general point about the relevance of agriculture, hypothesizing that societies with long histories of agriculture have less gender equality as a consequence of more patriarchal values and beliefs regarding the proper role of women in society. Their research is motivated by the idea that patriarchy originated in the Neolithic Revolution—the prehistoric transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society—and that patriarchal values and beliefs have persisted and become more ingrained in countries with long histories of agriculture. Agricultural societies were more gender biased than hunter-gatherer societies. Population growth and land scarcity made cultivation of food more labor intensive, which created “a premium on male brawn in plowing and other heavy farm work” ( Iversen and Rosenbluth 2010 , 32). This led to a division of labor within the family, in which the man used his physical strength in food production and the woman took care of childrearing, cooking, and other family-related duties. This increased the male’s bargaining power within the family, which, over generations, translated into norms and behavior that shaped cultural beliefs about gender roles.

An alternative mechanism builds on the work by Iversen and Rosenbluth (2010) , who emphasize the task division within the household. They note that evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies were characterized by more independent women as compared to agricultural societies. First, some evidence from present-day hunter-gatherers indicates that the gathering activity of women provides more than half of the daily caloric intake of their communities. Second, meat, as provided by male hunting activity, may not have been strictly necessary for survival; gathered food served as an independent and more secure source of calories.

Using a world sample, a European regional sample, and a sample of children of immigrants living in the United States, the authors find a negative association between the number of years that a country had been an agrarian society in 1500 ce and contemporary measures of gender equality, including female labor force participation, number of years since women gained suffrage, and percentage of seats in parliament held by women.

Another interesting aspect of the long-term persistence of gender roles is the relation between grammatical gender marking and female participation in the labor market, the credit market, land ownership, and politics ( Gay, Santacreu-Vasut, and Shoham 2013 ). The grammatical features of a language are inherited from the distant past and the gender system is one of the most stable linguistic features, surviving for thousands of years. Gay et al. (2013) broadly follow Whorf (1956 , 55):

[One is] inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs.

In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is defined as a set of rules for agreement that depends on nouns of different types. 7   Gay et al. (2013) rely on the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures , the most comprehensive data source of grammatical structures, and use four very stable grammatical variables related to gender: the number of genders in the language, whether the gender system is sex based, rules for gender assignment, and gender distinctions in pronouns. The authors construct the gender intensity index by summing these features for the most commonly spoken language in a country.

Using cross-country and individual-level data, they find that women speaking languages that more pervasively mark gender distinctions are less likely to participate in economic and political activities and more likely to encounter barriers in their access to land and credit. The authors also investigate a sample of immigrants living in the United States—that is, all facing the same institutional and labor market environment—and find consistent results.

Galor, Ozak, and Sarid (2016) also study the emergence of sex-based gender systems in languages and their effects on behavior. They advance the hypothesis and establish empirically that variation in caloric suitability for plough-positive/negative crops affects the emergence of grammatical gender in a language. 8 They also explore the relationship between linguistic and cultural traits and test whether their coevolution contributed to the stability and persistence of cultural characteristics and their lasting effect on gender differences. Their hypothesis is that preindustrial characteristics that were conducive to the emergence and progression of complementary cultural traits triggered an evolutionary process in language structures that has fostered the transmission of these cultural traits. In a society characterized by distinct gender roles and by gender biases, grammatical gender that fortified the existing social structure and cultural norms may have emerged and persisted over time. Moreover, agricultural characteristics that were complementary to the use of the plough and therefore to distinct gender roles in society may have fostered the emergence and prevalence of grammatical gender. Galor et al. (2016) test this hypothesis in two stages. In the initial stage, the empirical analysis explores the origins of language structures, focusing on the geographical roots of sex-based grammatical gender systems. In the second stage, the empirical analysis examines the effects of language structures on contemporary economic outcomes. The authors show that second-generation female immigrants who speak a language that has grammatical gender have a lower probability of attending college. Although the authors look at immigrants to show that there is cultural persistence over time, their identification strategy is an improvement over previous papers. Since they identify immigrants using the language spoken at home, they can control not only for country-of-destination fixed effects but also for country-of-origin fixed effects, allowing a better identification of the importance of historical characteristics (as represented by language) to female outcomes today.

A long-term determinant of differences in gender roles can be found in geography. In a fascinating paper, Carranza (2014) , having pointed out that soil texture, which varies exogenously, determines the workability of the soil and the technology used in land preparation, uses this as a lens to look at differences in female labor force participation in India. She distinguishes between loamy and clayey soil textures. 9 Deep tillage, possible in loamy but not in clayey soil textures, reduces the need for transplanting, fertilizing, and weeding, activities typically performed by women ( Basant 1987 ). 10 In areas where deep tillage is required, the lower demand for female labor relative to the demand for male labor is expected to have a negative impact on the perceived relative value of girls to a household ( Boserup 1970 ).

Carranza (2014) finds that soil texture explains a large part of the variation in women’s relative participation in agriculture. The author goes further and examines the impact of geography on the infant sex ratio, perhaps the most extreme indicator of gender-based discrimination. Because relatively smaller female labor contributions in loamy areas make girls relatively more costly, the ratio of girls to boys will be negatively related to the difference between the fractions of loamy and clayey soils. Sex ratios and female labor force participation in India today show a large geographical heterogeneity, even within the same state and cultural region. These differences within the same state are not driven by alternative mechanisms, including cultural, social, economic, or policy variables ( Dyson and Moore 1983 ; Agnihotri 1996 ).

Carranza (2014) estimates that soil texture explains 62 percent of the within-state variation in female agricultural labor force participation and 70 percent of the variation in the sex ratio for 0- to 6-year-olds. A 10-percentage-point greater fraction of loamy relative to clayey soils is associated with a 5.1 percent lower share of female agricultural laborers and a 2.7 percent lower ratio of female to male children. The relationship between soil texture, relative female labor force participation, and the ratio of female to male children did not change significantly between 1961 and 2001.

Preindustrial Societal Characteristics

Preindustrial social characteristics can have a persistent effect on gender roles. Among the most studied are the practice of matrilineality, modes of residence after marriage, and the dowry versus the bride price.

Matrilineality

Matrilineality refers to the fact that lineage and inheritance are traced through female members. This can affect the residential patterns of married couples (in matrilineal societies, it is more common for the married couple to reside in the wife’s natal home with her mother) and the inheritance of property (with property handed down from women to their daughters and granddaughters and from men to their sisters’ sons).

Matrilineality can improve women’s outcomes for a variety of reasons. Women in matrilineal societies have greater access to land and other assets, either through direct inheritance and ownership or through greater access to the possessions of the large matriclan. This makes them less reliant on their husbands and less vulnerable in the case of a husband’s death. Women in matrilineal systems have continued kin support, either by living with or near their own family after marriage or through ongoing connections maintained by matrilineal kinship. They are also likely to have greater intrahousehold bargaining power vis-à-vis their husbands and have greater exit options than patrilineal women. These differences are amplified when a couple resides matrilocally and a woman is surrounded by her family.

The difference between matrilineal and patrilineal kinship systems have wide implications for gender roles, including differences in competition ( Gneezy, Leonard, and List 2009 ), spatial ability ( Hoffman, Gneezy, and List, 2011 ), risk aversion and contribution in dictator games ( Gong and Yan, 2012 ; Gong, Yan, and Yang , 2015 ), political participation ( Gottlieb and Robinson 2016 ), and social interactions between family members ( Lowes 2016 ). 11

Gneezy et al. (2009) study how competitiveness among women varies between a patriarchal society (the Maasai in Tanzania) and a matrilineal and matrilocal society (the Khasi in northeast India). Among the Maasai, the most important distinctions between men are age based and almost all wealth is in cattle. The age structure prevents men from marrying until they are roughly 30, and polygamy is the most common form of marriage. Therefore, the average Maasai woman is married to a much older man who has multiple wives.

For the Khasi, inheritance and clan membership always follow the female lineage. Family life is organized around the mother’s house, which is headed by the grandmother, who lives with her unmarried daughters, her youngest daughter, her youngest daughter’s children, and any unmarried, divorced, or widowed brothers and sons. The youngest daughter never leaves and eventually becomes the head of the household; older daughters usually form separate households adjacent to their mother’s household. Furthermore, a woman never joins the household of her husband’s family and a man usually leaves his mother’s household to join his wife’s household. Sometimes a man practices duolocal marriage, living in both his mother’s and his wife’s households, but even when residing with his wife’s family, he spends much of his time in his mother’s or sisters’ households.

These two societies’ differences in societal structure are reflected in substantial differences in gender competition in an experimental setting. Maasai and Khasi subjects were given a choice to either partake in a ball-throwing game without competition or to compete with an anonymous person from the same village playing the same game, with the winner receiving all the benefits. 12 Among the Maasai, 50 percent of men chose to compete versus only 26 percent of women, a result similar to that in Western cultures, where patrilineal systems were historically more common. The result is reversed in the matrilineal society, where women were more competitive than men: 54 percent of Khasi women chose to compete versus only 39 percent of Khasi men.

These results shed light on the debate on whether the underlying sources of the observed gender differences in competition are attributable to nature or nurture or some combination of both. One possibility is that differences in competition are primarily attributable to the genetic differences between the sexes. An alternative hypothesis is that gender differences are culture specific—determined by the different social and economic functions of men and women in a society. The fact that women in different environments show different propensities to compete rules out the possibility that women are naturally less competitive. Gneezy et al. (2009) consider their results broadly in line with the importance of nurture. This explanation is consistent with Boyd and Richerson (2005) , who argued that social learning is the most important channel of cultural transmission compared to explicit training or socialization; individuals choose to copy successful individuals as much, if not more, than common individuals. This type of learning is called prestige-based learning. Khasi women would therefore decide to imitate older women in their household or successful women in their village. The Khasi institutions of matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance, in other words, could carry out the role of prestige-based learning in generating cultural transmission of differences in gender roles.

Hoffman et al. (2011) use a research approach similar to Gneezy et al. (2009) to study how differences in societal structure can influence a gender gap in spatial reasoning (measured by the time needed to solve a puzzle), a skill that has been shown to correlate with success in engineering courses, as well as the decision to major in physical sciences ( Humphreys, Lubinski, and Yao 1993 ). Spatial reasoning is measured by the time needed to solve a puzzle. Hoffman et al. (2011) show that women’s disadvantage disappears when they move from a patrilineal society (the Karbi) to a matrilineal society (the Khasi). Men take 36.4 percent less time than women in the patrilineal society but are no faster than women in the matrilineal society.

Gong et al. ( 2012 , 2015 ) study the importance of belonging to a matrilineal society in contributions in a dictator game and in risk aversion. The authors collect evidence on behavior for the matrilineal Mosuo and the patrilineal Yi societies. 13 The authors find that among the Mosuo, men contribute more in dictator games than women do—a pattern opposite that observed in Western societies—whereas there are no gender differences in the Yi society. Men are less risk averse in both the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, with the gender gap being smaller among the Mosuo, and the Mosuo are less risk averse than the Yi in general. These differences, according to the authors, could be the result of different family structures. The Mosuo have bigger families with more adult members; in case of disability, a Mosuo woman has her sisters, brothers, mother, and mother’s siblings all living in the same household to take care of her children. A Yi woman, on the other hand, does not have such security; in case of invalidity, the next female caretakers in line for one’s children will be her sisters-in-law, who are biologically unrelated to her children and live in a separate household. Such differences in family structure can be important in explaining the ethnic difference in gender differences. The ranking of education exactly mimics the ranking in risk aversion. Yi women have the least education and the gender difference in education is bigger for the Yi than for the Mosuo. Mosuo men take the least economic responsibility for the household and also are the least risk averse.

Gottlieb and Robinson (2016) compare the civic and political behavior of men and women in matrilineal groups to those in patrilineal groups. They match data on political opinions from the Afrobarometer to information about the historical social structure of each ethnicity from the Ethnographic Atlas . Their cross-country analysis finds that the gender gap in political engagement, political participation, and civic participation is significantly smaller in matrilineal groups than in patrilineal ones.

To understand the mechanisms driving the results, the authors use data on Malawi, a country with both patrilineal (Mpezeni Ngoni and Tumbuka) and matrilineal ethnicities (Chewa, Lomwe, Mapeza Ngoni, and Yao) and which presents variation in access to land and matrilocal residence, allowing the authors to investigate whether it is the short-term access to resources or the long-term expectation of resource entitlements that mostly determines female empowerment. 14

After documenting differences in matrilocality and land inheritance, the authors study the effects of these factors on women’s outcomes. They use three indicators for women’s empowerment: marriage exit options, social independence, and financial autonomy. Marriage exit options are measured by the probability that a woman can say that she can leave her husband for a variety of reasons. Social independence is measured using two questions asking whether it is acceptable for a woman to go to the market or to the clinic without her husband’s permission. Financial autonomy is measured by a question asking whether the respondent had money of her own that she could spend without her husband’s knowledge. Matrilineal women were more likely to support women leaving their husbands and having financial autonomy, but they were less likely to support women’s social independence.

The authors examined two aspects of matrilineality: land inheritance and matrilocal residence. Both are associated with more support for women leaving their husbands and greater financial autonomy for women, but less support for women’s social independence. Between the two, however, land inheritance appears to be the main determinant of women’s empowerment. In addition, the negative results on social independence disappear when the authors control for wealth and education, variables that vary substantially between the two groups.

As a final step, the authors investigate whether it is short-term access to resources or longer-term expectation of resource entitlements that most affects female empowerment. The authors find that long-term expectation of land entitlement and security has a stronger effect than simply owning land. Therefore, a history of less gender disparity in access to resources over generations may affect present outcomes, having reduced gender differences over time.

While the study constitutes a systematic, cross-national study on the importance of matrilineal kinship on the status of women, its nature remains descriptive. The identification relies on the assumption that matrilineality kinships are exogenous to the outcomes of interest. However, it may be that more gender-equitable ethnic groups were more likely to adopt or retain matrilineality.

Lowes (2016) compares how matrilineal and patrilineal kinship systems affect intrahousehold cooperation. In matrilineal societies, the wife maintains close relations with her own lineage, rather than being incorporated into her husband’s lineage. This can translate into less altruism as a result of conflicting allegiances within the household. In addition, in matrilineal societies, women maintain greater control over their children since they belong to her lineage, not to her husband’s lineage. Having the children as part of a woman’s lineage may increase the value of her outside option, increase her relative bargaining power, and reduce spousal cooperation. To test these hypotheses, Lowes (2016) collects data from 320 matrilineal and patrilineal couples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, approximately 40 percent of whom were from a matrilineal ethnic group. She finds that matrilineal individuals (both men and women) cooperate less with their spouses in a household public goods game and that these results are driven by opportunities to hide income. She also finds that when matrilineal individuals are paired with their spouses, they experience greater stress responses than patrilineal individuals do, as measured by an increase in skin conductance. In addition, she also finds that matrilineal women are better able to enact their preferences. Children of matrilineal women are healthier and better educated than children of patrilineal women. Finally, matrilineal individuals give less money to their spouses than patrilineal individuals do in a dictator game. Whereas patrilineal individuals are more generous with their spouses than they are with strangers, matrilineal individuals treat their spouses much as they treat strangers. Overall, matrilineal individuals are less altruistic toward their spouses because they maintain strong allegiances to their own lineage.

Matrilocality

Whereas most studies look at matrilineal systems in terms of inheritance along with residence choices after marriage, others investigate patrilocality in isolation, showing that alone it can give rise to differences in gender roles. In northern India, where the social structure is more patrilocal than in the south, gender inequality is more pronounced ( Jayachandran 2015 ). The mechanism behind it is that when a woman gets married, she ceases to be a member of her birth family and joins her husband’s family. Under this system, parents gain more returns to investment in a son’s health and education because he will remain a part of their family, whereas a daughter will physically and financially leave the household upon marriage.

Levine and Kevane (2003) study how investment in daughters varies based on residence after marriage. When parents know that their daughters will leave to live in other villages, their private return to investment in their daughters’ health or education might be expected to be lower than their private return to investment in their sons. Levine and Kevane (2003) study the virilocality hypothesis using data from Indonesia, a country where there is considerable variation in postmarriage residence. Indonesian groups can practice virilocality, ambilocality (residence with either set of parents), uxorilocality (residence with bride’s family), and neolocality (residence with neither set of parents). The authors did not find a strong correlation between virilocality and differential investment in daughters. They attribute that lack of results to the fact that residential norms are not very tight in Indonesia. The other interpretation is that it is a combination of norms—of which virilocality is only one—that reduces investment in daughters.

Bau (2016) studies the interaction of residential practices with policies and how this can affect gender differences. She shows that the complementarity between the transmission of culture and the education of one’s child means that the introduction and expansion of pension plans will crowd out both educating children targeted by the norm and transmitting the norm to the next generation. She finds that the establishment of pension plans in Ghana and Indonesia and the expansion of a plan in Indonesia confirm this hypothesis. In Indonesia, matrilocal daughters who are exposed to the pension plan for longer receive less education and are less likely to live with their parents after marriage. In Ghana, patrilocal sons show the same pattern.

The Dowry versus the Bride Price

Another factor that can vary substantially across cultures and have important effects on gender differences in social preferences is the presence of the dowry versus the bride price. Dowry is a payment that a bride’s parents make to the couple at the time of marriage. A bride price is a transfer at the time of marriage from the groom and/or his family to the bride’s family. According to Boserup (1970) , these social norms emerged in societies based on their type of agriculture: where women played a lesser role in agriculture, the dowry prevailed. Evidence on the impacts of the dowry system on women’s welfare is mostly anecdotal and points to a pro-male bias. In India, the prospect of paying dowry is often cited as a key factor in parents’ desire to have sons rather than daughters ( Das Gupta et al. 2003 ). 15 The presence of dowry also reduces investment in human capital and results in newly married women sometimes being the victims of violence or, worse, dowry deaths as punishment for the dowry being deemed inadequate by the groom ( Bloch and Rao 2002 ).

Ashraf et al. (2016) study how the cultural practice of bride price influences the efficacy of policies aimed at increasing education. Using the Sekolah Dasar Inpres school building program in Indonesia, where 61,807 primary schools were constructed between 1974 and 1980, the authors study its impact on girls’ schooling. They first confirm (similarly to Breierova and Duflo 2004 ) that the program had no overall effect on education. However, they uncover an important heterogeneity: a positive impact of the program on female education among girls from ethnic groups that traditionally engaged in bride price payments. The authors find similar effects when studying a similar school expansion program in Zambia. The bride price provides an additional reward to parental investment in a daughter’s education, a reward that is absent for cultures lacking the bride price. A higher bride price is therefore a moral obligation on the part of the groom’s family to compensate the bride’s family for their greater educational investment in their daughters.

Other Preindustrial Societal Characteristics

Many of the studies on the relevance of historical societal characteristics are based on experimental evidence, therefore raising the question of external validity. To what extent can results from games played with small groups be used to derive general conclusions about these important gender issues? A different approach is then to look at survey evidence and control for other determinants of women’s outcomes. Alesina, Brioschi, and La Ferrara (2016) follow this second approach and use comprehensive evidence from Africa to study the role of preindustrial societal characteristics on violence against women. To study the long-term determinants of domestic violence, they link individual-level data from contemporary Africa to historical preindustrial characteristics obtained by Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas . More specifically, the authors look at productive activities prior to industrialization (agriculture, gathering, hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry); alternative types of settlement (sedentary, nomadic, compact, and isolated); modes of marriage (the dowry vs. the bride price) and living arrangements after marriage (such as virilocality); the presence of endogamy (the custom of marrying exclusively within a specific ethnic or social group); the prevalence of the stem family (an arrangement in which two generations cohabit); polygyny (a form of plural marriage in which a man is allowed to have more than one wife); and differences in land inheritance (societies in which gender equality in land inheritance was more prevalent vs. matrilineal descent systems, in which a person’s descent was traced through the mother and her maternal ancestors and a man’s property was inherited by his sister’s sons rather than by his own children and primogeniture).

The authors find that ancestral characteristics that led to different economic roles for women determine cultural attitudes that persist even today, when the initial conditions that generated them have evolved or disappeared. In societies in which women were actively involved in subsistence activities (e.g., gathering), women’s role is more highly regarded and violence against women is lower today. On the contrary, plough-based societies, or societies whose form of subsistence was fishing or hunting, have a higher level of violence against women today; in these societies women have less bargaining power because they do not contribute to the family income. Regarding the role of different types of settlement, the authors find that women whose ancestors lived in nomadic and isolated settlements are exposed to a higher probability of violence today and are more prone to justify it. Men whose ancestors lived in compact settlements are less likely to justify abuses against their wives. One interpretation of these findings is that nomadic and isolated settlements were less economically developed communities; another is that societal protection of women is more difficult within these types of living arrangements.

Past societal norms also are related to domestic violence today: women in societies formerly characterized by bride price have a lower probability and lower intensity of violence today. Alesina et al.’s (2016) interpretation is that when men had to pay to marry their wives, they attributed a greater value and cared more about them, which is reflected in less domestic violence. They also find that endogamous societies (in which members marry within the same ethnic group) have more domestic violence, perhaps because beating a wife from a different ethnic group may bring about retaliation across ethnicities. They also find that when the stem family was prevalent, both men and women tend to be less favorable to violence. They do not find any effect of polygynous marriage on violence. On the one hand, to the extent that having more than one wife indicates a lower consideration of women’s status, one would expect to see polygyny associated with more violence. On the other hand, some of the motives that typically instigate violence against one’s wife may be alleviated by the presence of other wives. For example, if the inability of the first wife to deliver a son is compensated for by a second wife who delivers one, the husband may be less likely to beat the first wife. Virilocal residence does not have any effect on domestic violence.

Differences in Historical Family Structures

Among the historical societal characteristics, family structure has been very important in determining gender roles. Alesina and Giuliano (2014) show the historical persistence of family structures from medieval times until today and the impact of differences in family structure on various economic outcomes, including differences in gender roles.

In societies with strong family ties ( Castles 1995 ; Ferrera 1996 ; Esping-Andersen 1999 ; Korpi 2000 ), family solidarity is based on an unequal division of family work between men and women—what has been called the “male-breadwinner hypothesis,” with men working full time and women dedicating themselves to housework. Weak family ties, in contrast, will foster egalitarian gender roles, with men and women participating equally in employment and housework.

Alesina and Giuliano (2010) measure the strength of family ties by combining three questions from the World Values Survey, capturing beliefs on the importance of the family in a person’s life, the duties and responsibilities of parents and children, and the importance of love and respect for one’s parents. This combined measure is used to study the effect of the strength of family ties on a variety of outcomes, including female labor force participation and household production. They find that societies with strong family ties have greater home production, mostly done by women, and lower female labor force participation. They are also more traditional in terms of gender roles.

Similarly, Algan and Cahuc (2007) show that differences in family culture can explain lower female employment, and Giavazzi, Schiantarelli, and Serafinelli (2013) find that culture matters for women’s employment rates and for hours worked. Alesina and Ichino (2009) provide an in-depth analysis of the relevance of family ties on economic outcomes with respect to Italy. Bertocchi and Bozzano (2015) investigate the determinants of the educational gender gap in Italy with a primary focus on the potential influence of family structures. They use data from the 1861–1901 period immediately following the country’s unification. Their main dependent variable is the ratio of female to male enrollment rate in upper primary schools. They measure two aspects of family structure: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (equal division vs. primogeniture). They find that the most robust driver of the education gender gap was family structure, with a higher female-to-male enrollment ratio being associated with nuclear residential habits and equal division of inheritance.

Tur-Prats (2016) looks at the relationship between traditional family patterns (stem vs. nuclear) and intimate-partner violence. Stem families are those in which one child stays in the parental household with spouse and children so that at least two generations live together. In these families, one son inherits all the land and remains in the parental home with his wife to continue the family line. In nuclear families, all children receive an equal share of the inheritance when leaving the parental home to start their own independent households.

Territories where the stem family was prevalent currently exhibit lower rates of domestic violence and of gender equality. The relationship between family structure and domestic violence or gender roles could be explained by the fact that the coresidence of the wife with other women reduced the burden of household work, freeing up her time for nondomestic work. This allowed a more productive role and a larger contribution to family subsistence.

To measure intimate-partner violence, the author uses data from three cross-sectional surveys of violence against women in Spain, conducted in 1999, 2002, and 2006. Women were asked whether they had encountered any of twenty-six situations that are related to domestic violence. To further explore the cultural transmission channel, Tur-Prats (2016) uses data from the World Values Survey for Spain, finding that territories that had a stem-family tradition in the past currently exhibit more gender-equal attitudes than those with a nuclear-family tradition.

Data on intimate-partner violence are linked to historical measures of family type, given by the average number of married and widowed women per household at the province level in 1860. A unique source of exogenous variation based on the Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula is used as an instrument for family types. The so-called Reconquista was an almost eight-century-long period (722–1492) during which several Christian kingdoms took control of significant parts of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rulers and repopulated them. Because the stronger and more centralized monarchies in the west of Spain had an interest in restricting the development of powerful landholding families, they introduced compulsory sharing of inheritance among all children, which led to nuclear families. The eastern kingdoms, on the other hand, had a more powerful feudal nobility, which wanted to maintain its landholdings intact through indivisible inheritance, which led to stem families. The instrumental variable results are consistent with the original findings.

Since Max Weber, there has been debate on the impact of religion on people’s economic attitudes. Religion has, in particular, a profound impact on attitudes toward gender roles. Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2003) study the relevance of religion using individual-level data from the World Values Survey. As measures of attitudes toward women, they use responses to a variety of questions ranging from who should get a job first—a man or a woman—when jobs are scarce, whether men should have priority in obtaining university education, and whether both men and women should contribute to household income. Religious people and active churchgoers are less sympathetic to women’s rights, and the effect is twice as strong for Muslims as for any other religion.

The influence of religion on gender roles has also been explored by Algan and Cahuc (2006) , who show that Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims are more prone to embrace the traditional male breadwinner conception than Protestants and atheists. Esping-Andersen (1990) also associates a conservative view of women and the family with Catholic countries, while Bertocchi (2011) shows that Catholicism was negatively associated with the introduction of woman suffrage in Italy from 1870 to 1930.

Two interesting papers take a historical perspective in looking at the effect of religion on gender differences: one in the context of the Protestant Reformation ( Becker and Woessmann 2008 ) and one in the context of missionary activity in Africa ( Nunn 2014 ).

Becker and Woessmann (2008) provide evidence that Protestantism was a distinctive driving force in the advancement of female education in Prussia. Martin Luther explicitly urged, solely for religious reasons, that both girls and boys be able to read the Gospel. The authors use data on school enrollment from the Prussian Population Census in 1816 at the level of counties and towns to show that a larger share of Protestants in a county or town was indeed associated with a larger share of girls in the total school population. Instrumental variable estimates, in which each county’s and town’s share of Protestants is instrumented by its distance to Wittenberg, also suggest that the effect of Protestantism can be causally interpreted. The finding that Protestantism was one factor that helped to reduce the educational gender gap in Prussia is confirmed when using county-level data on the gender gap in adult literacy in 1871. The effect of Protestantism is still visible as recently as 1970: a higher share of Protestants in the population is associated with a higher gender parity index in years of education in 1970.

Nunn (2014) uses information on the location of Catholic and Protestant missions during Africa’s colonial period to investigate whether Protestant and Catholic missionaries differentially promoted the education of males and females. He uses data on seven countries from the Afrobarometer and links the reported information about the ethnicity of each respondent to test whether having ancestors living closer to missions during the colonial period increased that ethnicity’s educational level.

While he finds that both Catholicism and Protestantism had a long-run impact on educational attainment, the impact by gender was very different. Protestant missions had a large positive long-run impact on the education of females and a very small impact on the long-run education of males. In contrast, Catholic missions had no long-run impact on the education of females but a large positive impact on the education of males. These findings are consistent with the Protestant belief that both men and women had to read the Bible to go to heaven. The evidence is also consistent with the arguments of Woodberry and Shah (2004) and Woodberry (2009) that because Protestant missionary activity was open to educating minorities and women, it had a particularly positive effect for these groups.

Natural Experiments in History

Historical shocks can alter the relative position of women in a society (e.g., by increasing their relative income due to the appearance of a specific economic activity or by altering the sex ratio in the population). These shocks can therefore alter the prevailing views about the natural role of women in society. If new beliefs about the role of women persist and are transmitted across generations, a temporary shock can affect gender outcomes in the long run.

Teso (forthcoming) exploits the demographic shock generated by the transatlantic slave trade in Africa between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Male slaves outnumbered females, as they were preferred by plantation owners in the New World for their strength. This led to abnormal sex ratios in the areas from which slaves were taken: in those most affected, historical estimates suggest the presence of as few as forty to fifty men per one hundred women ( Thorton 1980 ). This demographic shock had an impact on the role of women, who had to take up traditionally male work ( Manning 1990 ). Although sex ratios reverted back to the natural level shortly after the end of the slave trade, the impact of this historical event on the role of women was long-lasting because cultural beliefs and societal norms had been affected by it. To test this theory, Teso (2016) matches Demographic and Health Surveys data on twenty-one Sub-Saharan countries with ethnicity-level data from Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) on the number of slaves taken during the slave trade. Exploiting variation in the degree to which different ethnic groups were affected by the trade, he shows that women whose ancestors were more exposed to the slave trade are today significantly more likely to be in the labor force and to be employed in a higher-ranked occupation. 16 The author also finds that women belonging to ethnic groups that were more severely hit by the slave trade are today more likely to participate in household decisions and to have lower fertility. 17

The slave trade also affected other types of social norms. Dalton and Leung (2014) and Edlund and Ku (2013) examine the hypothesis that the severe imbalance in sex ratio caused by the transatlantic slave trade altered beliefs about the acceptability of polygyny. Examining variation across ethnicities (Dalton and Leung 2011) and countries ( Edlund and Ku 2013 ), these studies show that a history of the transatlantic slave trade is associated with a greater prevalence of polygyny today.

Wars are another shock that could permanently change gender roles in societies. Historians have suggested that, during World War II, the high mobilization of men in the United States had a strong impact on gender roles ( Chafe 1972 ). Goldin and Olivetti (2013) ; Acemoglu, Autor, and Lyle (2004) ; and Fernandez, Fogli, and Olivetti (2004) use exogenous variation in mobilization rates across states and find a persistent effect of the war on female labor force participation. Fernandez et al. (2004) find that this effect operates through the marriage market.

Campa and Serafinelli (2016) document how more equal gender role attitudes emerged in state-socialist regimes. They exploit the postwar imposition across Central and Eastern Europe of state-socialist regimes that promoted women’s economic inclusion. The authors use two sets of evidence. In the first part of the paper, they use data from Germany 18 and compare attitudes toward work in the sample of women who, before German reunification, had lived in East Germany with those of women who had lived in West Germany. 19 In 1990, the likelihood of reporting that career success is important was approximately 11 percentage points higher for women in the East than for women in the West. The authors do not find a significant difference in men’s attitudes toward work between the East and the West. The results are very similar when attitudes are measured in 2004. The positive attitudes toward work in the East show that increased female access to higher education and full-time employment can act as mediating channels.

The authors then extend the analysis using a difference-in-differences strategy that compares gender role attitudes formed in Central and Eastern Europe to those formed in Western Europe before and after the imposition of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. To obtain time variation, they use measures of attitudes of immigrants who arrived in the United States at different times. The authors show that gender role attitudes have become much less traditional in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe.

Grosjean and Khattar (2016) study the long-run effect of the male-biased sex ratio that emerged in Australia by the late eighteenth century as a consequence of the British policy of sending convicts to Australia. Male convicts outnumbered female convicts by a ratio of six to one. The sex ratio among immigrants continued to be very biased into the twentieth century, as they were mostly men seeking out Australia’s economic opportunities in mining and pastoralism. The authors use spatial and time variation in the sex ratio and study the short- and long-term effects of a male-biased sex ratio on female outcomes at home and in the workplace. Since their identification relies on within-state variation, the results cannot be driven by institutional differences.

They find that gender imbalance was associated historically with women being more likely to get married, participating less in the labor force, and being less likely to work in high-ranking occupations. They then study the long-term implications. In areas that were more biased historically, people today have more conservative attitudes toward women working, women are less likely to have high-ranking occupations, and they work less and earn less. A one-unit increase in the historical sex ratio moves the average Australian today toward conservative attitudes by 8 percentage points at the mean. It is also associated with a 1-percentage-point decrease in the share of women employed as professionals (5 percent of the population mean and 12 percent of its standard deviation). There does not seem to be a welfare effect as measured by self-reported marital and overall life satisfaction. The authors explain this persistence as a result of cultural transmission.

Xue (2016) studies the impact of China’s cotton revolution—the adoption of spinning and weaving technologies from 1300 until 1840—on gender roles. This revolution allowed women to produce cotton textiles at home and sell clothing. Women living in regions suitable for the production of cotton textiles experienced a huge increase in their economic earning power, which became similar to or greater than that of their husbands. To identify the causal effect of the cotton revolution on modern outcomes, Xue collects information about premodern cotton textiles from county and prefecture gazetteers. Data on 1,489 counties are then linked to the contemporary sex ratio at birth. She finds a strong and negative relationship between premodern cotton textile production and sex ratio at birth. The reduction is substantial: one quarter of the standard deviation of the sex ratio variable.

The effect of the cotton revolution on gender roles is also observed in other historical periods in China: immediately after the shock but also during the period of state socialism. The author finds that cotton textile production prevented suicides of widows in the Ming dynasty: widows in areas suitable to cotton textile production generally maintained a decent standard of living and had relatively high social status. Xue also finds that female labor force participation in presocialist China and the probability of a wife’s heading the household under state socialism were both higher in regions suitable to cotton production.

Heterogeneity in Historical Persistence

In this chapter, we reviewed evidence of historical persistence in gender roles. It is, however, important to note that while there is a high degree of persistence, gender norms have also sometimes changed quickly over time. 20 When do gender role differences persist and when do they not? What factors affect their persistence? What determines the speed of their evolution when they change?

Giuliano and Nunn (2017) examine these questions by testing an insight that has been developed in the evolutionary anthropology literature (Boyd and Richerson 1985 , 2005 ; Rogers 1988 ). The idea is very simple: First consider a population living in a stable environment. In such a setting, the actions of one’s ancestors are particularly informative about which of many possible actions are optimal. The fact that these actions have evolved in this environment is important information. Thus, there are important benefits to a cultural belief in the importance of tradition. We would therefore expect societies that live in a stable environment to strongly value tradition and to be reluctant to deviate from it. Next, consider a population living in a very unstable environment. The setting of each generation changes sufficiently that the optimal actions of the previous generation may no longer be optimal. In such an environment, the traditions of one’s ancestors are less informative and cultural traits that strongly value tradition are thus less beneficial. We would therefore expect these societies to be less strongly tied to tradition and more likely to adopt new cultural practices and beliefs. The authors take this hypothesis to the data and test whether societies that historically lived in environments with more climate variability value tradition less, are more likely to adopt new cultural values, and exhibit less cultural persistence. They test this mechanism for gender differences by looking at female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies and female labor force participation today. They also look at the relationship between the traditional practice of polygamy and the practice of polygamy today.

To measure a location’s historical environmental stability, they use paleo-climatic data from Mann et al. (2009) that measures the average annual temperature of 0.5-degree-by-0.5-degree grid cells globally, beginning in 500 ad . Data on preindustrial societies are taken from the Ethnographic Atlas . The authors first document a strong relationship between traditional participation of women in agriculture and female labor force participation rates today and a strong relationship between traditional practice of polygamy and the practice of polygamy today. (Although average female labor force participation has been increasing and the practice of polygamy decreasing for decades or centuries, we still see a high degree of persistence of both practices today.) They then show that the persistence is weaker in countries with more historical variability in the environment. The paper is the first attempt in trying to provide a better understanding of when culture persists and when it changes. The findings also consist of a test of a prediction that is common in a class of models from evolutionary anthropology. The core assumption of the models is that culture evolves systematically based on relative costs and benefits of the different cultural traits. Testing these models is important since the current models of cultural evolution within economics share many of the same assumptions and features as the model from evolutionary anthropology. 21 More research needs to be done on how much other sources of instability (such as international trade, migration, or economic and political instability) could also contribute to the evolution of gender norms or cultural values more generally.

History matters in explaining the differences in gender roles observed today. What aspects of history should we look at? In this chapter, we reviewed recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. Thus, even the distant past affects gender norms today. Research also finds that persistence tends to be stronger when the environment is very stable and therefore experimenting with new norms is less necessary.

Acknowledgments

I thank Susan Averett and Saul Hoffman for comments that substantially improved the chapter.

Anukriti and Dasgupta (this volume) provide a review of research on marriage payments, that is, dowry and bride price.

To show long-term persistence, Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) look at differences in female labor force participation, but also at beliefs about the role of women in society in 2000. To analyze contemporary female labor force participation, they match ethnographic data to current populations using the global distribution of 7,612 language groups from the fifteenth edition of the Ethnologue and the global distribution of population densities from the 2000 Landscan database, generating a measure of the fraction of a country’s ancestors who traditionally engaged in plough agriculture.

In a companion paper ( Alesina et al. 2013 ), the authors examine the impact of agricultural technology on fertility. They find that societies with historic plough use had a lower level of fertility. The finding is consistent with the explanation that plough agriculture reduced the benefit of having children, since they were less useful in the field.

Plough-positive crops, which typically require extensive land preparation over a large surface area and in a very short period of time, include wet rice, barley, wheat, rye, and teff. Plough-negative crops, which include crops that require little land to produce a sufficient amount of food, crops that can be grown in rocky or sloped land, and crops with seeds that easily take root (even in shallow soils), include three root crops: maize, millet, and sorghum ( Pryor 1985 ).

Boserup (1970) explains the lack of polygamy in plough-farming societies in terms of access to land, saying that polygamy occurs in long-fallow agricultural societies with communal land tenure and land available for expansion, where “an additional wife is an additional economic asset which helps the family to expand its production” (p. 38).

Giuliano also looks at differences in gender attitudes using the Global Gender Gap Index, a comprehensive indicator introduced by the World Economic Forum . The index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education, and health criteria and is designed to measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities in individual countries rather than the actual level of the available resources and opportunities in those countries. Differences in historical agricultural practices are strongly correlated with a global measure of gender gap, as summarized by this index.

These are normally based on biological sex, but can also be based on social constructs such as age or social status.

Historical caloric suitability measures the potential daily calories from cultivating the crop with maximal caloric yield during the pre-1500 ce era in that specific location.

According to the proportion in which small, medium, and large particles are combined in the soil, soil texture can range from very fine clay to medium loam to very coarse sand. Finer soils have higher particle density and lower pore space than coarser soils. For that reason, they are heavier, tighter, and more difficult to work.

It is interesting to note that the depth of tillage does not determine the gender-based division of labor. The strength required in land preparation is a function of the depth of tillage and the resistance offered by the soil, which are inversely related. Deep and shallow tillage have similar strength requirements. Men always prepare the land.

Shurchkov and Eckel (this volume) discuss the effect of differences in competition on labor market outcomes for women more broadly.

In the game without competition, subjects had ten attempts and received $1 for each basket scored. In the game with competition, subjects received $3 for each basket in a win, but no money at all in a loss.

In the Mosuo society, agriculture is the main form of subsistence, the head of the household is traditionally female, and women are in charge of economic decision making in the household, while men engage more in activities beyond agriculture and the household. The Mosuo have the unique feature of “walking marriage,” in which the man and the woman in a relationship stay at their mothers’ households aside from night visits at the woman’s, without any economic obligation to each other. Children are raised collectively by the woman’s household without the father. The Yi people were traditionally slash-and-burn farmers and their society is structured by a patrilineal exogamous lineage called jiazhi . Men start their own households once married, except for the youngest son. Women have no right to inherit any property, but they are the primary workforce and thus share the everyday decision-making responsibility with men in the household. Men are in charge of the most important household decisions.

The survey did not ask respondents whether they observed matrilineal or patrilineal descent, but collected information about where they lived after marriage (in the wife’s home village, the husband’s home village, or another village) and whether a respondent personally owned land and, if so, how he or she had received it (inherited from own kin, inherited from spouse’s kin, purchased, or received from a chief). In terms of land ownership, men report owning land at significantly higher rates than women among both the Tumbuka and the Mpenezi Ngoni. Women in matrilineal and patrilineal ethnic groups were equally likely to receive land from the chief or to have bought land, but in matrilineal groups, women were more likely to receive land from their own kin than from their husband’s kin. The pattern was reversed for women in patrilineal groups. In terms of residence after marriage, a majority of the matrilineal Yao and Lomwe practice matrilocal residence, but only 41 percent of the Mapezo Ngoni and 25 percent of the Chewa do. Of the patrilineal Tumbuka and Mpezeni Ngoni, only a small fraction (around 10 percent) practice matrilocal residence.

Portner (this volume) discusses the role of son preference and fertility in developing countries, while Rose (this volume) discusses child gender and the family more broadly.

Pan and Cortes (this volume) present a broader discussion of occupational choices of women.

To show that the effect of the slave trade on gender roles was the result of the biased sex ratio, the author looks at the effect of the Indian Ocean slave trade (which was not biased toward men) and finds no effect. To rule out another possibility—that places that were more affected by the transatlantic slave trade developed markets and local institutions that led to higher female labor force participation—the author compares individuals of different ethnicity who currently live in the same village or in the same city neighborhood, finding that ancestral exposure to the slave trade still has an effect, although smaller.

Before 1945, the politicoeconomic system was the same in East and West Germany. After 1945, the country was split in two, with women in the East and West exposed to very different institutions and policies. East Germany focused on policies that favored female full-time employment, while West Germany encouraged a system in which women either stayed home after they had children or were funneled into part-time employment after an extended break.

Attitudes toward work are measured using a question about the importance of carreer success for the respondent.

Among the factors responsible for the change are the increase in marital bargaining power due to the reduction in time spent on household chores ( Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu, 2005 ), a changing social atmosphere ( Fernandez et al., 2004 ), the introduction of the pill ( Goldin and Katz 2002 ), and the diffusion of knowledge about the effects of female labor force participation ( Fogli and Veldkamp 2011 ; Fernandez 2013 ).

See, for example, Bisin and Verdier ( 2000 , 2001 ), Hauk and Saez-Marti (2002) , and Tabellini (2008) .

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Council on Contemporary Families

KEYNOTE ESSAY: Gender Structures Every Aspect of Life

Keynote: Gender Structures Every Aspect of Life

The Gender Matters Online Symposium (.pdf) keynote essay was prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Barbara J. Risman , University of Illinois-Chicago. Risman is co-editor, with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough, of the recently released Handbook of The Sociology of Gender (Springer 2018), which includes forty chapters examining new research on gender diversity and change on issues ranging from the gendering of childhood to the impact of gender on work and parenting to changes in sex for the over-sixty population . This essay summarizes some of that research, along with Risman’s findings in Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford, 2018) . Risman’s takeaway: Gender matters, now more than ever, because it structures every aspect of life. And we benefit from knowing how it matters.

You cannot pick up a newspaper today without seeing debates about whether masculinity is in crisis, whether women are “opting out” of work or choosing work over motherhood, and who can use which bathrooms. Why are so many young people today dissatisfied with familiar and traditional genders? Are they rejecting the stereotypes that demand boys to be tough and girls to take care of everyone’s feelings? Are they rejecting the very categories of male and female, and the conventional demand that you can be only one or the other? Or are the debates just “fake news” at a time when most people perfectly happy with traditional gender categories?

Answers: The undisputed changes.

Some things are pretty clear cut. First, women are never going back to the home . The outward movement of women into the work force since the early 1970s has leveled off for now, but mothers are far more likely to work for pay than in the past; they return to work earlier after having a child; and they work for longer periods of their lives. In my in-depth interviews with 116 Midwestern Millennials for Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure , almost no one, not even the most devoutly religious respondents, told me that mothers belong at home with their children.

Second, feminism is no longer just a women’s movement. The General Social Survey has been asking questions about people’s support for gender equality since the mid-1970s. As of the latest survey, in 2016 , support has reached an all-time high, and the gap between men’s and women’s opinions has sunk to an all-time low, with most of the change due to men’s “catching up” with women in their support for equality. Many men I interviewed were every bit as egalitarian as the most feminist women I talked to, and several were far more feminist than most women. A substantial portion of female and male feminist “innovators” entirely reject gender expectations and stereotypes.

Third, nearly all young adults today consider themselves libertarian about gender. They refuse to judge people who are different from themselves in terms of gender identity or expectations. Several male respondents told me that although they would never wear nail polish, they think other men should be free to do so without harassment. Even those very religious respondents who believed that men should have more authority than women in families also believed that women and men should be equal at work.

Disputed—or at least unfamiliar—changes from the view of older generations.

While support for gender and sexual equality is now more prevalent, views of gender and sexuality have become more complicated. Millennials are increasingly supportive of transgendered individuals. Some Millennials reject any gender binary at all. These “genderqueer” respondents do not want to switch their sex category—neither biologically nor legally. They reject the belief that they must be gendered at all, even in how they adorn and inhabit their body. Some genderqueer Millennials are content to identify as a sex category (e.g. as female) but reject the gender category woman. Others just skip categories altogether. When Washington State recently allowed people to check an X option instead of male or female on their official forms, they noted that this option could be used by people who identified as ”intersex, amender, amalgagender, androgynous, bigender, demigender, female-to-male, genderfluid, genderqueer, male-to-female, neutrois, nonbinary, pangender, third sex, transgender, transsexual, Two Spirit, and unspecified.” These categories encompass very different people, with distinct identities, behaviors, and values. When it comes to gender and sexual identity, we have gone far beyond a mere 50 shades of gray.

What research tells us about how the new diversity matters.

To understand this new diversity, we need to talk about exactly what the word “gender” means. In our forthcoming Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (co-edited with Carissa Froyum and William Scarborough), 65 scholars analyze specific ways that people are doing – and undoing – gender, and report on how it matters . Unless otherwise noted, the research evidence I cite here is from the Handbook .

Let’s start with new vocabulary, and how it matters. Sex is the presumably biological category you were labeled at birth, male or female. I say presumably because the biological categories are not always clear. Some children are born with internal female organs, but an extended clitoris that appears to be a micro-phallus. Even intersex people, who have both male and female body parts, are usually, if mistakenly, labeled male or female at birth. The very definition of biological facts is shaped by an assumption that there are two and only two possible sex categories. But even when children meet the biological definition of male or female, sometimes that sex category doesn’t fit with their identity, and they reject it. Transgender people reject the sex category they were raised in, and identify as male or female despite their childhood label and rearing. As mentioned above, genderqueer people reject their categorization as women or men: Rather than identify as the other category, they reject categories, and identify as between the binary. At this moment in time, the language for describing gender is as fluid as gender itself has become.

Biology does not determine all.

All this shows that gender is based on a lot more than sex organs or biology. Those who are skeptical about gender equality movements often argue that men and women evolved biologically to exhibit different kinds of behaviors that are driven by their genetic heritage. Yet genes don’t work that way. To wit: the new field of epigenetics shows how genes are triggered by environmental factors and lead to different outcomes in different contexts. In their chapter for the Handbook , Davis and Blake show that while bodies play a role in people’s sense of self, most of the differences social scientists can measure between women and men are not choreographed by genes or hormones. Hormones exist in the body, but adult experiences shape hormones as well as vice versa. For example, winning a competition can raise testosterone levels, while taking care of a baby lowers it. This is true for men and women. Biology simply doesn’t explain how different gender identities are created or how the workplace is organized and jobs are distributed according to gender. Taking care of preschoolers in a nursery requires more energy, upper-body strength, and ability to respond rapidly to emergencies than parking cars at a hotel, yet the former jobs are typically held by women and the latter by men. Guess who gets paid more?

How we train boys and girls into gender.

As symposium and Handbook contributors Gansen and Martin show in “ Not Just Kid Stuff: Becoming Gendered ,” boys and girls are systematically raised to become different kinds of people. This task involves parents, peers, media, and often even daycare center staff. Raising girls who love dolls and boys who love vehicles can be as obvious as steering girls to the kitchen and boys to the trains, but the socialization that creates feminine girls and masculine boys is often nowadays far less obvious . Girls are shamed for being “unladylike” while boys are shamed for being “unmanly.” Female-bodied children are taught to “throw like a girl” while male-bodied children are corrected when they do so.

Kane’s Handbook article, updated in the symposium’s “ Parenting and the Gender Trap ,” illustrates how when partners become parents they reproduce such gender socialization and pass it on to the next generation. Despite mothers and fathers both working for pay outside the home, mothers often continue to manage the household and provide more nurturing for children. And so the circle continues: By just watching their own parents, many children learn that it is women who take care of other people. Kenly Brown’s research on alternative schools (e.g. schools for children who cannot attend conventional ones) in “ Gender, Race, and Girls in California’s Alternative Schools ” suggests that such gender socialization and expectations interact in complex ways with racial stereotypes, however, contributing “to the isolation of marginalized students, particularly low-income Black girls, who are the most vulnerable to violence and neglect in their interpersonal lives.”

Doing gender 24/7.

Gender is not just about how people are raised. In everyday, routine activities, gender organizes people’s lives even more directly. People use their gender training to display and claim they are male or female, and they watch for cues to assess the gender of others. We don’t really judge someone’s sex by inspecting naked bodies. Instead, we assess other people’s gender identity by their dress and behavior. Everyday interaction looks natural, but it is highly choreographed. People are nearly all evaluated by how well they “do gender.” People expect you to “act your age” — and your gender. Parents and romantic partners are expected to do and be different things according to whether they are male or female. We assume mothers, wives, and girlfriends will provide emotional comfort, and that fathers, husbands, and boyfriends will be physically assertive, whether as protectors or aggressors. And if real people don’t conform to gender stereotypes, their public images are often reworked to do so. For example, sociologist Philip Cohen found that images of Princess Diana showed her six inches shorter than Prince Charles, despite the fact that they were actually the same height.

The ideal worker and your unconscious.

Fisk and Ridgeway’s Handbook essay notes that people instantly and unconsciously sex categorize each other, and in doing so, they invoke deep cultural beliefs without even knowing it. Men are seen as more effective as leaders, accorded higher status than women, and given more influence in group settings. But gender matters beyond these stereotypes because we have quite literally built schools, workplaces, and the economy around traditional genders. Gender matters not just as identity or ideology, but as a core component of how our social world is organized. Just as every society has an economic and political structure, so too every society has a gender structure.

Some people may operate in social contexts where they are evaluated more positively if they reject doing gender traditionally, but the expectations remain in both conservative and progressive settings. And whatever people believe, all must adapt to organizations and institutions that are based on the belief that “ideal” workers are entirely and uniquely committed to the business at hand, which rewards the typically male life course and the historically masculine privilege of having a domestic wife. Women who return to their paid labor a few weeks, or months, after adopting or birthing a child are commonly asked how they can bear to leave their infant, while fathers often stigmatized if they do not increase their efforts to earn a larger paycheck.

When one thinks about gender structures encountered every day, the world of work is an obvious place to start. Everyone needs to earn a living, or lives with someone who does, and so workplaces are significant in everyone’s life. The most obvious way gender structures work is by assuming that the “ideal worker” does not experience pregnancy and has no moral or practical responsibilities for taking care of anyone but himself (and perhaps has a wife to do even that).  Any organization that assumes workers are available from nine to five (or often, nowadays, 24/7) over a lifetime, has baked gender expectations – and gender discrimination — into its very DNA.

This is a caregiving penalty, and it translates into a motherhood penalty. Even so, this is not the only way workplaces disadvantage women. Wynn and Correll’s “ Combating Gender Bias in Modern Workplaces ” shows how stereotypes limit women’s success in the corporate sector. Women and men hold stereotypes that men are more competent and women more nurturing. When it comes to hiring and promotion, those biases hurt women’s chances by increasing the scrutiny women face. On the one hand, highly competent women are seen as less likeable. On the other, if they are mothers, employers often believe they will not be committed to their work. Chavez, in “ Gender, Tech Jobs, and Hidden Biases that Make a Difference ,” notes that even in industries where women and men are equally likely to be hired, women are often hired for different reasons than men. Women are hired for their “people” skills, for example, rather than their technical ones — and this may decrease their chance of promotion.

These biases not only decrease women’s workplace opportunities; they increase men’s. In effect, unconscious bias and workplace family policies are affirmative action policies for men — especially white men with wives. Chavez reports how gender stereotypes do not operate entirely the same for Blacks, Whites, Latinx, and Asians. White men with wives are the primary beneficiaries of this organizational affirmative action for men while men of color often are not.

Public policy.

Workplaces are not unique in having been built from the ground up with gender expectations embedded in their very design. Even apparently gender-neutral governmental regulations often incorporate gendered assumptions into their foundation. In her research on immigrant families, Banerjee (“ Housewife Visas and Highly Skilled Immigrant Families in the U.S. ”) shows that the visas for skilled workers were designed long ago for men with housewives. Skilled workers’ spouses were admitted to the United States on “dependent visas,” because they were expected to be stay-at-home wives who neither needed nor deserved work permits. While that policy was jettisoned by the Obama Administration, it has recently been re-enacted. The result, Banerjee shows, is that wives of male high-tech workers — and husbands of female nurses – are forced to be economically dependent partners, and this negatively affects their families. In the future, it may disadvantage America, as new talent will choose other more family-friendly destinations. While gender inequality affects the experience of migration for the professional workers Banerjee studies, the high rate of migration globally has gendered consequences for workers at every level. As Choi, Hwang, and Parreñas report in “ Separating Migrant Families, as Practiced around the Globe ,” men and women migrate internationally for paid work at almost the same rate, but family separation leads to new inequalities: Women still solely face the expectations to hold the family together while they also provide financial support while men are considered good fathers for their remittances. Women even face shaming for leaving the caretaking work for their own children to other women left back home. 

Seemingly family-friendly work policies remain gendered. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, women receive 16 weeks of paid maternity leave , while men get two days. The law still assumes–and ensures–that mothers take more responsibility for children than fathers. In that country, the right to work part-time has created a society where women are assumed to be on a mommy track, and the glass ceiling is really a glass floor that keeps women on a lower level because they never get—or are expected to have—intensive work experience.

Reflections and resolution.

Overall, much work is left to do before we have a society where gender is not embedded in much of the law and most of the social institutions, along with the cultural beliefs that legitimate them. In fact, given the accumulating research highlighted in the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender , I believe that as long as we operate under a gender structure that assumes a male-female binary, none of us will be free from the historical constraints of institutionalized sexism, with its assumption that there are only two categories, and that those are opposites, conferring unequal capacities and justifying unequal treatment. For human beings to develop fully as effective rational actors and warm nurturing human beings, we need a world where the sex category assigned to babies won’t dictate how they are raised or what we expect from them as children, teens, or adults.

This is why sociologists spend so much time studying gender. As Judith Lorber has written, the paradox of gender is that we must make it very visible before we can begin to dismantle it. My utopian goal is to eliminate the gender structure entirely. While not all feminists agree–not even all the authors in the new Handbook –I believe that full equality demands we create a world beyond gender.

In the meantime, however, the research recounted here reveals progress and points to ways in which can continue the march toward gender equality. Most Americans now believe that men and women should have equal rights and responsibilities both in public and private spheres. My own recent research with Ray Sin and William Scarborough suggests that the belief that women belong in the home and men in the public sphere is now nearly extinct. That indeed is a major feminist accomplishment.

There is other good news as well. Velotta and Schwartz (“ The Push and Pull of Sex, Gender, and Aging ”) show us that women and men have more romantic and sexual options throughout the course of their lives than in the past, despite obstacles posed by the continued problems of ageism and sexism. In the world of work, the articles by Wynn and Correll and Fisk and Ridgeway profile practices that reduce the impact of gender bias in hiring and promotion, which in turn breaks down sexist stereotypes. Recent data suggest that every generation of men is doing more child care than before, a process that accelerates when governments adopt “use it or lose it” paternity leave . And as men in highly visible roles take parental leaves and share caretaking, this further erodes cultural stereotypes about masculinity. Our Handbook discusses in more depth the challenges and opportunities facing the movement for gender equality.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Barbara  J. Risman , College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a 2018 Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University, UK. Dr. Risman is Senior Scholar at the Council of Contemporary Family and is author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure and co-editor of the Handbook of the Sociology of Gender. [email protected]

August 8, 2018

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

Paola belingheri.

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

Filippo Chiarello

Andrea fronzetti colladon.

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

3 Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Paola Rovelli

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

Associated Data

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data collection

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

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

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

Text processing and keyword extraction

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

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

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

Classification of research topics

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

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

Evaluation of semantic importance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overview of main topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compensation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision-making

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

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

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

Career progression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization

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

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

Human capital

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

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

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

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

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

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

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

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

Research gaps and conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

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

Funding Statement

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

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UNESCO is stepping up the evidence base for gender equality

To address the backtracking on gender equality in many places, we need evidence and political will to stay the course. UNESCO is making its contribution with our Gender Based Resilience Framework.

UNESCO launched the first-time measurement framework of gender-based resilience to assess the status quo and inform policy making at the 3 rd Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination in São Paulo, Brazil, in December 2023. The first report, “ Empowering women for the good of society ”, showed how gender gaps in wages, representation in decision-making, education, science, business, and safety not only hinder women’s empowerment, but negatively impact our collective social and economic resilience.

The numbers speak for themselves. A third of both women and men see women earning more than their husbands as a problem. In countries where women spend up to two hours more than men on unpaid care and domestic work per day, their employment rate is around 50%, but it reduces to 30-40% in countries where they spend four or more hours more than men.

To explore opportunities for change, UNESCO delivered “ The Weight of Words ”, an AI-powered analysis that sheds light on the impact of gender-coded language in job postings on women’s participation and upward mobility in the workforce. It shows how addressing gendered language rooted in sexist stereotypes in the labour market could be a great cost-effective fix to bring positive payoffs to both societies and economies.

In today’s modern world, the weight of patriarchies in all their forms continues to burden the minds and bodies of individuals — men, women, and people of diverse gender identities.” - , Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences, UNESCO

Empowering women and girls requires meaningful engagement from men and boys to combat gender stereotypes, social and cultural norms, and harmful role models that push men to embrace aggression, dominance, emotional suppression, and entitlement to women’s bodies. 

Three out of five men globally are pressured into the role of “breadwinners”, while societies continue to discriminate against women and girls, forcing them on less fulfilling — if not entirely unfulfilling — paths. “ Engaging men for gender equality in the Global South: Perspectives from the UNESCO Maputo Dialogue ” ,   written by Robert Morrell, pioneer of Critical Masculinities Studies in South Africa, with insights from stakeholders from Botswana, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Grenada, Iceland, Jamaica, Mexico, Mozambique, South Africa, Sweden, and Zimbabwe, presents advice to design effective solutions at the grassroots level.

What’s next?

“The Gender Equality Quest in Video Games ” — another UNESCO publication to look out for in 2024. Video games are worlds of gender inequalities and stereotypes. Women represent almost half of all gamers, but only 5% of game protagonists are women. Women comprise just 16% of executive positions in the top 14 gaming companies. The pervasiveness of violence in video games, which reaches the daily lives of 3.38 billion gamers, can seem to perpetuate flawed notions of masculinity and nurture harmful behaviours. At the same time, gamers and developers around the world are leading positive change. Together with Eight Goals One Foundation, UNESCO will explore the potential of the video game industry and community to transform mentalities for the better, including combating online harassment and abuse.

This diversity of research is part of  UNESCO’s Transforming MEN’talities Programme ,  established at the 219 th Session of UNESCO’s Executive Board in March 2024. Led by UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences Sector, the programme aims to change mindsets and policies by unravelling the root causes and consequences of gender-based discrimination and sharing best practices on successfully engaging all members of society — but particularly men and boys — for gender equality.

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In 2021, Ridgeway information Ltd. was engaged by UN Women under the Coordination Unit to lead the research and design of a series of Gender Equality Briefs for the Pacific.

The purpose of developing the one regional and 14 country gender equality briefs is to have easily accessible resources that encompass the key gender equality issues and commitments in each country, that include the most updated gender data and statistics available, and that are fully referenced to be used to inform a variety of audiences and to increase gender mainstreaming in key document development.

Using a gender analysis framework, aligning with the SDG gender indicators and targets, the regional and country gender equality briefs cover a number of thematic areas including Women’s Human Rights, Women’s Representation and Leadership, Women’s Economic Empowerment, Education, Health/Sexual and Reproductive Health, Ending Violence against Women and Girls, and Gender and Protection in Humanitarian Action.

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