Gender Codes: Exploring Malaysia’s Gender Parity in Computer Science
The Voice of Technology: Understanding The Work Of Feminine Voice Assistants and the Feminization of the Interface
Whose Voices, Whose Values? Environmental Policy Effects Ofextra-Community Sovereignty Advocacy
Environmental Science and Public Policy
“Felons, Not Families”: The Construction of Immigrant Criminality in Obama-Era Policies and Discourses, 2011-2016
History and Literature
Seeing Beyond the Binary: The Photographic Construction of Queer Identity in Interwar Paris and Berlin
History and Literature
Iconic Market Women: The Unsung Heroines of Post-Colonial Ghana (1960s-1990s)
History and Literature: Ethnic Studies
From Stove Polish to the She-E-O: The Historical Relationship Between the American Feminist Movement and Consumer Culture
Social Studies
“Interstitial Existence,” De-Personification, and Black Women’s Resistance to Police Brutality
#Metoo Meets #Blm: Understanding Black Feminist Anti-Violence Activism in the United States
Social Studies
"Why Won’t Anyone Fight For Us?”: A Contemporary Class Analysis of the Positions and Politics of H-1b and H-4 Visa Holders
Social Studies
2019
Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Why Can’t I See Myself At All?: A Close Reading of Children’s Picture Books Featuring Gender Expansive Children of Color
African and African-American Studies
2019
Dilating Health, Healthcare, and Well-Being: Experiences of LGBTQ+ Thai People
2019
The Consociationalist Culprit: Explaining Women’s Lack of Political Representation in Northern Ireland
2019
Queering the Political Sphere: Play, Performance, and Civil Society with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco, 1979-1999
2019
Playing With Power: Kink, Race, and Desire
History and Literature
2019
“Take Root:” Community Formation at the San Francisco Chinatown Branch Public Library, 1970s-1990s
Fetal Tomfoolery: Comedy, Activism, and Reproductive Justice in the Pro-Abortion Work of the Lady Parts Justice League
And They're Saying It's Because of the Internet: An Exploration of Sexuality Urban Legends Online
(In)visibly Queer: Assessing Disparities in the Adjudication of U.S. LGBTQ Asylum Cases
Enough for Today
Radical Appropriations: A Cultural History and Critical Theorization of Cultural Appropriation in Drag Performance
Surviving Safe Spaces: Exploring Survivor Narratives and Community-Based Responses to LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence
“The Cruelest of All Pains”: Birth, Compassion, and the Female Body in
Virtually Normal? How “Initiation” Shapes the Pursuit of Modern Gay Relationships
How Stigma Impacts Mental Health: The Minority Stress Model and Unwed Mothers in South Korea
The Future is Taken Care of: Care Robots, Migrant Workers, and the Re-production of Japanese Identity
Bodies on the Line: Empowerment through Collective Subjectification in Women's Rugby Culture
"In the Middle of the Movement": Advocating for Sexuality and Reproductive Health Rights in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Breaking the Equator: Formation and Fragmentation of Gender and Race in Indigenous Ecuador
Social Studies
Deconstructing the American Dream: in Kodak Advertisements and Shirley Cards in Post World War II American Culture
Imposing Consent: Past Paradigms, Gender Norms, and the Continuing Conflation of Health and Genital Appearance in Medical Practice for Intersex Infants
And I am Telling You, You Can’t Stop the Beat: Locating Narratives of Racial Crossover in Musical Theater
Reality® Check: Shifting Discourses of “Female Empowerment” in the History of the Reality Female Condom, 1989-2000
Dialectics of a Feminist Future
Lesbian Against the Law: Indian Lesbian Activism and Film, 1987-2014
Talking Dirty: Using the Pornographic to Negotiate Sexual Discourse in Public and Private
Wars Are Fought, They Are Also Told: A Study of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism in U.S. History Textbooks
Yoko as a Narrator in Nobuyoshi Araki’s and
2014
Reading at an Angle: Theorizing Young Women Reading Science-Fictionally
English and American Literature
2014
“Are you Ready to be Strong?”: Images of Female Empowerment in 1990s Popular Culture
History and Literature
2014
Constructing the Harvard Man: Eugenics, the Science of Physical Education, and Masculinity at Harvard, 1879-1919
History and Science
2014
Sex, Science, and Politics in the Sociobiology Debate
History and Science
2014
"A Little Bit of Sodomy in Me”: Disgust, Loss, and the Politics of Redemption in the American Ex-Gay Movement
Religion
2014
Art of Disturbance: Trans-Actions on the Stage of the US-Mexico Border
Romance Languages and Literatures
2014
“Too Important for Politics”: The Implications of “Autonomy” in the Indian Women’s Movement
Social Studies
2014
Yes, No, Maybe: The Politics of Consent Under Compulsory Sex-Positivity
Social Studies
2013
Inside the Master's House: Gender, Sexuality, and the 'Impossible' History of Slavery in Jamaica, 1753-1786
2013
Illuminating the Darkness Beneath the Lamp: Im Yong-sin’s Disappearance from History and Rewriting the History of Women in Korea’s Colonial Period (1910-1945)
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
2013
"How to Survive a Plague": Navigating AIDS in Mark Doty's Poetry
English and American Literature
2013
Respectability's Girl: Images of Black Girlhood Innocence, 1920-2013
History and Literature
2013
Defining Our Own Lives: The Racial, Gendered, and Postcolonial Experience of Black Women in the Netherlands
Social Studies
2013
Beyond Victim-Blaming: Strategies of Rape Response through Narrative
Sociology
2012
From “Ultimate Females” to “Be(ing) Me”: Uncovering Australian Intersex Experiences and Perspectives
2012
Modernity on Trial: Sodomy and Nation in Malaysia
2012
: Woven Accounts of Gender, Work and Motherhood in South Korea
2012
Sexual Apartheid: Marginalized Identity(s) in South Africa's HIV/AIDS Interventions
2012
The Pornographer's Tools: A Critical and Artistic Response to the Pornography of Georges Bataille and Anaïs Nin
2012
Cerebral interhemispheric connectivity and autism: A laboratory investigation of Dkk3 function in the postmitotic development of callosal projection neuron subpopulations and a historical analysis of the reported male prevalence of autism and the “extreme male brain” theory
Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
2011
"Let's Just Invite Them In" versus "We Just Don't Have the Resources to Support You": Selective and Non-Selective College Administrators as Creators of Alcohol Policies and Practices, Campus Cultures, and Students' Identities, and Implications for Opportunities in Higher Education
2011
Plaintiffs' Role in Reinventing Legal Arguments for Same-Sex Marriage
2011
Facing Tijuana's Maquilas: An Inquiry into Embodied Viewership of the US-Mexico Border
Romance Languages and Literatures
2011
"The Woman Who Shouts": Coming to Voice as a Young Urban Female Leader
Social Studies
2011
Closet Communities: A Study of Queer Life in Cairo
Social Studies
2011
Redefining Survival: Statistics and the Language of Uncertainty at the Height of the AIDS Epidemic
Statistics
2010
A Genealogy of Gay Male Representation from the Lavender Scare to Lavender Containment
2010
More Than "Thoughts by the Way": Young Women and the Overland Journey Finding Themselves Through Narrative Voice, 1940-1870
2010
Que(e)rying Harvard Men, 1941-1951: A Project on Oral Histories
2010
When Welfare Queens Speak: Survival Rhetoric in the Face of Domination
African and African American Studies
2010
ACT UP New York: Art, Activism and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993
Visual and Environmental Studies
"Gay, Straight, or Lying?": The Cultural Silencing of Male Bisexuality in America
"I had never seen a beautiful woman with just one breast": Beauty and Norms of Femininity in Popular Breast Cancer Narratives
2009
Diego Garcia: Islands of Empire, Archipelagos of Resistance
2009
Zion Sexing Palestine
2009
Are You Sisters?: Motherhood, Sisterhood, and the Impossible Black Lesbian Subject
African and African American Studies
2009
Girl Interpellated: Female Childhoods and the Trauma of Nationalist Subjectivity
History and Literature
Breaching the Subject of Birth: An Examination of Undergraduate Women's Perceptions of "Alternative" Birthing Methods
Sociology
2008
Biomedicalizing the Labor of Love: Narratives of Maternal Disability and Reproduction
Dis/locating the Margins: Gloria Anzaldúa and New Potential for Feminist Pedagogy
Mommy, Where Do Babies Come From? Egg Donation and Popular Constructions of Authentic Motherhood
Parallel Histories and Mutual Lessons: Advocates Negotiate Feminism and Domestic Violence Services in Immigrant Communities in Boston
SILENCE=DEATH: (Re)Presentations of "The AIDS Epidemic" 1981-1990
The "Sparrow in the Cage": Images of the Emaciated Body in Representations of Anorexia Nervosa
Theater of the Abject: The Powers of Horror in Sarah Kane's
Toward a Participatory Framework for Inclusive Citizenship: Haitian Immigrant Women's Claim to Civic Space in Boston
"Keepin' it Real," Queering the Real: Queer Hip Hop and the Performance of Authenticity
African and African American Studies
On the Surface: Conceptualizing Gender and Subjectivity in Chinese Lesbian Culture
East Asian Languages and Civilization
Viewing Post-War Black Politics Through a New Lens: Tracing Changes in Ann Perry's Conception of the Mother-Child Relationship, 1943-1965
History and Literature
Silent Families and Invisible Sex: Christian Nationalism and the 2004 Texas Sex Education Battle
Social Studies
White 2.0: Theorizing White Feminist Blogging
Social Studies
2007
Do Mothers Experience The Mommy Wars?: An Examination of the Media's Claims About the Mommy Wars and the Mothers Who Supposedly Fight In Them
2007
On The Offense: The Apologetic Defense and Women's Sports
2007
Stop Being Polite & Start Getting "Real": Examining Madonna & Black Culture Appropriation in the MTV Generation
2007
The Inviability of Balance: Performing Female Political Candidacy
2007
The Money Taboo
English
2007
Somewhere Over the Rainbow Nation: The Dynamics of the Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Countermovement After a Decade of Democracy in South Africa
Government
2007
Facing The Empress: Modern Representations of Women, Power and Ideology In Dynasty China
Religion
2007
Re-Evaluating Homosexuality: Extralegal Factors in Conservative Jewish Law
Social Studies
2007
Who's Producing Your Knowledge?: Filipina American Scholars
Social Studies
2006
"The Potential of Universality": Discovering Gender Fluidity Through Performance
Coming Out of the Candlelight: Erasure, Politics, and Practice at the 2005 Boston Transgender Day of Remembrance
May Our Daughters Return Home: Transnational Organizing to Halt Femicide in Ciudad Juarez
She Let It Happen: An Analysis of Rape Myth Acceptance among Women
Anthropology
"This is no time for the private point of view": Vexing the Confessional in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton
History and Literature
Relying on the Experts: The Hidden Motives of Tampon Manufacturers, Feminist Health Activists and the Medical Community During the American Toxic Shock Epidemic from 1978- 1982
History of Science
(In)visibility: Identity Rights and Subjective Experience in Gay Beirut
Social Studies
Social Studies
Social Studies
Social Studies
2005
"Takin' Back the Night!" Buffy the Vampire Slayer and "Girl Power" Feminism
Bread Winners or Bread Makers? The Professional Challenges for Working Women
Power to the People! Or Not: The Exceptional Decrease in Women’s Formal and Informal Political Participation in Slovenia During Democratization
To Whom Many Doors Are Still Locked: Gender, Space & Power in Harvard Final Clubs
Coca Politics: Women's Leadership in the Chapare
Anthropology
Redressing Prostitution: Trans Sex Work and the Fragmentation of Feminist Theories
Government
The Media Coverage of Women, Ten Years Later, in the 108th Congress, Has Anything Changed Since 'The Year of the Women' in 1992
Government
Divided Designs: Separatism, Intersectionality, and Feminist Science in the 1970s
History of Science
Completing the Circle: Singing Women's Universality and the Music of Libana
Music
Attitudes, Beliefs and Behavior Towards Gays and Lesbians
Psychology
Beauty and Brains: The Influence of Stereotypical Portraits of Women on Implicit Cognition
Psychology
"Rational Kitchens" How Scientific Kitchen Designs Reconfigured Domestic Space and Subjectivity from the White City to the New Frankfurt
Social Studies
2004
Begin By Imagining: Reflections of Women in the Holocaust
Feminism within the Frame: An Analysis of Representations of Women in the Art of Americas Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
History of Art and Architecture
The Fluid Body: Gender, Agency, and Embodiment in Chöd Ritual
Religion
Parodic Patriotism and Ambivalent Assimilation: A Rereading of Mary Antin's The Promised Land
Romance Languages and Literatures
Virgin, Mother, Warrior: The Virgin of Guadalupe as an Icon of the Anti- Abortion Movement
Romance Languages and Literatures
Feminist Evolutions: An exploration and response to the disconnect between young women and contemporary dominant feminism
Social Studies
Public Enemies: South Asian and Arab Americans Navigate Racialization and Cultural Citizenship After 9/11
Social Studies
The Blue Stockinged Gal of Yesterday is Gone: Life-course Decision-making and Identity Formation of 1950s Radcliffe College Graduates
Social Studies
At the Narrative Center of Gravity: Stories and Identities of Queer Women of Color
Embodying the Psyche, Envisioning the Self: Race, Gender, and Psychology in Postwar American Women’s Fiction
From Many Mouths to Her Mind: Pursuits of Selfhood, the American Woman, and the Self-Help Book
Out of Love: The Permissibility of Abuse in Love and Self Development
Promising Monsters, Perilous Motherhood: The Social Construction of 20th Century Multiple Births
Sexing the Gender Dysphoric Body: A Developmental Examination of Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood
The Specter of Homoeroticism: Recasting Castration in David Fincher's 'Fight Club'
Women's Occupational Health: A Study of Latina Immigrant Janitors at Harvard
Biology
Accidental Bodies
English
Transformations in the Polish Female Gender Model from Communism to Democracy
History of Science
Between Nation and World: Organizing Against Domestic Violence in China
Social Studies
The Process of Becoming: Cultural Identity-Formation Among Second-Generation South Asian Women in the Contexts of Marriage and Family
Social Studies
A Turn of the Page: Contemporary Women’s Reading Groups in America
Bordering Home
Canary in a Coal Mine: The Mixed Race Woman in American History and Literature
Reflections in Yellow
My Rights Don't Just Come to Me: Palestinian Women Negotiating Identity
Anthropology
“Progressive Conservatism”: The Intersection of Boston Women's Involvement in Anti-Suffrage and Progressive Reform, 1908 - 1920
History
“What Can a Woman Do?”: Gender, Youth, and Citizenship at Women's Colleges During World War I
History
Building Strong Community: A Study of Queer Groups at Northeastern, Brandeis, and Harvard
Sociology
Taking Care: Stereotypes, Medical Care, and HIV+ Women
Of Tongues Untied: Stories Told and Retold by Working-Class Women
On Display: Deconstructing Modes of Fashion Exhibition
The Un-Candidates: Gender and Outsider Signals in Women's Political Advertisements
Tugging at the Seams: Feminist Resistance in Pornography
Witnessing Memory': Narrating the Realities of Immigrant and Refugee Women
“La Revolution Tranquille”: Concubinage: The Renegotiation of Gender and the Deregulation of Conjugal Kinship in the Contemporary French Household
Anthropology
What is “natural” about the menstrual cycle?
Anthropology
Multi-Drug Resistance in Malaria: Identification and Characterization of a Putative ABC-Transporter in Plasmodium falciparum
Biology
“We Was Girls Together”: The Role of Female Friendship in Nella Larsen's and Toni Morrison's
English
Pom-Pom Power--The History of Cheerleading at Harvard
History
Conception of Gender in Artificial Intelligence
History of Science
“Hysterilization”: Hysterectomy as Sterilization in the 1970s United States
History of Science
What's Blood Got to Do with It? Menarche, Menstrual Attitudes, Experiences, and Behaviors
Psychology
Facing the Screen: Portrayals of Female Body Image on Websites for Teenagers
Sociology
They're Not Those Kinds of Girls: The Absence of Physical Pleasure in Teenage Girls' Sexual Narratives
Sociology
(Re)Writing Woman: Confronting Gender in the Czech Masculine Narrative
“Like a Nuprin: Little, Yellow, Queer”: The Case for Queer Asian American Autobiofictional Performance
Sex, Mothers, and Bodies: Chilean Sex Workers Voicing their Honor
Anthropology
Mapping his Manila: Feminine Geographies of the City in Nick Joaquin's
English
Precious Mettle: Margaret DeWitt, Susanna Townsend, and Mary Jane Megquier Negotiate Environment, Refinement & Femininity in Gold Rush California
History
From to : Analyzing the Aesthetics of Spoken Word Poetry
History and Literature
The Hymeneal Seal: Embodying Female Virginity in Early Modern England
History of Science
Suit Her Up, She's Ready to Play: How the Woman-in-a-Suit Tackles Social Binaries
Social Studies
"From the Bones of Memory": Women's Stories to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
"When We Get Married, We'll Live Next Door to Each Other": Adolescence, Girl-Friends, and "Lesbian" Desires
Healthy Bodies, Healthy Lives: The Women's Health Initiative and the Politics of Science
Adah Isaacs Menken, The [Un]True Stories: History, Identity, Memory, Menken, and Me
Afro-American Studies
Situated Science: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophical Discourse
English
From "Sympathizers" to Organizers: The Emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement from the New Left at Harvard-Radcliffe
History
Re-(e)valu[ate/ing] Madonna: Understanding the Success of Post-Modernity's Greatest Diva
Music
"Let's Not Change the Subject!": Deliberation on Abortion on the Web, in the House and in Abortion Dialogue Groups
Social Studies
A Socialist-Feminist Re-vision: An Integration of Socialist Feminist and Psychoanalytic Accounts of Women's Oppression
Social Studies
Common Visions, Differing Priorities, Challenging Dynamics: An Examination of a Low-Income Immigrant Women's Cooperative Project
Sociology
"I Don't Want to Grow Up - If It's Like That": Carson McCullers's Construction of Female Adolescence and Women's Coming of Age
Another Toxic Shock: Health Risks from Rayon and Dioxin in Chlorine Bleached Tampons Manufactured in the United States, a Public Policy Analysis
Damned Beauties of the Roaring Twenties: The Death of Young, White, Urban, American Women and
Just Saying No? A Closer Look at the Messages of Three Sexual Abstinence Programs
The Cost of Making Money: Exploring the Dissociative Tendencies of College Educated Strippers
Whose Sexuality? Masochistic Sexual Fantasies and Notions of Feminist Subjectivity
That Takes Balls…or Does it? A Historical and Endocrinologic Examination of the Relation of Androgens to Confidence in Males and Females
Anthropology
black tar/and honey: Anne Sexton in Performance
English
Redefining the Politics of Presence: The Case of Indian Women in Panchayati Raj Institutions
Government
The Psychic Connection: The historical evolution of the psychic hotline in terms of gender, spirituality, and talk therapy
History
Visions and Revisions of Love: and the Crisis of Heterosexual Romance
Visual and Environmental Studies
"I Feel it in My Bones That You are Making History": The Life and Leadership of Pauli Murray
"Reports from the Front: Welfare Mothers Up in Arms": A Case Study with Policy Implications
All the Weapons I Carry 'Round with Me: Five Adult Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse Speak about Their Experiences with Impact Model Mugging
: Manufacturing Multiplicity from American Fashion Magazines
Listening to Stories of Prison: The HIV Epidemic in MCI-Framingham
The Communicating Wire: Bell Telephone, Farm Wives, and the Struggle for Rural Telephone Service
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Good Girl: Adolescent Fiction and Patriarchal Notions of Womanhood
Out of the Courtroom and onto the Ballot: The Politicization of the 1930s and '40s Massachusetts Birth Control Movement
History
"The Role For Which God Created Them": Women in the United States' Religious Right
Social Studies
Potent Vulnerability: American Jewry and the Romance with Diaspora
Social Studies
"I Certainly Try and Make the Most of it": An Exploratory Study of Teenage Mothers Who Have Remained in High School
In Their Own Words: Life and Love in the Literary Transactions of Adolescent Girls
Math/Theory: Constructing a Feminist Epistemology of Mathematics
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…" Nella Larsen, Alice Walker, and the Self-Representation of Black Female Sexuality
Racial Iconography and Feminist Film: A Cultural Critique of Independent Women's Cinema
Real Plums in an Imaginary Cake: Mary McCarthy and the Writing of Autobiography
Single-Mother Poverty: A Critical Analysis of Current Welfare Theory and Policy from a Feminist, Cultural Perspective
Intra-household Resource Allocations in South Africa: Is There a Gender Bias?
Economics
Vision and Revision: The Naked Body and the Borders of Sex and Gender
English
Are Abusive Men Different? And Can We Predict Their Behavior?
Psychology
Racial Iconography and Feminist Film: A Cultural Critique of Independent Women's Cinema
Visual and Environmental Studies
"What Does a Girl Do?": Teenage Girls' Voices in the Girl Group Music of the 1950s and '60s
Continuing the Struggle: Gender Equality in an Egalitarian Community
Elements of Community: Re-entering the Landscape of Utah Mormonism
Loving and Living Surrealism: Reuniting Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst
Reading the Body: The Physiological Politics of Gender in Charlotte Bronte's , Margaret Oliphant's , and Mary Braddon's
Searching for a Place Apart: A Journey into and out of Bulimia Nervosa
The Flagstad Case
The Sound Factory
Visual Strategies of the Contemporary U.S. Abortion Conflict
Working Women, Legitimate Lives: The Gender Values Underlying 1994 Welfare Reform
The Hormone Replacement Therapy Decision: Women at the Crossroads of Women's Health
Anthropology
The Economic Consequences of Domestic Violence
Economics
"It's My Skin": Gender, Pathology, and the Jewish Body in Holocaust Narratives
English
Essentialist Tensions: Feminist Theories of the "Maleness" of Philosophy
Philosophy
Differences Among Friends: International feminists, USAID, and Nigerian women
Helke Sander and the Roots of Change: Gaining a Foothold for Women Filmmakers in Postwar Germany
On Dorothy Allison's and Literary Theory on Pain and Witnessing
Redefining : A Study of Chicana Identity and the Malinche Image
The Feminist Critique of the Birth Control Pill
The Re-visited: Women Villains in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
The Framings of Ethel Rosenberg: Gender, Law, Politics, and Culture in Cold War America
Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing
When Pregnancy is a Crime: Addiction, Pregnancy and the Law
Strategic Sentiments: Javanese Women and the Anthropology of Emotion
Anthropology
Engendering Bodies in Pain: Trauma and Silence in Dorothy Allison's
English
The Flowers of Middle Summer
English
Conceptions of Self, Relationships and Gender Roles in Japanese American Women in California and Hawaii
Psychology
Bad Mothers and Wicked (wo)Men: Facts and Fictions about Serial Killers
Child of Imagination: Literary Analysis of Woolf, Steedman, Rich & Gilligan
Gender Roles on Trial During the Reign of Terror
Grief and Rage: The Politics of Death and the Political Implications of Mourning
Jewels in the Net: Women Bringing Relation into the Light of American Buddhist Practice
Mamas Fighting for Freedom in Kenya
Rethinking "Feminine Wiles": Sexuality and Subversion in the Fiction of Jane Bowles
Sexing the Machine: Feminism, Technology, and Postmodernism
Sisterhood is Robin? The Politics of the Woman-Centered Feminist Discourse in the New Ms. Magazine
"Thank God for Technology!" Taking a Second Look at the Technocratic Birth Experience
Where She Slept These Many Years
Women's Narratives of Anger: Exploring the Relationship between Anger and Self
Edith Wharton's : Gendered Paradoxes and Resistance to Representation
English
Sociocognitive and Motivational Influences on Gender-Linked Conduct
Psychology
Conceptions of the Female Self: A Struggle Between Dominant and Resistant Forces
Objectified Subjects: Women in AIDS Clinical Drug Trials
Re-membering the American Dream: Woman in the Process of Placing a Beam in a Bag
: Voices of Resistance
Women and War
Women of the Cloister, Women of the World: American Benedictines in Transition
The Changing Lives of Palestinian Women in the Galilee: Reflections on Some Aspects of Modernization by Three Generations
Anthropology
Blending the Spectrum: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Women and HIV Disease
Biology
Maestra: Five Female Orchestral Conductors in the United States
Music
Negotiating Identity: Multiracial People Challenging the Discourse
Social Studies
Pain, Privacy, and Photography: Approaches to Picturing the Experiences of Battered Women
Visual and Environmental Studies
Incest and the Denial of Paternal Fallibility in Psychoanalysis and Feminist Theory
Sex and the Ivory Girl: Judy Blume Speaks to the Erotics of Disembodiment in Adolescent Girls' Discourses of Sexual Desire
Women's Secrets, Feminine Desires: Narrative Hiding and Revealing in Frances Burney's , Emily Bronte's , and Mary Braddon's
Workers, Mothers and Working Mothers: The Politics of Fetal Protection in the Workplace
Appalachian Identity: A Contested Discourse
Anthropology
Half-Baked in Botswana: Why Cookstoves Aren't Heating Up the Kitchen
Economics
"Management of Men": Political Wives in British Parliamentary Politics, 1846-1867
History
re:Visions of Feminism: An Analysis of Contemporary Film and Video Directed by Asian American Women
Social Studies
A Mini-Revolution: hemlines, gender identity, and the 1960s
Feeding Women and Children First: A Study of the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children
On Refracting a Voice: Readings of Tatiana Tolstaia
Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, The Mothers' Clinics, and the Practice of Contraception
: Meaning and Community Re-orient/ed
With Child: Women's Experiences of Childbirth from Personal, Historical, and Cultural Perspectives
Representing "Miss Lizzie": Class and Gender in the Borden Case
History and Literature
Seductive Strategies: Towards an Interactive Model of Consumerism
History and Literature
Nancy Chodorow's Theory Examined: Contraceptive Use Among Sexually Active Adolescents
Psychology
Choosing Sides: Massachusetts Activists Formulate Opinions on the Abortion Issue
Social Studies
Influence of Early Hollywood Films on Women's Roles in America
Rethinking Sex and Gender in a World of Women without Men: Changing Consciousness and Incorporation of the Feminine in Three Utopias by Women
A Different Voice in Politics: Women As Elites
Government
The Lady Teaches Well: Middle-Class Women and the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780-1830
History
The Analytical Muse: Historiography, Gender and Science in the Life of Lady Ada Lovelace
History of Science
The Tragic Part of Happiness: The Construction of the Subject in
Literatures
The Ideology of Gender Roles in Contemporary Mormonism: Feminist Reform and Traditional Reaction
Religion
La fonction génératrice: French Feminism, Motherhood, and Legal Reform, 1880-1914.
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Published by Owen Ingram at January 2nd, 2023 , Revised On June 10, 2024
The concept of gender describes the differences in characteristics, behaviours, and responsibilities between males and females. Gender studies explore the complicated concerns that arise from the interaction of men and women.
It is essential that you thoroughly understand the subject before you begin writing your dissertation . You must choose an interesting topic for your thesis in order to get a decent grade. As you progress through your dissertation, an excellent topic will provide you with direction and help you jump-start the process.
Below is a list of excellent gender studies dissertation topics you can learn and research. We provide a wide range of topics for you to use as is or modify as you wish. Getting a great grade on your dissertation has never been simpler.
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Thinking about what you want in a topic before looking at the list is crucial. Selecting a topic that interests you or piques your curiosity will make the research process easier. Check out the guidelines below on how to select and narrow a dissertation topic .
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Physiotherapy is a healthcare profession that deals with movement disorders of the body arising from different conditions. Physiotherapy focuses on performing practices that reduce physical ailments.
Japanese Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field focusing on Japan’s language, history, culture, and society. It is an invaluable resource for researchers who seek to gain a comprehensive understanding of the country’s past and present.
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Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.
Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare access to popular culture. Gender is never isolated from other factors that determine someone’s position in the world, such as sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, region of origin, citizenship status, life experiences, and access to resources. Beyond studying gender as an identity category, the field is invested in illuminating the structures that naturalize, normalize, and discipline gender across historical and cultural contexts.
At a college or university, you’d be hard pressed to find a department that brands itself as simply Gender Studies. You’d be more likely to find different arrangements of the letters G, W, S, and perhaps Q and F, signifying gender, women, sexuality, queer, and feminist studies. These various letter configurations aren’t just semantic idiosyncrasies. They illustrate the ways the field has grown and expanded since its institutionalization in the 1970s.
This non-exhaustive list aims to introduce readers to gender studies in a broad sense. It shows how the field has developed over the last several decades, as well as how its interdisciplinary nature offers a range of tools for understanding and critiquing our world.
Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler, “Editorial.” Signs , 1975; “Editorial,” off our backs , 1970
The editorial from the inaugural issue of Signs , founded in 1975 by Catharine Stimpson, explains that the founders hoped that the journal’s title captured what women’s studies is capable of doing: to “represent or point to something.” Women’s studies was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary field that could represent issues of gender and sexuality in new ways, with the possibility of shaping “scholarship, thought, and policy.”
The editorial in the first issue of off our backs , a feminist periodical founded in 1970, explains how their collective wanted to explore the “dual nature of the women’s movement:” that “women need to be free of men’s domination” and “must strive to get off our backs.” The content that follows includes reports on the Equal Rights Amendment, protests, birth control, and International Women’s Day.
Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminism against Itself.” NWSA Journal , 2002
Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies, which consolidated as an academic field of inquiry in the 1970s. Wiegman tracks some of the anxieties that emerged with the shift from women’s to gender studies, such as concerns it would decenter women and erase the feminist activism that gave rise to the field. She considers these anxieties as part of a larger concern over the future of the field, as well as fear that academic work on gender and sexuality has become too divorced from its activist roots.
Jack Halberstam, “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (2014)
Halberstam’s entry in this volume provides a useful overview for debates and concepts that have dominated the field of gender studies: Is gender purely a social construct? What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry? Halberstam’s synthesis of the field makes a compelling case for why the study of gender persists and remains relevant for humanists, social scientists, and scientists alike.
Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, “Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century.” Hypatia , 2009
Scholar and transgender activist Miqqi Alicia Gilbert considers the production and maintenance of the gender binary—that is, the idea that there are only two genders and that gender is a natural fact that remains stable across the course of one’s life. Gilbert’s view extends across institutional, legal, and cultural contexts, imagining what a frameworks that gets one out of the gender binary and gender valuation would have to look like to eliminate sexism, transphobia, and discrimination.
Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories.” Social Problems , 2006
Judith Lorber identifies the key paradigm shifts in sociology around the question of gender: 1) acknowledging gender as an “organizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies;” 2) stipulating that gender is socially constructed, meaning that while gender is assigned at birth based on visible genitalia, it isn’t a natural, immutable category but one that is socially determined; 3) analyzing power in modern western societies reveals the dominance of men and promotion of a limited version of heterosexual masculinity; 4) emerging methods in sociology are helping disrupt the production of ostensibly universal knowledge from a narrow perspective of privileged subjects. Lorber concludes that feminist sociologists’ work on gender has provided the tools for sociology to reconsider how it analyzes structures of power and produces knowledge.
bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminist Review , 1986
bell hooks argues that the feminist movement has privileged the voices, experiences, and concerns of white women at the expense of women of color. Instead of acknowledging who the movement has centered, white women have continually invoked the “common oppression” of all women, a move they think demonstrates solidarity but actually erases and marginalizes women who fall outside of the categories of white, straight, educated, and middle-class. Instead of appealing to “common oppression,” meaningful solidarity requires that women acknowledge their differences, committing to a feminism that “aims to end sexist oppression.” For hooks, this necessitates a feminism that is anti-racist. Solidarity doesn’t have to mean sameness; collective action can emerge from difference.
Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 2008
Chances are you’ve come across the phrase “intersectional feminism.” For many, this term is redundant: If feminism isn’t attentive to issues impacting a range of women, then it’s not actually feminism. While the term “intersectional” now circulates colloquially to signify a feminism that is inclusive, its usage has become divorced from its academic origins. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s based on Black women’s experiences with the law in cases of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality is not an adjective or a way to describe identity, but a tool for analyzing structures of power. It aims to disrupt universal categories of and claims about identity. Jennifer Nash provides an overview of intersectionality’s power, including guidance on how to deploy it in the service of coalition-building and collective action.
Treva B. Lindsey, “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies , 2015
Treva Lindsey considers the erasure of Black women’s labor in anti-racist activism , as well as the erasure of their experiences with violence and harm. From the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s contributions and leadership have not been acknowledged to the same extent as their male counterparts. Furthermore, their experiences with state-sanctioned racial violence don’t garner as much attention. Lindsey argues that we must make visible the experiences and labor of Black women and queer persons of color in activist settings in order to strengthen activist struggles for racial justice.
Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians , 2007
Renya Ramirez (Winnebago) argues that indigenous activist struggles for sovereignty, liberation, and survival must account for gender. A range of issues impact Native American women, such as domestic abuse, forced sterilization , and sexual violence. Furthermore, the settler state has been invested in disciplining indigenous concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship, reorienting them to fit into white settler understandings of property and inheritance. A Native American feminist consciousness centers gender and envisions decolonization without sexism.
Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society , 2005
Hester Eisenstein argues that some of contemporary U.S. feminism’s work in a global context has been informed by and strengthened capitalism in a way that ultimately increases harms against marginalized women. For example, some have suggested offering poor rural women in non-U.S. contexts microcredit as a path to economic liberation. In reality, these debt transactions hinder economic development and “continue the policies that have created the poverty in the first place.” Eisenstein acknowledges that feminism has the power to challenge capitalist interests in a global context, but she cautions us to consider how aspects of the feminist movement have been coopted by corporations.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008
Afsaneh Najmabadi remarks on the existence of sex-reassignment surgeries in Iran since the 1970s and the increase in these surgeries in the twenty-first century. She explains that these surgeries are a response to perceived sexual deviance; they’re offered to cure persons who express same-sex desire. Sex-reassignment surgeries ostensibly “heteronormaliz[e]” people who are pressured to pursue this medical intervention for legal and religious reasons. While a repressive practice, Najmabadi also argues that this practice has paradoxically provided “ relatively safer semipublic gay and lesbian social space” in Iran. Najmabadi’s scholarship illustrates how gender and sexual categories, practices, and understandings are influenced by geographical and cultural contexts.
Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore’s “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008
Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore map the ways that transgender studies can expand feminist and gender studies. “Transgender” does not need to exclusively signify individuals and communities, but can provide a lens for interrogating all bodies’ relationships to gendered spaces, disrupting the bounds of seemingly strict identity categories, and redefining gender. The “trans-” in transgender is a conceptual tool for interrogating the relationship between bodies and the institutions that discipline them.
David A. Rubin, “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs , 2012
David Rubin considers the fact that intersex persons have been subject to medicalization, pathologization, and “regulation of embodied difference through biopolitical discourses, practices, and technologies” that rely on normative cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Rubin considers the impact intersexuality had on conceptualizations of gender in mid-twentieth century sexology studies, and how the very concept of gender that emerged in that moment has been used to regulate the lives of intersex individuals.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs , 2005
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provides a thorough overview of the field of feminist disability studies. Both feminist and disability studies contend that those things which seem most natural to bodies are actually produced by a range of political, legal, medical, and social institutions. Gendered and disabled bodies are marked by these institutions. Feminist disability studies asks: How are meaning and value assigned to disabled bodies? How is this meaning and value determined by other social markers, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, national origin, and citizenship status?
The field asks under what conditions disabled bodies are denied or granted sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy and how disability impacts the exploration of gender and sexual expression in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood historical and contemporary pathologization of genders and sexualities. It explores how disabled activists, artists, and writers respond to social, cultural, medical, and political forces that deny them access, equity, and representation
Karin A. Martin, “William Wants a Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing.” Gender and Society , 2005
Karin Martin examines the gender socialization of children through an analysis of a range of parenting materials. Materials that claim to be (or have been claimed as) gender-neutral actually have a deep investment in training children in gender and sexual norms. Martin invites us to think about how adult reactions to children’s gender nonconformity pivots on a fear that gender expression in childhood is indicative of present or future non-normative sexuality. In other words, U.S. culture is unable to separate gender from sexuality. We imagine gender identity and expression maps predictably onto sexual desire. When children’s gender identity and expression exceeds culturally-determined permissible bounds in a family or community, adults project onto the child and discipline accordingly.
Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes.” Signs , 2013
Sarah Pemberton’s considers how sex-segregated prisons in the U.S. and England discipline their populations differently according to gender and sexual norms. This contributes to the policing, punishment, and vulnerability of incarcerated gender-nonconforming, transgender, and intersex persons. Issues ranging from healthcare access to increased rates of violence and harassment suggest that policies impacting incarcerated persons should center gender.
Dean Spade, “Some Very Basic Tips for Making High Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.” The Radical Teacher , 2011
Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade offers a pedagogical perspective on how to make classrooms accessible and inclusive for students. Spade also offers guidance on how to have classroom conversations about gender and bodies that don’t reassert a biological understanding of gender or equate certain body parts and functions with particular genders. While the discourse around these issues is constantly shifting, Spade provides useful ways to think about small changes in language that can have a powerful impact on students.
Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese , 2010
Feminist philosophy of science is a field comprised of scholars studying gender and science that has its origins in the work of feminist scientists in the 1960s. Richardson considers the contributions made by these scholars, such as increased opportunities for and representation of women in STEM fields , pointing out biases in seemingly neutral fields of scientific inquiry. Richardson also considers the role of gender in knowledge production, looking at the difficulties women have faced in institutional and professional contexts. The field of feminist philosophy of science and its practitioners are marginalized and delegitimized because of the ways they challenge dominant modes of knowledge production and disciplinary inquiry.
Bryce Traister’s “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly , 2000
Bryce Traister considers the emergence of masculinity studies out of gender studies and its development in American cultural studies. He argues that the field has remained largely invested in centering heterosexuality, asserting the centrality and dominance of men in critical thought. He offers ways for thinking about how to study masculinity without reinstituting gendered hierarchies or erasing the contributions of feminist and queer scholarship.
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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
Andrea fronzetti colladon.
2 Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy
3 Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland
4 Faculty of Economics and Management, Centre for Family Business Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
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.
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.
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.
Keyword set | Examples of searched words | |
---|---|---|
Gender | Bride | |
Daughter | , | |
Female | , | |
Femini | , , | |
Girl | ||
Lady | , | |
Maid | ||
Mother | , , | |
Queen | ||
Widow | ||
Wife | , | |
Woman | , | |
Equality | Bias | , , |
Diversity | , | |
Empower | , , | |
Equality | , , | |
Equity | , , | |
Homeworking | , , | |
Inclusion | , , | |
Quota | ||
Stereotype | , , |
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.
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.
Topic | Short Description |
---|---|
Behavior | Behavioral aspects related to gender |
Board of directors | Women in boards of directors |
Career Progression | Women’s promotion and career advancement |
Compensation | Salary and rewards in relation to employment |
Culture | Ideas, customs and social behaviors, including bias and stereotypes |
Decision-making | The decision-making process |
Education | Primary, secondary and tertiary education |
Empowerment | Authority, power and self-confidence |
Entrepreneurship | Women starting their own enterprises |
Family | Women’s relationship with family and family obligations, wok-life balance |
Feminine | Female characteristics |
Governance | The governance structures of firms and society |
Hiring | Appointing women to positions within the workforce |
Human Capital | The intellectual capital resulting from education and social capital |
Leadership | Leadership skills and leadership positions |
Management | Managerial practices and processes |
Masculine | Male characteristics |
Network | Networking dynamics as they relate to women |
Organization | The organization of firms |
Parenting | The act of raising children and its implications |
Performance | Measuring the work output of individuals, teams and organizations |
Personality | Traits and individual characteristics of women |
Politics | Policies and regulations, women in politics |
Reputation | How women are viewed by their colleagues, peers and society |
Role | The roles covered by women in the workforce |
Sustainability | Women’s relation to sustainability and social responsibility |
Well-Being | Psychological, personal, and social welfare of women |
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.
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.
Topic | Top associations (other topics in bold) |
---|---|
Behavior | social, work, , differences, related, , child, positive, group, individual, self, influence, relationship, stereotype, health, inequality, change, , student, participant, , , experience, , , intention |
Career Progression | , inequality, difference , work, social, equity, , , , , level, , development, policy, examine, role, self, experience, , support, , individual, , perceive, academic, differences |
Compensation | gap, , difference, inequality, , , work, increase, higher, lower, market, less, labor, household, low, , age, time, high, labour, attention, discrimination, change, country, individual, status |
Decision Making | , , social, work, , , inequality, household, group, policy, , process, , health, , level, role, individual, , , equity, , stereotype, different, , change |
Education | age, inequality, level, , study, social, health, gap, status, equity, student, , , child, , school, economic, policy, work, , experience, higher, access, household, development |
Hiring | , work, , , discrimination, level, , time, , gap, sector, , market, social, increase, status, , policy, inequality, experience, differences, lower, equity, high, data, satisfaction, |
Human Capital | , , work, , social, , , , self, , health, , , student, , group, child, individual, development, age, differences, lack, gap, focus, change |
Organization | work, , , inequality, , , social, diversity, policy, level, change, , employee, individual, , equity, , practice, value, , management, structure, discrimination, , |
Performance | , , , stereotype, work, , , , , self, impact, social, , , difference, high, firm, threat, student, inequality, role, , increase, relationship, experience |
Role | , , work, , , , firm, , , social, , role, , employee, less, increase, experience, traditional, , stereotype, sector, , business, gap, group, data |
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 ].
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 ].
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 ].
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 ].
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 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 ].
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 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.
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).
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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In our series of recommended reading lists, gender experts provide starting points for researchers, students, practitioners and others looking to dive deeper into research on gender and a wide variety of topics.
This time, we asked the CGIAR GENDER Platform team members to pick out their top gender research reads from 2021. Explore below for their selection of the most interesting, important and captivating publications released last year.
#1 rural youth in southern nigeria.
There are three clear reasons why Rural Youth in Southern Nigeria: Fractured Lives and Ambitious Futures by Crossouard et al. sticks in my mind. First, because it is about youth. We often talk about youth and their importance for the future, but I have not seen much research about rural youth. As the CGIAR GENDER Platform evolves, we will work more on youth issues, so it is important we have more theoretical thinking and evidence in this space. My second reason is linked to the article’s approach: years ago, I was in the field in Kenya with a PhD student doing research on how rural education was preparing youth for the future, and she found that the education system was not at all linked to the realities. This article looks at that issue as well. Finally, I picked this because it is about Nigeria, and having spent seven years of my career there, Nigeria always interests me. It was also good to see a CGIAR scientist involved in this research.
Gender Equality in Climate Policy and Practice Hindered by Assumptions by Lau et al. is one of those articles that should have been written a long time ago. It lays out the assumptions we are still dealing with in gender in agriculture research. For example, that women are caring and connected to the environment; that women are a homogenous and vulnerable group; that gender equality is a women’s issue; and that gender equality is a numbers game. The authors very nicely show how these assumptions hinder progress on climate change and how they can even be counterproductive. Now that this article is out there for the public, we can move on and really deal with the issues at hand!
#3 gender expertise in environment and development.
This book, Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development by Resurrección and Elmhirst, is thoughtful and beautifully written. It brings together critical reflections from gender experts on their experiences working in environment and development organizations, including CGIAR. It takes an innovative format: a series of conversations between the co-editors and writers, Bernadette Resurrección and Rebecca Elmhirst, and gender experts who are working to place gender and social inclusion issues at the center of research and practice on sustainability and environmental management. These conversations surface the motivations, negotiations, achievements and daily struggles of these professionals as they navigate the complexities of all that is implied by working on gender in largely technical fields. Every chapter has a different flavor, but all will resonate with those of us working in this area; and make us nod our heads, sigh, laugh (or cry!) and better understand our profession and ourselves.
Colfer’s book, Masculinities in Forests: Representations of Diversity , focuses on how masculinities relate to forest management, drawing on her experience working in different forest contexts, from the USA to Indonesia. It takes a timely dive into diverse masculinities and how these shape practices in forest management, all the while recognizing men’s agency in expressing different masculine identities. Aside from the rich content that is discussed, couched in an accessible framework and language, I appreciated that the book examines masculinities among professionals working in the field of forestry as well as among various forest communities. I was also very impressed by how Colfer was able to re-examine decades of ethnographic research through a new lens to write this book. Wow!
#5 diffusion and dilution.
Doss’ Diffusion and Dilution: The Power and Perils of Integrating Feminist Perspectives into Household Economics is important to me is because it acknowledges the advances we have made in integrating feminist economic perspectives into mainstream economics, but also points out areas for improvement. It helps us to stay focused. Personally, I find the call for careful consideration of benefits versus potential harm, and proper training of enumerators when collection data about domestic and gender-based violence, extremely important. I sometimes feel we make the decision to collect data about domestic and gender-based violence too lightly. The article further opens the discussion about two other pet topics of mine: First, how can we better capture the complexity of households, including the web of power relations between different members, in which individuals make decisions? Second, how can we measure social norms and their importance for people’s capabilities and choices? How can these be changed and what are the effects?
I keep going back to this brief, A Review of Evidence on Gender Equality, Women’s Empowerment and Food Systems by Njuki et al., mainly for its gendered food systems framework. The framework brings the different ways in which gender affects capabilities, choices and outcomes in food systems together. It provides a theoretical basis for various key questions in gender in agricultural and food system research and shows how this is supported by evidence. To me, its key contribution is the way it disentangles the different ‘entry points’ of gender constraints. Gender inequalities cannot only creep into biophysical, technological or economic drivers of food systems, shocks and vulnerabilities affecting these drivers can also affect men and women differently. Finally, the conceptualization of gendered food systems as systems underscores the dynamic, interdependent nature of the different elements and the need for a holistic approach to achieve gender equality in agriculture and food systems.
#7 advancing gender equality.
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, read the introduction. Pyburn and van Eerdewijk’s introduction to Advancing Gender Equality through Agricultural and Environmental Research excellently presents the topics discussed in the book, which features contributions from 55 CGIAR gender researchers. The book flips an often-posed question: instead of asking what gender equality can do for agricultural development, it asks how agricultural and environmental research can advance gender equality. One of the best overviews of gender research in CGIAR, the introductory chapter contextualizes CGIAR gender research within our organization’s struggles to address gender and within the broader thinking around gender and development. The introduction provides summaries of each chapter as well as information on the methodological and geographic breakdown of studies reviewed.
As gender researchers in the GCIAR are well aware, women and men in developing countries have different preferences and interests, and good policies and programs take these differences into account. But what about what researchers themselves bring to the table? This article, How Women Saved Agricultural Economics , by Offutt and McCluskey, points out that women (and minorities) tend to be under-represented in economics positions in government and academia, and are not recognized for their achievements with awards and editorships due to both overt discrimination and implicit bias. Yet, the authors say, the diversity resulting from women’s increased presence in field has increased the relevance of the discipline over the last several decades. This research documents the importance of increasing representation in academic fields where women (and other minorities) are traditionally under-represented. While this study focuses on agricultural economics in the United States, it has prompted further analysis of how these patterns apply in other countries, such as India and Kenya, and within other institutions.
#9 food and agriculture systems.
Foresight studies on agriculture tend to not integrate social dimensions as these often do not render themselves to quantitative measurement. This article, Food and Agriculture Systems Foresight Study: Implications for Gender, Poverty and Nutrition by Lentz, is a rare review that argues for mainstreaming a gender, poverty and nutrition focus into foresight research. This would help ensure that we reduce the risk of entrenching gender inequalities and promoting technologies that exacerbate inequality, and that we are able to inform policy- and innovation-led pathways. Having dabbled in participatory foresight analysis using scenario planning, visioning and backcasting, this piqued my curiosity. The paper offers helpful insights into how and when to bundle or sequence interventions and the need to understand the effects of interventions on the whole agri-food system. It offers a very engaging and useful read, even for those who are unfamiliar with foresight methods.
The issue of women’s limited land ownership is sticky and has occupied central stage in debates and discourses for a while. Nowhere have we been able to make any significant progress in reducing the gender gaps in land ownership. Cheryl Doss (2018) questioned the myth of women owning less than one percent of land globally. This continues to be a complex issue, with the definition of “ownership” being only one of the tricky issues. Agarwal’s 2021 paper, How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? , uses longitudinal data from the Village Level Studies (VLS), collected by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from a set of Indian villages between 2009 and 2014, to look at which women are more likely to own land, why and how these patterns changed over the years. We at the CGIAR GENDER Platform have also been highlighting the need to focus more on unpacking intersectionalities to have better insights that can inform targeted solutions. This paper provides a very good example of the importance of intersectional approaches and it highlights the gap and the critical need for a national and state-level datasets.
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StudyCorgi . "569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/.
StudyCorgi . 2021. "569 Gender Essay Topics & Research Topics on Gender." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/gender-essay-topics/.
These essay examples and topics on Gender were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.
This essay topic collection was updated on June 22, 2024 .
In our series of recommended reading lists, gender experts provide starting points for researchers, students, practitioners and others looking to dive deeper into research on gender and a wide variety of topics.
This time, we asked the CGIAR GENDER Platform team members to pick out their top gender research reads from 2021. Explore below for their selection of the most interesting, important and captivating publications released last year.
#1 rural youth in southern nigeria.
There are three clear reasons why Rural Youth in Southern Nigeria: Fractured Lives and Ambitious Futures by Crossouard et al. sticks in my mind. First, because it is about youth. We often talk about youth and their importance for the future, but I have not seen much research about rural youth. As the CGIAR GENDER Platform evolves, we will work more on youth issues, so it is important we have more theoretical thinking and evidence in this space. My second reason is linked to the article’s approach: years ago, I was in the field in Kenya with a PhD student doing research on how rural education was preparing youth for the future, and she found that the education system was not at all linked to the realities. This article looks at that issue as well. Finally, I picked this because it is about Nigeria, and having spent seven years of my career there, Nigeria always interests me. It was also good to see a CGIAR scientist involved in this research.
Vine distribution among the rural youth (Photo: Hugh Rutherford/CIP)
Gender Equality in Climate Policy and Practice Hindered by Assumptions by Lau et al. is one of those articles that should have been written a long time ago. It lays out the assumptions we are still dealing with in gender in agriculture research. For example, that women are caring and connected to the environment; that women are a homogenous and vulnerable group; that gender equality is a women’s issue; and that gender equality is a numbers game. The authors very nicely show how these assumptions hinder progress on climate change and how they can even be counterproductive. Now that this article is out there for the public, we can move on and really deal with the issues at hand!
#3 gender expertise in environment and development.
This book, Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development by Resurrección and Elmhirst, is thoughtful and beautifully written. It brings together critical reflections from gender experts on their experiences working in environment and development organizations, including CGIAR. It takes an innovative format: a series of conversations between the co-editors and writers, Bernadette Resurrección and Rebecca Elmhirst, and gender experts who are working to place gender and social inclusion issues at the center of research and practice on sustainability and environmental management. These conversations surface the motivations, negotiations, achievements and daily struggles of these professionals as they navigate the complexities of all that is implied by working on gender in largely technical fields. Every chapter has a different flavor, but all will resonate with those of us working in this area; and make us nod our heads, sigh, laugh (or cry!) and better understand our profession and ourselves.
Colfer’s book, Masculinities in Forests: Representations of Diversity , focuses on how masculinities relate to forest management, drawing on her experience working in different forest contexts, from the USA to Indonesia. It takes a timely dive into diverse masculinities and how these shape practices in forest management, all the while recognizing men’s agency in expressing different masculine identities. Aside from the rich content that is discussed, couched in an accessible framework and language, I appreciated that the book examines masculinities among professionals working in the field of forestry as well as among various forest communities. I was also very impressed by how Colfer was able to re-examine decades of ethnographic research through a new lens to write this book. Wow!
Gender and forests. Photo: Mokhamad Edliadi/CIFOR
#5 diffusion and dilution.
Doss’ Diffusion and Dilution: The Power and Perils of Integrating Feminist Perspectives into Household Economics is important to me is because it acknowledges the advances we have made in integrating feminist economic perspectives into mainstream economics, but also points out areas for improvement. It helps us to stay focused. Personally, I find the call for careful consideration of benefits versus potential harm, and proper training of enumerators when collection data about domestic and gender-based violence, extremely important. I sometimes feel we make the decision to collect data about domestic and gender-based violence too lightly. The article further opens the discussion about two other pet topics of mine: First, how can we better capture the complexity of households, including the web of power relations between different members, in which individuals make decisions? Second, how can we measure social norms and their importance for people’s capabilities and choices? How can these be changed and what are the effects?
I keep going back to this brief, A Review of Evidence on Gender Equality, Women’s Empowerment and Food Systems by Njuki et al., mainly for its gendered food systems framework. The framework brings the different ways in which gender affects capabilities, choices and outcomes in food systems together. It provides a theoretical basis for various key questions in gender in agricultural and food system research and shows how this is supported by evidence. To me, its key contribution is the way it disentangles the different ‘entry points’ of gender constraints. Gender inequalities cannot only creep into biophysical, technological or economic drivers of food systems, shocks and vulnerabilities affecting these drivers can also affect men and women differently. Finally, the conceptualization of gendered food systems as systems underscores the dynamic, interdependent nature of the different elements and the need for a holistic approach to achieve gender equality in agriculture and food systems.
#7 advancing gender equality.
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, read the introduction. Pyburn and van Eerdewijk’s introduction to Advancing Gender Equality through Agricultural and Environmental Research excellently presents the topics discussed in the book, which features contributions from 55 CGIAR gender researchers. The book flips an often-posed question: instead of asking what gender equality can do for agricultural development, it asks how agricultural and environmental research can advance gender equality. One of the best overviews of gender research in CGIAR, the introductory chapter contextualizes CGIAR gender research within our organization’s struggles to address gender and within the broader thinking around gender and development. The introduction provides summaries of each chapter as well as information on the methodological and geographic breakdown of studies reviewed.
As gender researchers in the CGIAR are well aware, women and men in developing countries have different preferences and interests, and good policies and programs take these differences into account. But what about what researchers themselves bring to the table? This article, How Women Saved Agricultural Economics , by Offutt and McCluskey, points out that women (and minorities) tend to be under-represented in economics positions in government and academia, and are not recognized for their achievements with awards and editorships due to both overt discrimination and implicit bias. Yet, the authors say, the diversity resulting from women’s increased presence in field has increased the relevance of the discipline over the last several decades. This research documents the importance of increasing representation in academic fields where women (and other minorities) are traditionally under-represented. While this study focuses on agricultural economics in the United States, it has prompted further analysis of how these patterns apply in other countries, such as India and Kenya, and within other institutions.
Market vendor (Photo: C. de Bode/CGIAR)
#9 food and agriculture systems.
Foresight studies on agriculture tend to not integrate social dimensions as these often do not render themselves to quantitative measurement. This article, Food and Agriculture Systems Foresight Study: Implications for Gender, Poverty and Nutrition by Lentz, is a rare review that argues for mainstreaming a gender, poverty and nutrition focus into foresight research. This would help ensure that we reduce the risk of entrenching gender inequalities and promoting technologies that exacerbate inequality, and that we are able to inform policy- and innovation-led pathways. Having dabbled in participatory foresight analysis using scenario planning, visioning and backcasting, this piqued my curiosity. The paper offers helpful insights into how and when to bundle or sequence interventions and the need to understand the effects of interventions on the whole agri-food system. It offers a very engaging and useful read, even for those who are unfamiliar with foresight methods.
The issue of women’s limited land ownership is sticky and has occupied central stage in debates and discourses for a while. Nowhere have we been able to make any significant progress in reducing the gender gaps in land ownership. Cheryl Doss (2018) questioned the myth of women owning less than one percent of land globally. This continues to be a complex issue, with the definition of “ownership” being only one of the tricky issues. Agarwal’s 2021 paper, How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? , uses longitudinal data from the Village Level Studies (VLS), collected by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from a set of Indian villages between 2009 and 2014, to look at which women are more likely to own land, why and how these patterns changed over the years. We at the CGIAR GENDER Platform have also been highlighting the need to focus more on unpacking intersectionalities to have better insights that can inform targeted solutions. This paper provides a very good example of the importance of intersectional approaches and it highlights the gap and the critical need for a national and state-level datasets.
Crossouard, B., Dunne, M., Szyp, C., Madu, T., & Teekin, B. (2021). Rural youth in southern Nigeria: Fractured lives and ambitious futures. Journal of Sociology . https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833211042422
Negotiating gender expertise in environment and development.
Resurrección, B.P., & Elmhirst, R. (2020). Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development: Voices from Feminist Political Ecology (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351175180
Colfer, C.J.P. 2021. Masculinities in Forests: Representations of Diversity. London: Routledge
Cheryl R. Doss (2021) Diffusion and Dilution: The Power and Perils of Integrating Feminist Perspectives Into Household Economics, Feminist Economics, 27:3, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2021.1883701
Pyburn, Rhiannon, ed.; and van Eerdewijk, Anouka, ed. 2021. Advancing gender equality through agricultural and environmental research: Past, present, and future. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/9780896293915
Offutt, S., and J. McCluskey. 2021. How women saved agricultural economics, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. 1–19 https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13183
Erin C Lentz, Food and agriculture systems foresight study: Implications for gender, poverty, and nutrition, Q Open , Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2021, qoaa003, https://doi.org/10.1093/qopen/qoaa003
Agarwal, Bina, Anthwal, Pervesh, and Mahesh, Malvika. (2021). ‘How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? Inter-gender and intra-gender gaps, Journal of Development Studies, April, open access https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021.1887478.
Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > Women's and Gender Studies > Theses and Dissertations
Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.
Social Media and Women Empowerment in Nigeria: A Study of the #BreakTheBias Campaign on Facebook , Deborah Osaro Omontese
Going Flat: Challenging Gender, Stigma, and Cure through Lesbian Breast Cancer Experience , Beth Gaines
Incorrect Athlete, Incorrect Woman: IOC Gender Regulations and the Boundaries of Womanhood in Professional Sports , Sabeehah Ravat
Transnational Perspectives on the #MeToo and Anti-Base Movements in Japan , Alisha Romano
Criminalizing LGBTQ+ Jamaicans: Social, Legal, and Colonial Influences on Homophobic Policy , Zoe C. Knowles
Dismantling Hegemony through Inclusive Sexual Health Education , Lauren Wright
Transfat Representation , Jessica "Fyn" Asay
Ain't I a Woman, Too? Depictions of Toxic Femininity, Transmisogynoir, and Violence on STAR , Sunahtah D. Jones
“The Most Muscular Woman I Have Ever Seen”: Bev FrancisPerformance of Gender in Pumping Iron II: The Women , Cera R. Shain
"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality and Its Representations in Pornographic Imagery , Leah Marie Turner
Reproducing Intersex Trouble: An Analysis of the M.C. Case in the Media , Jamie M. Lane
Race and Gender in (Re)integration of Victim-Survivors of CSEC in a Community Advocacy Context , Joshlyn Lawhorn
Penalizing Pregnancy: A Feminist Legal Studies Analysis of Purvi Patel's Criminalization , Abby Schneller
A Queer and Crip Grotesque: Katherine Dunn's , Megan Wiedeman
"Mothers like Us Think Differently": Mothers' Negotiations of Virginity in Contemporary Turkey , Asli Aygunes
Surveilling Hate/Obscuring Racism?: Hate Group Surveillance and the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hate Map" , Mary McKelvie
“Ya I have a disability, but that’s only one part of me”: Formative Experiences of Young Women with Physical Disabilities , Victoria Peer
Resistance from Within: Domestic violence and rape crisis centers that serve Black/African American populations , Jessica Marie Pinto
(Dis)Enchanted: (Re)constructing Love and Creating Community in the , Shannon A. Suddeth
"The Afro that Ate Kentucky": Appalachian Racial Formation, Lived Experience, and Intersectional Feminist Interventions , Sandra Louise Carpenter
“Even Five Years Ago this Would Have Been Impossible:” Health Care Providers’ Perspectives on Trans* Health Care , Richard S. Henry
Tough Guy, Sensitive Vas: Analyzing Masculinity, Male Contraceptives & the Sexual Division of Labor , Kaeleen Kosmo
Let’s Move! Biocitizens and the Fat Kids on the Block , Mary Catherine Dickman
Interpretations of Educational Experiences of Women in Chitral, Pakistan , Rakshinda Shah
Incredi-bull-ly Inclusive?: Assessing the Climate on a College Campus , Aubrey Lynne Hall
Her-Storicizing Baldness: Situating Women's Experiences with Baldness from Skin and Hair Disorders , Kasie Holmes
In the (Radical) Pursuit of Self-Care: Feminist Participatory Action Research with Victim Advocates , Robyn L. Homer
Significance is Bliss: A Global Feminist Analysis of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Privileging of Americo-Liberian over Indigenous Liberian Women's Voices , Morgan Lea Eubank
Monsters Under the Bed: An Analysis of Torture Scenes in Three Pixar Films , Heidi Tilney Kramer
Can You Believe She Did THAT?!:Breaking the Codes of "Good" Mothering in 1970s Horror Films , Jessica Michelle Collard
Don't Blame It on My Ovaries: Exploring the Lived Experience of Women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Creation of Discourse , Jennifer Lynn Ellerman
Valanced Voices: Student Experiences with Learning Disabilities & Differences , Zoe DuPree Fine
An Interactive Guide to Self-Discovery for Women , Elaine J. Taylor
Selling the Third Wave: The Commodification and Consumption of the Flat Track Roller Girl , Mary Catherine Whitlock
Beyond Survival: An Exploration of Narrative Healing and Forgiveness in Healing from Rape , Heather Curry
Gender Trouble In Northern Ireland: An Examination Of Gender And Bodies Within The 1970s And 1980s Provisional Irish Republican Army In Northern Ireland , Jennifer Earles
"You're going to Hollywood"!: Gender and race surveillance and accountability in American Idol contestant's performances , Amanda LeBlanc
From the academy to the streets: Documenting the healing power of black feminist creative expression , Tunisia L. Riley
Developing Feminist Activist Pedagogy: A Case Study Approach in the Women's Studies Department at the University of South Florida , Stacy Tessier
Women in Wargasm: The Politics of Womenís Liberation in the Weather Underground Organization , Cyrana B. Wyker
Opportunities for Spiritual Awakening and Growth in Mothering , Melissa J. Albee
A Constant Struggle: Renegotiating Identity in the Aftermath of Rape , Jo Aine Clarke
I am Warrior Woman, Hear Me Roar: The Challenge and Reproduction of Heteronormativity in Speculative Television Programs , Leisa Anne Clark
Reforming Dance Pedagogy: A Feminist Perspective on the Art of Performance and Dance Education , Jennifer Clement
Narratives of lesbian transformation: Coming out stories of women who transition from heterosexual marriage to lesbian identity , Clare F. Walsh
The Conundrum of Women’s Studies as Institutional: New Niches, Undergraduate Concerns, and the Move Towards Contemporary Feminist Theory and Action , Rebecca K. Willman
A Feminist Perspective on the Precautionary Principle and the Problem of Endocrine Disruptors under Neoliberal Globalization Policies , Erica Hesch Anstey
Asymptotes and metaphors: Teaching feminist theory , Michael Eugene Gipson
Postcolonial Herstory: The Novels of Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine): A Comparative Analysis , Oksana Lutsyshyna
Loving Loving? Problematizing Pedagogies of Care and Chéla Sandoval’s Love as a Hermeneutic , Allison Brimmer
Exploring Women’s Complex Relationship with Political Violence: A Study of the Weathermen, Radical Feminism and the New Left , Lindsey Blake Churchill
The Voices of Sex Workers (prostitutes?) and the Dilemma of Feminist Discourse , Justine L. Kessler
Reconstructing Women's Identities: The Phenomenon Of Cosmetic Surgery In The United States , Cara L. Okopny
Fantastic Visions: On the Necessity of Feminist Utopian Narrative , Tracie Anne Welser
The Politics of Being an Egg “Donor” and Shifting Notions of Reproductive Freedom , Elizabeth A. Dedrick
Women, Domestic Abuse, And Dreams: Analyzing Dreams To Uncover Hidden Traumas And Unacknowledged Strengths , Mindy Stokes
Safe at Home: Agoraphobia and the Discourse on Women’s Place , Suzie Siegel
Women, Environment and Development: Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America , Evaline Tiondi
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Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary field and may require keywords the aspect of the gender issue combined with keywords related to multiple disciplines (history, politics, medicine, literature, etc.). The ideas below will help get you started. If you need further help with keywords, talk to your professor or set up a research appointment with a librarian.
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The language used to describe library, archival, and other cultural collections has been under scrutiny to ensure inclusiveness for several decades. The implementation of inclusive and respectful language is uneven and progress is incremental. Below are a few resources that may help you identify a range of terms to use when searching, keeping in mind that using a variety of synonyms for your research topic will be most effective, especially when searching in multiple databases and disciplines.
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Lack of communication between managers and their employees can hurt productivity and even undermine the customer experience. Female managers are more adept at building rapport among mixed-gender teams, which can improve an organization’s performance, says research by Jorge Tamayo.
How can you break down gender boundaries and support the non-binary people on your team better? A study by Katherine Coffman reveals the motivations and aspirations of non-binary employees, highlighting the need for greater inclusion to unlock the full potential of a diverse workforce.
Whether on judicial benches or in corporate boardrooms, white men are more likely to step into roles that other white men vacate, says research by Edward Chang. But when people from historically marginalized groups land those positions, workforce diversification tends to last. Chang offers three pieces of advice for leaders striving for diversity.
The pandemic didn't destroy the workplace advancements moms had achieved. However, not all of the positive changes forced by the crisis and remote work have stuck, says research by Kathleen McGinn and Alexandra Feldberg.
Tech companies and programs turn to recruiters to find top-notch candidates, but gender bias can creep in long before women even apply, according to research by Jacqueline Ng Lane and colleagues. She highlights several tactics to make the process more equitable.
In 2020, the Mars Petcare leadership team found themselves facing critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe generated demand for substantive change, and Mars Petcare's 100,000 employees across six continents were ready for visible signs of progress. How should Mars’ leadership build on their existing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and effectively capitalize on the new energy for change? Harvard Business School associate professor Katherine Coffman is joined by Erica Coletta, Mars Petcare’s chief people officer, and Ibtehal Fathy, global inclusion and diversity officer at Mars Inc., to discuss the case, “Inclusion and Diversity at Mars Petcare.”
Women managers might think they need to roll up their sleeves and work alongside their teams to show their mettle. But research by Alexandra Feldberg shows how this strategy can work against them. How can employers provide more support?
For years, Airbnb gave hosts extensive discretion to accept or reject a guest after seeing little more than a name and a picture, believing that eliminating anonymity was the best way for the company to build trust. However, the apartment rental platform failed to track or account for the possibility that this could facilitate discrimination. After research published by Professor Michael Luca and others provided evidence that Black hosts received less in rent than hosts of other races and showed signs of discrimination against guests with African American sounding names, the company had to decide what to do. In the case, “Racial Discrimination on Airbnb,” Luca discusses his research and explores the implication for Airbnb and other platform companies. Should they change the design of the platform to reduce discrimination? And what’s the best way to measure the success of any changes?
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Need ideas for argumentative essay on gender inequality? We’ve got a bunch!
… But let’s start off with a brief intro.
Equality between the sexes is a huge part of basic human rights. It means that men and women have the same opportunities to fulfil their potential in all spheres of life.
Today, we still face inequality issues as there is a persistent gap in access to opportunities for men and women.
Women have less access to decision-making and higher education. They constantly face obstacles at the workplace and have greater safety risks. Maintaining equal rights for both sexes is critical for meeting a wide range of goals in global development.
Inequality between the sexes is an interesting area to study so high school, college, and university students are often assigned to write essays on gender topics.
In this article, we are going to discuss the key peculiarities of gender equality essay. Besides, we have created a list of the best essay topic ideas.
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But first, you’d need to choose a good topic which is neither too broad nor too narrow to research.
Research is crucial for the success of your essay because you should develop a strong argument based on an in-depth study of various scholarly sources.
Equality between sexes is a complex problem. You have to consider different aspects and controversial points of view on specific issues, show your ability to think critically, develop a strong thesis statement, and build a logical argument, which can make a great impression on your audience.
If you are looking for interesting gender equality essay topics, here you will find a great list of 100 topic ideas for writing essays and research papers on gender issues in contemporary society.
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Examples of inequality can be found in the everyday life of different women in many countries across the globe. Our gender inequality research paper topics are devoted to different issues that display discrimination of women throughout the world.
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Research Article
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
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.
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.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t001
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.
To guide the literature analysis, two experts met regularly to examine the sample of collected papers and to identify the main topics and trends in gender research. Initially, they conducted brainstorming sessions on the topics they expected to find, due to their knowledge of the literature. This led to an initial list of topics. Subsequently, the experts worked independently, also supported by the keywords in paper titles and abstracts extracted with the procedure described above.
Considering all this information, each expert identified and clustered relevant keywords into topics. At the end of the process, the two assignments were compared and exhibited a 92% agreement. Another meeting was held to discuss discordant cases and reach a consensus. This resulted in a list of 27 topics, briefly introduced in Table 2 and subsequently detailed in the following sections.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t002
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.
In terms of descriptive textual statistics, our corpus is made of 15,465 text documents, consisting of a total of 2,685,893 lemmatized tokens (words) and 32,279 types. As a result, the type-token ratio is 1.2%. The number of hapaxes is 12,141, with a hapax-token ratio of 37.61%.
Fig 1 shows the list of 27 topics by decreasing SBS. The most researched topic is compensation , exceeding all others in prevalence, diversity, and connectivity. This means it is not only mentioned more often than other topics, but it is also connected to a greater number of other topics and is central to the discourse on gender equality. The next four topics are, in order of SBS, role , education , decision-making , and career progression . These topics, except for education , all concern women in the workforce. Between these first five topics and the following ones there is a clear drop in SBS scores. In particular, the topics that follow have a lower connectivity than the first five. They are hiring , performance , behavior , organization , and human capital . Again, except for behavior and human capital , the other three topics are purely related to women in the workforce. After another drop-off, the following topics deal prevalently with women in society. This trend highlights that research on gender in business journals has so far mainly paid attention to the conditions that women experience in business contexts, while also devoting some attention to women in society.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g001
Fig 2 shows the SBS time series of the top 10 topics. While there has been a general increase in the number of Scopus-indexed publications in the last decade, we notice that some SBS trends remain steady, or even decrease. In particular, we observe that the main topic of the last twenty-two years, compensation , is losing momentum. Since 2016, it has been surpassed by decision-making , education and role , which may indicate that literature is increasingly attempting to identify root causes of compensation inequalities. Moreover, in the last two years, the topics of hiring , performance , and organization are experiencing the largest importance increase.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g002
Fig 3 shows the SBS time trends of the remaining 17 topics (i.e., those not in the top 10). As we can see from the graph, there are some that maintain a steady trend–such as reputation , management , networks and governance , which also seem to have little importance. More relevant topics with average stationary trends (except for the last two years) are culture , family , and parenting . The feminine topic is among the most important here, and one of those that exhibit the larger variations over time (similarly to leadership ). On the other hand, the are some topics that, even if not among the most important, show increasing SBS trends; therefore, they could be considered as emerging topics and could become popular in the near future. These are entrepreneurship , leadership , board of directors , and sustainability . These emerging topics are also interesting to anticipate future trends in gender equality research that are conducive to overall equality in society.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g003
In addition to the SBS score of the different topics, the network of terms they are associated to enables to gauge the extent to which their images (textual associations) overlap or differ ( Fig 4 ).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g004
There is a central cluster of topics with high similarity, which are all connected with women in the workforce. The cluster includes topics such as organization , decision-making , performance , hiring , human capital , education and compensation . In addition, the topic of well-being is found within this cluster, suggesting that women’s equality in the workforce is associated to well-being considerations. The emerging topics of entrepreneurship and leadership are also closely connected with each other, possibly implying that leadership is a much-researched quality in female entrepreneurship. Topics that are relatively more distant include personality , politics , feminine , empowerment , management , board of directors , reputation , governance , parenting , masculine and network .
The following sections describe the top 10 topics and their main associations in literature (see Table 3 ), while providing a brief overview of the emerging topics.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t003
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 ].
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 ].
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 ].
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 ].
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 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 ].
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 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.
S1 text. keywords used for paper selection..
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.s001
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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Heavy makeup, gaudy jewelry, dramatic hairstyles, and clothes that are considered cheap, fake, too short, too tight, or too masculine: working-class Black and Latina girls and women are often framed as embodying "excessive" styles that are presumed to indicate sexual deviance. In Aesthetics of Excess Jillian Hernandez examines how middle-class discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. At the same time, their style can be a source of cultural capital when appropriated by the contemporary art scene. Drawing on her community arts work with Black and Latina girls in Miami, Hernandez analyzes the art and self-image of these girls alongside works produced by contemporary artists and pop musicians such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Nicki Minaj. Through these relational readings, Hernandez shows how notions of high and low culture are complicated when women and girls of color engage in cultural production and how they challenge the policing of their bodies and sexualities through artistic authorship.
By offering an analysis of how violence against women has come to be named in activist, policy, and academic arenas, Violence Against Women in the US is an essential resource for students, scholars, and practitioners.
In The Language of the Heart, Trysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and bibliotherapy have played in that development.
An engaging and unique survey of women in business that begins with 17th century Native American fur traders and ends with the producer of the film Top Gun. Along the way, the reader is introduced to some of the women---famous, infamous, and forgotten---who have engaged in business throughout U.S. history.
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Professor of Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth
Bedassa Tadesse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Gender inequality isn’t just unfair — it’s also a drag on the world economy. Giving women the same economic opportunities as men would add about US$12 trillion to global gross domestic product by 2025, one analysis found. That’s an 11% boost.
The link between women’s empowerment and economic growth is well established. When women are economically empowered, they invest more in their families, creating a cycle of positive outcomes that spans generations . Women’s participation in the workforce leads to greater productivity and brings diverse perspectives that enhance decision-making and drive innovation .
Recognizing these benefits, governments and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly directed aid — funds provided to developing countries to foster economic growth — toward promoting women’s empowerment.
As an economist who studies development , I wanted to know: Does all that money really make a difference? So, in a recent study , my colleagues and I analyzed the impact of gender-related aid on gender inequality using data from 118 countries over a 13-year period, from 2009 to 2022.
What we found was uplifting: Gender-related aid reduced inequality in most countries we studied.
We looked at two types of gender-related aid. The first is funding for projects that tie gender into larger economic goals. Development experts call this “ significant gender-related aid .” There’s also aid funding that narrowly and explicitly targets gender equality. Experts call this “principal gender-related aid.”
We found that the first approach consistently and significantly reduced gender inequality in 115 out of 118 countries we studied. The latter approach had statistically significant effects in 85 countries. It also appeared to be much more effective when paired with the first approach.
Our findings strongly suggest that integrating gender-related aid into broader development efforts is crucial for promoting gender equality. Gender and development are intricately intertwined, a fact often overlooked. Recognizing this connection is crucial for achieving sustainable and inclusive growth.
That might all sound pretty abstract, but our research shows that the world has made progress in real people’s lives over the past decades. Cases from several countries show just how much progress is possible:
Rwanda: Following the 1994 genocide, Rwanda made a concerted effort to rebuild its society with gender equality at its core. Today, women hold 61% of parliamentary seats , the highest percentage in the world . This remarkable achievement is in part a direct result of gender-focused policies and significant investments in women’s political empowerment. Rwanda’s progress illustrates how political will and dedicated gender-related aid can transform a society .
Bangladesh: Despite traditional gender roles, Bangladesh has made significant strides in gender equality , particularly in education and economic participation . Through targeted programs like the Female Secondary School Stipend Program and microfinance initiatives by organizations like the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh has seen substantial improvements in girls’ education and women’s economic empowerment. These initiatives have contributed to a decline in gender disparities and have spurred economic growth.
Ethiopia: In recent decades, Ethiopia has invested heavily in education , particularly for girls. Programs aimed at increasing school enrollment and reducing dropout rates among girls have led to improved literacy rates and better health outcomes. These educational advancements have empowered women economically and socially, reducing gender inequality .
Despite progress made, these achievements aren’t set in stone. Instability can rapidly undo years of progress. Recent policy backsliding in Afghanistan , Brazil and the United States shows the need for vigilance.
Discussions about the importance of reducing gender inequality often revolve around the direct benefits to women and girls. But everyone, including men, stands to win in a more gender-equal society.
First, women’s economic empowerment leads to stronger economies , which benefits everyone. Research shows that gender equality promotes healthier relationships, reduces violence and fosters more cohesive and supportive communities . Similarly, workplaces prioritizing gender equality tend to have better team dynamics, higher employee satisfaction and increased productivity . These are gains for everyone, regardless of gender.
And gender equality has distinct benefits for men. This is because it alleviates the pressures associated with traditional masculinity , which can lead to better mental health. For example, in more gender-equal societies, men report being happier with life and less stressed and depressed .
This shows that the benefits of gender equality aren’t limited to women and girls; they extend to all members of society. Everyone has a stake in helping progress move along.
Governments and aid professionals should follow five steps for success to safeguard the advances made in gender equality and continue progressing:
1. Keep the aid flowing: Continued financial and technical support for gender equality initiatives is vital. Our research suggests policymakers should focus on integrating gender considerations into all development projects.
2. Engage everyone: Involving men and boys in gender equality efforts helps to challenge and change harmful gender norms, fostering a more inclusive society.
3. Tailor strategies: Although aid has an effect across the board, gender equality initiatives must consider each country’s unique sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Tailoring strategies to fit these contexts ensures that interventions are relevant and practical .
4. Strengthen institutions: Effective institutions and governance are crucial for successfully implementing and sustaining gender equality initiatives. Efforts to improve governance and reduce corruption will enhance the impact of aid
5. Promote education: Schools are a powerful tool for promoting gender equality. Investing in educational programs that empower women and girls and raise awareness about gender issues is essential for long-term change .
Gender equality is a cornerstone of a just and prosperous society. The benefits of empowering women extend far beyond the immediate recipients of gender-related aid, fostering economic growth, political stability and social cohesion. Our research shows that efforts to empower women really do pay off — literally and otherwise.
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Among young u.s. workers without a college degree, men and women hold very different types of jobs.
Among the 10 largest occupations held by young adults without a college degree, large numbers are employed as retail salespersons and first-line supervisors of sales workers.
A majority of latinas feel pressure to support their families or to succeed at work, few east asian adults believe women have an obligation to society to have children, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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The enduring grip of the gender pay gap.
The difference between the earnings of men and women has barely closed in the United States in the past two decades. This gap persists even as women today are more likely than men to have graduated from college, suggesting other factors are at play such as parenthood and other family needs.
37% of Americans have a negative view of the impact of same-sex marriage being legal, with 19% saying it is very bad for society.
Most say that, compared with five years ago, those who commit sexual harassment or assault at work are more likely to be held responsible and those who report it are more likely to be believed.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary – that is, their gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.
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This study examines gender differences in the social impact and commercial motives for academic entrepreneurship using the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps) program. I-Corps provides experiential entrepreneurship training to faculty and graduate student researchers at local I-Corps university sites and through a nationwide program. Since the inception of I-Corps, only 20% of participants have been women. We first use survey data from one I-Corps university site to show that women participants had higher social entrepreneurial intentions compared to commercial entrepreneurial intentions, and these social entrepreneurial intentions were higher than men’s. We then extend and generalize this finding by analyzing 1,267 publicly available project summaries from the National I-Corps Program from 2012-2019. We find that women PIs’ I-Corps project proposals emphasized social impact significantly more than men PIs, while projects for all PIs emphasized commercial impact to a similar degree. We next ran a field experiment to estimate the causal impact of social impact vs. commercial motives by experimentally manipulating the recruitment email messages inviting researchers to participate in the I-Corps training program. We find that women were more likely to show interest in a social impact version of a message compared to a commercial version, while men showed equal interest in both types of messages. Taken together, our results indicate that women are more interested in pursuing commercialization and entrepreneurship activities when they are tackling societal problems. They suggest that low-cost interventions that emphasize the social impact value of entrepreneurial opportunities may increase gender diversity in entrepreneurship activities.
We appreciate support from the University of Massachusetts I-Corps Site team, including Karen Utgoff, Kenneth Carter, Sundar Krishnamurty, Burnley Jaklevic, Allison Koss and Maryanne Laukaitis. This research was supported by NSF Award #1829219. This study was approved by the University of Massachusetts Amherst IRB (Protocol ID 2018-509). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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2024 Centennial Medalist Myra Marx Ferree, PhD ’76
As the only one of seven siblings to graduate from college, Myra Marx Ferree didn’t get much guidance from her family on an academic career. Luckily, she encountered mentors at every turn who were instrumental in helping her chart her path. The first was the director of financial aid at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, where she worked during high school. He encouraged her to apply to other schools secure in the knowledge that she’d have a “free ride” at St. Peter’s. She ended up at Bryn Mawr, where she studied political science. Her advisor there suggested she apply to law school as a backup, but also that she apply to PhD programs to continue learning and “explore the greater world.” When she was accepted by both Harvard Law School and Harvard Griffin GSAS she enrolled at the latter to pursue her interest in social sciences.
At Harvard, Ferree found a new mentor in Thomas Pettigrew, PhD ’56, a social psychologist in the department who promoted a broad view of disciplines as complementary. “His primary focus was on race,” she says, “but he had put together a dataset that included questions on voting for a woman for president. He knew I was interested in what were then called sex roles, so he suggested I write about that.” Her article was accepted without revision in Public Opinion Quarterly, which cemented her confidence that she could not only learn but also contribute to scholarship at the highest level.
As her adviser, Pettigrew greenlighted Ferree’s dissertation topic on working-class feminists—not a popular theme at the time. “It just goes to show how much the study of gender in academia has advanced,” Ferree says. “We’ve gone from ‘that stuff is not interesting’ to the point where it has become institutionalized. I was fortunate that Tom took me seriously.”
Gender scholarship wasn't legitimate when [Myra] and I started writing about it. She helped lead the way for people to say, 'We need to look into this.' —Christine Bose, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany
Ferree went on to contribute extensively not only to the sociology of gender but also to interdisciplinary scholarship on family, social movements, political discourse, work and organizations, and the comparative study of feminism. And she honored her early guides in academia by becoming a legendary mentor herself.
“Myra really helped shape the field of sociology of gender by opening new areas of scholarship and bringing people into them,” says Christine Bose, a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. “Gender scholarship wasn’t legitimate when she and I started writing about it. She helped lead the way for people to say, ‘We need to look into this.’”
Not only was Ferree a key mentor for a generation of scholars, including Aili Tripp, the Vilas Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Ferree taught for many years, but “she also played a tremendous role in community building,” says Tripp, creating long-lasting scholarly platforms by serving on national committees, establishing awards, networking internationally, and holding editorial positions on a raft of journals. “Her real talent is collaboration.”
Ferree focused on intersectionality before the word was coined, trying time and again to show how gender, class, and race had to be understood together for social scientists to get any of them right. “I found it hard to limit myself by discipline or topic,” she says. “When I started out, every question was wide open. We feminists knew the old answers that assumed only men mattered were wrong, but lacked good research on women. It replicated stereotypes over and over again, and I wanted a fresh look at all of it. I never thought I’d be recognized for helping to transform social science research, but yes, that is what I was aiming for.”
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We are thrilled to announce that Professor Amanda Lock Swarr has won the 2024 Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute (DSREI) Professional Book Award for her book Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (Duke University Press, 2023). The award committee praised the book as "a thought-provoking discussion of the history of medical colonialism in South Africa, exceptionally well-researched over a 20-year period and well-written." They highlighted how the book "forces us to reconsider the assumptions inherent in the medical gaze as well as our ideas about sexuality and gender."
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There is no gainsaying that individuals with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are faced with serious socio-legal, and medical discrimination following the enactment of anti-homosexuality law in Nigeria. However, not much is known of the effort of an organized body of psychology in the country to ensure adequate knowledge and competence among Nigerian psychologists. This article, therefore, appraises the stance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) psychology in Nigeria in relation to the cardinal quadrants: Advocacy, Education, Research, and Practice. A multi-method design was adopted to sort for both primary and secondary data. Purposive sampling was adopted to involve 124 practicing psychologists. Findings revealed that the Nigerian psychology curriculum limits its scope to sexual and gender disorders (sexual dysfunction, gender dysphoria, and paraphilic disorders) while missing out on sexual and gender diversity content. Furthermore, the outcome shows that not much is documented on the contribution of the field of psychology to the knowledge of LGBT. Many of the participants had a history (and still) working with LGBT clients and did not have formal LGBT-affirmative training. The study concluded that the integration of LGBT psychology is essential for significant achievement in the space of advocacy, education, research, and professional practices.
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
The psychology profession has numerous sub-fields albeit course contents bore into existence to excavate and further deepen the area of concern or interests. One of the most emerging course contents in psychology is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT Footnote 1 ) psychology. LGBT psychology is a sub-field of psychology developed to research the scientific understanding surrounding the lives and teach a diverse range of psychological and social perspectives of persons with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities (Balsam et al., 2005 ). However, it is important to note that the emergence of LGBT psychology was accompanied by a series of historical global events.
Historically (before the 1950s), sexually and gender diverse (SGD) persons and communities remained targets of hate violence and backlash from privileged heterosexual persons throughout the world; such that victims were regarded as sick and criminals, and not the perpetrators of violence against the SGD populations. Throughout the 50s and 60s, SGD persons and communities continued to be at risk of psychiatric institutionalization, as well as criminal incarceration, and predisposed to other social consequences, such as losing jobs, and child custody, among others (Glassgold et al., 2007 ). Arguably, the breakthrough into the understanding of SGD people and communities started with the submissions of the article titled “The Homosexual in America” by Donald Webster Cory (Pseudo name for Edward Sagarin) in 1951, which paved the way for further scientific research, understanding, and attitudinal change in the United States of America (USA; Sagarin, 1971 ).
Thereafter, research interest began to grow significantly among the populations. In 1956, Evelyn Hooker won a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the psychology of gay men (Hooker, 1956 ). Many scholars across the globe began to expand their niche research interests at that time (Ardila, 2015 ; Hookers, 1956 ). Domination of similar scientifically proven outcomes was reported across different studies, which culminated in the ordination of the first out-gay ministers by the United Church of Christ in 1972; the formation of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in the same year; explosion of political actions through the establishment of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign; and the election of openly gay and lesbian representatives into the political space (De Waal & Manion, 2006 ; Hooker, 1956 ).
History and responses to LGBT psychology differ from country to country, and there is no exception to Nigerian history. However, the historical processes and attitudes toward same-sexuality and gender diversity are almost the same across countries (Ardila, 2015 ). The current study assessed the historical events of the Nigerian LGBT in tandem with the reports from a Western country (i.e., the USA) and an African country (i.e., South Africa). Below is the historical timelines across the three countries.
Historically, 1950s, 1980s, and 2000s were considered the era of a dark age for SGD persons living in the USA, South Africa, and Nigeria, respectively. In this context, a dark age is characterized by the absence of scientific inquiry about the phenomenon of discussion. At that time, the understanding and knowledge about the SGD populations were informed by religion, socio-cultural, and subjective rational thoughts. Historically, in the case of Nigeria, the dark era started when the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) of 2013 was signed into law in 2014 (Human Rights Watch, 2016; Thoreson & Cook, 2011 ).
The Renaissance period is a period after the Dark Ages, that is characterized by classical sort of knowledge and findings that are scientifically rooted (Copenhaver, 1992 ). The Renaissance period in the USA was contextualized as a post-publication of the finding of Donald Webster (1951) and Evelyn Hooker ( 1956 ). In South Africa, the Renaissance period was ascribed to when the first LGBT + Civil Society Organization (CSO) was established, which involved the initiatives of some pioneering psychologists and volunteers in Cape Town and Johannesburg (De Waal & Manion, 2006 ; Hoad et al., 2005 ; Reddy et al., 2009 ). In Nigeria, several CSOs and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) were established to stimulate, educate, and further deepen the rights of the SGD populations in the country. In 2017 for example, a significant increase was reported in heterosexual dispositions toward SGD persons and communities compared to the 2015 survey polls, such that a 07% and 39% opinion increase was reported in the acceptance of SGD communities, and access to basic (healthcare, education, and housing) amenities, respectively (Olamide, 2018 ).
The liberation phase in the USA continued until 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as an “illness” classification in its diagnostic manual. Likewise, the American Psychological Association in 1987 published a major revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-III, where the “ego-dystonic homosexuality” classification was removed. Therefore, most organized bodies of the psychology profession have begun to mobilize support, and sensitization (workshops) for the rationale of the removal of diverse sexual orientations as a disorder. Similarly, the South African government in 2016 acknowledged and signed that LGBT + equality rights, which afforded the country global recognition for its progressive constitution that was the first to include non-discrimination based on diverse sexual orientations in the African continent and fifth in the world (Hoad et al., 2005 ; Judge et al., 2008 ; Nel, 2014 ; Republic of South Africa, 1996). Nigeria seems stuck at the renaissance stage, and not much is documented about the efforts of the organized body of psychology, which explains the persistent problems and challenges confronting the SGD persons and communities to date (Human Rights Watch, 2016).
In Nigeria, there is ambivalence in the global position of an organized body of the psychology profession and the sociopolitical stance. Table 1 below shows the summary of the current social and legal context and the roles of organized institutions.
The Nigerian government passed the anti-homosexuality law on January 7, 2014. The same-sex marriage (prohibition) bill signed into law criminalizes any form of civil union between persons of the same sex, punishable under the law (Okuefuna, 2016 ). The law stipulated that persons engaged in same-sex acts in the country are liable for being imprisoned for 14 years. The law also criminalizes any form of support to persons of diverse sexual orientations. The offense is punishable under the law with 10 years of imprisonment. Similarly, an anti-homosexuality law was earlier adopted in 1999 by twelve northern states (Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara) of Nigeria under the auspice of the Sharia law. The adoption of the Islamic legal systems by the 12 Northern States is a legacy punishment for offenders of the same sexuality among the Muslims in the region.
However, the position of the organized body of psychology and psychiatry posited that people with diverse sexual orientations do not suffer from mental health problems (depathologization) but are minority groups that require support (APA, 2010 : 2016 ; Hooker, 2006). The position of depathologization was reflected in the universally accepted manuals of practice in psychology and psychiatry professions, that is, the DSM-5, and the International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision (ICD-10).
The anti-homosexuality law and the Sharia law were reported to have culminated in various social problems for people with diverse sexual orientations in the country (Human Rights Watch, 2016; Thoreson & Cook, 2011 ). ). The passage of the anti-homosexuality law was immediately followed by legitimized extortions and extensive media reports of high levels of violence, including mob attacks (Human Rights Watch, 2016; Thoreson & Cook, 2011 ). Sexual assaults have also been reported to be on the increase (Adie, 2019 ; Giwa et al., 2020 ).
No formal information is known about the activities of the organized body of psychology in the increase of awareness and provision of affirmative practices that conform to international standards. However, some NGOs in the country provide medical, psychological, and social services to people with diverse sexual orientations. For instance, Diadem Consults, as an NGO provides HIV and healthcare support to SGD persons. Numerous NGOs, such as the Outright Action International, and The Initiative for Equal Rights provide psychosocial support to SGD persons in Nigeria. The proposed imminent solution to the identified gap is the institutionalization of LGBT psychology.
The field of behavioural sciences (such as psychiatry and psychology) is saddled with the core responsibilities of scientifically determining what is normal and abnormal, what is adaptive and maladaptive in fairness to humanity (Glassgold & Drescher, 2007 ). Non-implementation of LGBT Psychology and affirmative practices for professionals in the academic and practice, respectively, contributes significantly to the pathologization, criminalization, and greater stigma experienced by the SGD communities (Matza et al., 2015 ). Knowledge of LGBT psychology is expected not only to advance human rights and development but also to provide means for ensuring and maintaining the mental health of people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.
Organized bodies of psychology domiciled in advanced countries have expanded the psychology curriculum that speaks to the reality of complexes in sexuality and gender nonconforming. The understanding and topics around sexualities and gender identities are core to the discipline of psychology, so every psychologist-in-training is saddled with the responsibilities of understanding what sexuality or gender identities are considered adaptive and maladaptive and the psychological rationale of its various classifications. Core to the ethics of the psychology discipline is the well-being of people and groups and the alienation of threats to human well-being (Ardila, 2015 ; Glassgold & Drescher, 2007 ). A large body of research suggests that mental health concerns are common among LGB individuals and often exceed the prevalence rates of the general population (King et al., 2017; World Health Organization [WHO], 2013 ). LGBT + people experience high rates of physical victimization, criminalization, and social exclusion, which appear to contribute to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation (Horne et al., 2009 ).
The ambivalent concept of ‘depathologization’ of the same sexuality in the most adopted diagnostic manual in the field of psychology (DSM-5; in Nigeria) and ‘criminalization’ of sexual minorities by the Nigerian government created significant gaps in the teaching curriculum and practice of specialists within the field of behavioral sciences (psychiatry, psychology, etc.). Hence, there is a need for an updated training curriculum, and competent professionals to address numerous intrapsychic factors, such as depression, anxiety, internalized homophobia, and social challenges, such as; victimization/bullying/Hate speech, discrimination, sexual assaults and abuse confronting the LGBT + persons and communities (Adie, 2019 ; Giwa et al., 2020 ; Makanjuola et al., 2018 ; Ogunbanjo et al., 2020).
This research is informed by the concepts of the Minority Stress Model (MSM: Meyer, 2003 ). The Minority Stress Model is fast becoming one of the most prominent theoretical and explanatory frameworks of SGD persons and communities. The concept of minority stress derives from several psychosocial theoretical directions, resulting in conflicts between minorities and dominant values, and the social environment experienced by members of minority groups (Meyer, 1995 ). The minority stress theory is that the differences between sexually and gender-diverse individuals and communities can be largely explained by stressors caused by hostile, homo-, bi, and transphobic cultures, often leading to lifelong harassment, abuse, discrimination, and harm (Meyer, 2003 ) and may ultimately affect quadrants of LGBT-Psychology (curriculum, research, outreach, & affirmative knowledge).
There is overwhelming evidence of increased mental health concerns among SGD people and communities, yet there are limited competent mental health providers to meet mental health needs (King et al., 2017; Nel & Victor, 2018; WHO, 2013 ). However, despite the passage of the anti-homosexuality law in 2014 putting pressure on the activities of the non-academic actors, some NGOs have documented much progress in terms of sensitization and provision of medical and psychosocial support, while not much is documented about the activities of the academic actors. The major course designated to bridge the gap in developed (and some developing) countries is LGBT psychology, designed to reconcile the gap between fallible social knowledge and scientific findings.
Clarke et al. ( 2010 ) shed more light on the understanding and contents of LGBT psychology for trainees in the field of behavioural science. Clarke et al. ( 2010 ) identified the following outlines [1] understanding the branch of psychology that is affirmative of LGBT people, [2] understanding the challenge of prejudice and discrimination faced by LGBT people, [3] the privilege of heterosexuality in psychology, and in the broader society, [4] LGBT concerns as legitimate contents in psychological research, 5) provision of a range of psychological perspectives on the lives and experiences of LGBT people, sexualities,, and genders. The perspectives of Clarke et al. (2010) account for both the practice and research gaps in LGBT psychology in Nigeria. The field of psychology and psychiatry housed the reserved right of society and science to define what is abnormal and normal with a sense of fairness, both within and outside the profession (Glassgold & Drescher, 2007).
In sum, the need to advance sexuality and gender knowledge motivates the organized body of psychology to respond to the emerging knowledge gap within the academic space, through the development and integration of LGBT psychology into the conventional psychology curriculum.
The current study set to assess and evaluate the current state of LGBT psychology in Nigeria and its implications for recommendations. The following specific objectives were developed based on the quadrants of LGBT psychology, which are to assess the.
‘Curriculum and Education’ quadrant of LGBT psychology.
‘Research’ quadrant of LGBT psychology.
‘Outreach’ quadrant of LGBT psychology.
‘Professional’ quadrant of LGBT psychology.
Does the Nigerian undergraduate curriculum entail LGBT-psychology content compared to what is obtained in the United States of America and South Africa?
To what extent do psychology professionals research LGBT-related matters in Nigeria?
How engaged (outreach) is the organized body of psychology in Nigeria to the LGBT communities?
To what extent are the practicing psychologists caring for LGBT + persons or communities in Nigeria exposed to LGBT + affirmative training?
The study setting is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with over 180 million people, and is in the western part of the African continent (Wright & Okolo, 2018). The Nigerian climate, like most other countries in Africa, has a long history of SGD populations (Alimi, 2015). The popular assumption among Nigerians was that the concept of LGBT is a Western imposition on African communities (Alimi, 2015; Mohammed, 2019). Nigeria also has the most diverse cultures in Africa, with more than 250 local languages.
All dominant tribes in Nigeria had and still have their historical cultural understanding of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. For example, ancient Yoruba identified sexual minorities (SM) as ‘adofuro’ (a Yoruban word that means someone who engages in anal sex) and gender diverse (GD) individuals as ‘Lakiriboto’ (absence of binary gender assignment at birth due to ambiguous external genitalia) and/or ‘làgbedemeji’ (a person with a combination of penile and vaginal characteristics) (Alimi, 2015). Similarly, a historical reference to Hausa and/or Fulani of Northern Nigeria revealed that northerners identified SGD persons with the descriptive name Yan Daudu (in the Hausa language, meaning that men are considered ‘wives’ to men). The Yan Dauda communities were typically same-sex attracted by the same sex, who thrived (and still thrive) in northern Nigeria (Alimi, 2015). In 2014, the Nigerian government passed into law an anti-homosexuality law against SM in the country (Omilusi, 2021).
The research utilized a multi-method approach (positivistic & survey) to sort both primary and secondary data used in the study. To conform to the positivist paradigm and the deductive approach. Survey-based questionnaires are preferred for observing populations and answering quantitative research questions (LaDonna et al., 2018). The approaches permit researchers to explore the public documents of the organized body of psychology (including newsletter), approved training curriculum, publications, and survey subset of the population of interest in the country.
The population of the study survey phase is practicing therapists in Nigeria with experience/history of working with LGBT + persons or communities. The study participants are the one hundred twenty-four participants ( n = 124) practicing therapists who consented to participate in the study. 57.3% ( n = 71) of the study’s participants were female practitioners, while 42.7 ( n = 53) self-identified as male practitioners. The participants’ age ranges between 21 and 66 years (mean = 39.5; SD = 05.03). Regarding participants’ sexual orientation, all the participants (100%) self-identified as heterosexuals.
The qualitative phase of the synthesized needed information from the benchmark minimum academic standards (BMAS) for undergraduate psychology programs authored by the National Universities Commission (NUC), a governmental body saddled with the responsibilities of regulating and periodically ensuring that the curriculum of psychology teachings in the country is universal and meets the minimum standard as stipulated in the BMAS document.
The questionnaire booklets were made up of widely used and psychometrically sound instruments for the collection of data in the study. The questionnaire was made up of two sections, Section A-C:
Socio-Demographics section that measured respondents’ data such as specialty, gender identity, age, marital status, highest educational attainment, and length of experience.
Checklist of previous experience with LGBT training. This section explored the categorical checklist for participants to tick as applied. The checklists entail a tick for the absence of formal and informal training, a tick for the history of previous formal training (applicable to foreign-trained therapists), and a tick for the history of informal training experience (i.e. training through webinars, conferences, YouTube, etc.).
Self-Efficacy working with LGBT clients was measured using the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Affirmative Counselling Self-Efficacy Inventory (LGB-CSI). LGB-CSI is a 32-item scale developed by Dillon and Worthington (2003) to measure participants’ self-efficacy in performing LGBT+-affirmative psychotherapy in Nigeria. The scale has five dimensions, namely advocacy skills, knowledge application, awareness, assessment, and relationship. LGB-CSI scores are obtained by adding all items of the mentioned subscales. LGB-CSI is a six-point Likert scale with good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α > 0.70).
As the study was a mixture of qualitative and quantitative kinds, qualitative content was recovered from the current benchmark for minimum academic standards (B-MAS), public documents of the Nigerian Psychological Associations, and published qualifying articles on some selected database databases (Google Scholar; PudMed & Elsevier) database between January 30, 2015 (period after the enactment of anti-homosexuality law in Nigeria) and April 2023 (deadline for data collection). The selected articles were LGBT-based publications by researchers / co-researchers affiliated with Nigerian institution(s). However, the quantitative data were retrieved through a set of in-print, structured, and validated questionnaires, which enabled an objective assessment of the constructs of interest in the study. Participants who self-identified as psychologists were included and met other inclusion criteria were included in the study. A detailed informed consent form (stating all ethical requirements) was made available to prospective participants who willingly consented and participated in the study. Participants were recruited using a purposive sampling technique because data collection of this nature is cumbersome to retrieve from the specialist due to the existing anti-homosexuality law in Nigeria. The data collection for the study spans from June 08, 2022, to April 25, 2023.
Showing the numbers of LGBT-related Publications for the year 2015–2022 in Nigeria
Showing the number of psychologists with a history working with LGBT clients in Nigeria.
The document analysis method was adopted for the qualitative phase of the study, while a one-way analysis of covariance was used to test the importance of affirmative training of LGBT in self-efficacy for psychotherapy with SGD populations. Quantitative data were analysed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS v.27) and Prism Graph pad (version 16.0).
This section presents the data analyses and results of the study. This section presents the interpretations of the document analyses the four cardinals of LGBT-Psychology and establishes the quantitative findings of the study objectives that established the interplay between the study objectives 1 (curriculum and education) and 4 (professionalism).
The finding in study objective 1 that proposed to assess the curriculum and educational quadrant of LGBT psychology in Nigeria was synthesized from the B-MAS for undergraduate psychology programs compared to the psychology curriculum obtained from the United States of America and South Africa as presented in Table 2 .
The results in Table 2 show that related course titles, such as clinical psychology/pathology, contemporary issues in psychology, and psychology of social change, were included in the Nigerian curriculum and training standard as available in South Africa and the USA. However, the Nigerian course contents under clinical psychology/psychopathology cover topics like sexual dysfunction, gender dysphoria, and paraphilic disorder, but the scopes are not expanded and cover topics like sexual and gender diversity and sexual health. Similarly, the course title Contemporary Issues in Psychology does not cover the discussion of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities as a course content just like the curriculum of counterparts within the African continent (e.g. South Africa) and the Western communities (e.g. USA). However, the content of LGBT psychology subsumed under the course title ‘Psychology of social change named social change and identity crises’ was not covered in the Nigerian curriculum despite the inclusion of the psychology of social change in the curriculum.
Furthermore, Table 2 revealed that the Nigerian psychology curriculum does not incorporate LGBT Psychology/Psychology of Sexual and Gender Diversity into the existing training curriculum like what is available in SA and the USA. The LGBT-Psychology/ Psychology of Sexual and Gender Diversity curriculum highlighted the following course contents: [1] historical perspectives of diverse sexual orientations and gender identity [2] LGBT terminology [3] theories of identity development [4] Mental health and well-being of sexual and gender minorities [5] Approaches and ethical approaches to LGBT research [6] Issues that impact LGBTQ + individuals and communities [7] Understanding the role the field of psychology plays in supporting marginalized communities, specifically sexual and gender minorities.
The finding in objective 2 of the study that proposed to assess the research quadrant of LGBT psychology in Nigeria was synthesized from related published articles from 2015 to 2022 in the three main and rated publications (Google Scholar; PudMed & Elsevier) as presented in Fig. 1 .
The descriptive analysis of the synthesized literature as shown in Fig. 1 revealed that the majority (69.2%) of the reviewed articles (e.g. Oginni et al., 2021 ; Mapayi et al., 2016 ; 2022; Sekoni et al., 2022 ; Sekoni et al., 2020 ; Ogunbajo et al., 2021 ; Makanjuola et al., 2018 ; and Oginni et al., 2021 ) were co-published by psychiatrists. The results also revealed that 14.28% of the LGBT-related articles (e.g. Ogunbanjo et al., 2020; Sekoni et al., 2016 ; McKay et al., 2017 ) were co-published by public health specialists, 07.1% of the LGBT-related articles were affiliated with the department of law (e.g. Okuefuna, 2016 ; Arimoro, 2018 ), 03.8% were affiliated with the department of sociology (e.g. Akanle et al., 2019 ), 03.8% of the articles were affiliated with the department of performing theatre (e.g. Okpadah, 2020 ), while none (0%) was affiliated with the department of psychology.
The finding in objective 3 of the study that proposed to assess the outreach quadrant of LGBT psychology in Nigeria was synthesized from previously published flyers/workshops/conferences/outreach/communications issued by the organized body of psychology in Nigeria between 2015 and 2022 as presented in Table 3 .
The results in Table 3 revealed that there was no documented outreach to the LGBT community based on an organized body of psychology in Nigeria. In other words, there was no record of the involvement of the organized body in national discussions, community engagements, or the publication of a position document on LGBT populations. In social media handles, there was no formal LGBT-based broadcast in the newsletters, websites, WhatsApp, and telegram handles of the organized body of psychology. Similarly, there were no LGBT-related topics recorded in the workshop/conference previously organized by the body of psychology between 2015 and 2022.
The finding in study objective 4 that proposed to assess the professional practice quadrant of LGBT psychology in Nigeria was synthesized among practicing clinical psychologists caring for LGBT + persons or communities was presented in Figs. 3 and 4 .
Figure 2 revealed that majorityof the participants (81%, n = 101) reported having previously and/or currently provided psychological services to members of the LGBT communities, while the counterpart minority (19%, n = 23) reported no history of working with self-disclosed clients
Figure 3 revealed that majority of the participants (91.9%, n = 114) reported no history of formal and informal LGBT training, while 5.65% ( n = 07) of the participants had informal LGBT + affirmative training, while 2.42% ( n = 03) of practicing psychologists had formal LGBT + affirmative training (during their foreign education pursuit) The findings in Figs. 3 and 4 revealed that most of the practicing psychologists who had (or still) attended to LGBT persons and communities had not informed training tailored toward the populations. The findings informed the need to examine the impact of Quadrant 1 (curriculum and education) on Quadrant 4 (Professional Practice) of LGBT psychology. Table 4 examines the influence of the LGBT training experience on self-efficacy in working with LGBT clients The results in Table 4 showed that the effectiveness of psychologists working with LGBT clients was significantly influenced by the experience of LGBT training (F (03,120) = 52.66; p < 0.01; n p 2 = 0.568). Such that 56.8% (eta value x 100) of the perceived self-efficacy working with LGBT clients was accounted for by previous LGBT training experience. Since the significance was established in the F-value, a post hoc analysis was therefore conducted to determine the magnitude of the F-value (see Fig. 4 )
Showing the distribution of previous training experience on affirmative psychotherapy for the SGD populations
Figure 4 revealed that psychologists with formal LGBT-affirmative training (M = 51.60; SD = 02.67) exhibited greater efficacy working with LGBT clients than counterparts with informal training (M = 38.85; SD = 02.59) and psychologists without formal and informal LGBT-affirmative training (M = 32.25; SD = 01.07). However, there were no significant differences in the efficacy of working with LGBT clients by psychologists without informal/formal training and those with informal pieces of training (MD = 06.60; p > 0.05).
Scheffe post hoc analysis showing the influence of training experience on self-efficacy working with LGBT clients
The study evaluated the stance of LGBT psychology in Nigeria, and the outcome also revealed that the Nigerian curriculum is somewhat sufficient with that of the reference counterpart in the study (i.e. USA and South Africa), following the enrolment of same courses (such as clinical psychology/pathology, contemporary issues in psychology and psychology of social change) in the Nigerian curriculum and training but the scope are limited and do not cover some important contents like sexual and gender diversity, sexual health, and social change and identity crises. Furthermore, the Nigerian psychology curriculum does not incorporate LGBT Psychology/Psychology of Sexual and Gender Diversity into the existing training curriculum as what is available in SA and the USA. The organized bodies of psychology in some developed and developing communities (such as the USA, UK, Philippines, Canada, Australia, South Africa, etc.) identified overwhelming knowledge and scientific findings of contemporary events of sexualities and gender identity and incorporated the identified knowledge gaps into a stand-alone course entitled ‘LGBT Psychology’ to keep psychology students abreast of the specific knowledge needed to understand human sexual and gender behaviours (Ardila, 2015 ; Clarke et al., 2010 ; Moreno et al., 2020 ) For the second objective, the descriptive outcome established that most of the published articles were co-published by psychiatrists, public health specialists, lawyers, sociologists, and academic artists. However, none of the reviewed articles was published by a psychologist. Research outputs played an important role in the scientific understanding of diverse sexuality and gender, co-morbid mental distress, and lived experiences of LGBT persons and communities, rather than the primitive dispositions that are well-rooted in religious ideology, punishable by death (Morgan & Nerison, 1993 ). In other words, superior arguments through scientific discoveries have changed the narrative of the same sexuality over the years, just like mental health illnesses that were at an early stage attributed to spiritual torments (Hooker, 1956 ; Sagarin, 1951). The finding implied that LGBT psychology has no visible place in the research focus of psychologists in Nigeria. This is evidenced in the the study that none of the authors of published articles on LGBT persons and communities self-identified as a psychologist or member of the Department of Psychology at any higher institution in Nigeria. There is a need to discuss LGBT Psychology at conventions or conferences, to incorporate scientific matters about the SGD populations. Meanwhile, the discussion of LGBT matter and scientific findings contributed significantly to the development of LGBT psychology in countries such as the Philippines (Ofreneo, 2013 ) and South Africa (Nel, 2009 ) The third objective revealed that there were no documented LGBT community-based outreach, broadcast, and/or inclusive LGBT-related themes to workshops/conferences organized by the body of psychology, indicating the passive disposition of the psychology body in national discussions, newsletters, community engagements, or issuance of position paper regarding the SGD populations. Behavioural scientists such as psychologists are the core custodians of community well-being and psychology (PsySSA, 2017 ). Outreach is one of the responsibilities of professionals in taking scientific knowledge from the community members for public interest or further enhancing the community’s mental health and well-being (Smith, 1990 ). Psychologists as experts share knowledge to inform policymakers, engage media on issues of human behaviour, and take principle and formal stands on pressing social issues, especially when behavioural expertise is needed to contribute to debate and decision-making (Cohen et al., 2012 ). Outreach can be done through various social media channels (such as Facebook, newsletter, emails, etc.) or formal outreach (involvement in national discussions, academic conferences, community engagements, etc.). In South Africa, psychologists worked closely with CSOs to sensitize the masses and ensure competence in working with SGD populations (De Waal & Manion, 2006 ; Hoad et al., 2005 ; Reddy et al., 2009 ; Van Zyl & Steyn, 2005 ; Victor & Nel, 2017) The outcome of objective 4 showed that most of the participants reported having previously and/or currently rendered psychological services to members of the LGBT communities, while most also reported having no history of formal and informal LGBT training. In other words, most practicing psychologists lack informed training tailored to the needs of SGD populations. Further research revealed that the effectiveness of psychologists working with LGBT clients was significantly influenced by the LGBT training experience.
Based on the outcome of the study and as behavioural scientists and practitioners, the following recommendations were presented The study recommends that the NUC expand some of the existing course content that talks about sexual disorders and gender identities to discuss the overview and scientific reasons why homosexuality was considered a disorder, while people with diverse sexual orientations were considered a marginalized set of people. The introduction of LGBT Psychology will ensure a good understanding of the history of LGBT psychology, affirmative practices, knowledge of past and current attitudes and behaviours towards LGBT people, including common misconceptions, prejudice, and discrimination, research, and ethics working with LGBT and other identified contents are considered very important to fill the knowledge gap identified The organized body of psychology is encouraged to update the psychology curriculum of Nigeria to bridge the training and theoretical gaps of students studying psychology in Nigeria. The curriculum adjustment will guide to exploration of LGBT issues and concerns in different areas of psychology and other content reported in the results section. In this regard, psychologists’ academic outputs are expected to increase in publications, and thus address the need for more inclusive pedagogical and research practices, which will contribute to the challenging heteronormativity as it was experienced in global communities and South Africa (Nduna et al., 2017 ; Nel, 2009 ). For example, the organized body of psychology in South Africa took a leading role in Africa through the early introduction of LGBT psychology and the development of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA)’s Affirmative Practice Guidelines for Psychology Professionals, sufficiently promoted by the Specialized Division of Sexuality and Gender. The division focus areas are Research, Training, and Development; Education and Training; Experiential workshops; and Advocacy and Expert opinion (Nel, 2014 ) The implication of adjusted teaching, learning, and research into LGBT psychology also have significant and impactful implications in the ethics and practice guidelines for attending to people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. The American Psychology Association (APA) for the USA and the PsySSA for South Africans developed and published an affirmative guideline that assists practicing psychologists to operate within professional conduct and competencies while handling patients who are members of the LGBT community Researchers or psychologists in practice are encouraged to collaborate with scholars from other countries to recognize the relative, cultural, and national specificities of LGBT lives and, in turn, contribute immensely to the international discussion and approach to LGBT psychology.
The researchers evaluated and discussed LGBT Psychology in Nigeria, from the unique field of psychology mainly, other disciplines and scholars from different fields should explore and appraise the disposition and contributions to the LGBT course. The use of in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussions to engage stakeholders in the organized body of psychology or key players in curriculum development may provide a more in-depth understanding of the factors affecting SGD populations and LGBT psychology in Nigeria and proffer potential solutions.
This article has provided information on the development and assessment of LGBT psychology in Nigeria, and what is available in other countries, specifically the USA and South Africa. The study concluded that the Nigerian course contents are sufficient as much as their counterpart nations (USA & SA), however, lacking some important course content (i.e. social change and identity crises; LGBT-Psychology/ Psychology of Sexual and Gender Diversity. The study further established that no LGBT-related published articles from 2015 to 2022 in Nigeria were credited/affiliated with the Department of Psychology. There was no documented outreach to the minority (LGBT) groups by the organized body of psychology. Lastly, the majority of the practicing psychologists reported having previously and/or currently providing psychological services to members of the LGBT communities, without formal and informal LGBT training. This article proposes specific recommendations to facilitate the emergence of LGBT psychology and to help develop the field in Nigeria, as it has already been established in many developed and developing countries as a formal area of psychological science.
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
There is no unanimous use of the LGBT abbreviations, other variations of the acronyms could also be used in the study (e.g. SGD, LGBTQIA + etc.)
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The authors would like to thank the practicing psychologists/counseling psychologists who volunteered to take partake in this study.
Open access funding provided by University of South Africa. The research was independently funded by the researchers. No funding was obtained from external sources for this research.
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Department of Psychology, College of Human Sciences, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
Abayomi O. Olaseni
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AOO conceived the research ideas, organized the research, performed the studies, analyzed the data, and drafted the manuscript. JAN co-conceived the research ideas, provided the overall leadership across every role, and revised the entire manuscript. All authors contributed to writing sections of the manuscript and read and approved the submitted version.
Correspondence to Abayomi O. Olaseni .
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Traditional radiology education for medical students predominantly uses textbooks, PowerPoint files, and hard-copy radiographic images, which often lack student interaction. PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) is a crucial tool for radiologists in viewing and reporting images, but its use in medical student training remains limited.
This study investigates the effectiveness of using PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) for teaching radiology to undergraduate medical students compared to traditional methods.
Fifty-three medical students were divided into a control group (25 students) receiving traditional slide-based training and an intervention group (28 students) using PACS software to view complete patient images. Pre- and post-course tests and satisfaction surveys were conducted for both groups, along with self-evaluation by the intervention group. The validity and reliability of the assessment tools were confirmed through expert review and pilot testing.
No significant difference was found between the control and intervention groups regarding, gender, age, and GPA. Final multiple-choice test scores were similar (intervention: 10.89 ± 2.9; control: 10.76 ± 3.5; p = 0.883). However, the intervention group demonstrated significantly higher improvement in the short answer test for image interpretation (intervention: 8.8 ± 2.28; control: 5.35 ± 2.39; p = 0.001). Satisfaction with the learning method did not significantly differ between groups (intervention: 36.54 ± 5.87; control: 39.44 ± 7.76; p = 0.129). The intervention group reported high familiarity with PACS capabilities (75%), CT principles (71.4%), interpretation (64.3%), appropriate window selection (75%), and anatomical relationships (85.7%).
PACS-based training enhances medical students’ diagnostic and analytical skills in radiology. Further research with larger sample sizes and robust assessment methods is recommended to confirm and expand upon theses results
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Radiology is a fundamental component in basic medical education, bridging the gap between anatomy and clinical practice. Like other fields of medical education, radiology education faces the challenge of transitioning from passive learning to interactive and experiential learning [ 1 , 2 ]. With the expansion of the field of radiology, radiology education has undergone a revolution. Doctors used to carry plain films and show them using projectors or view boxes because plain films were the only main diagnostic method in radiology during the 1970s. Since the introduction of computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the late 1980s, the increase in the amount of image data associated with these imaging modalities has led to a greater demand for compatible information storage systems. Therefore, the picture archiving and communication system (PACS), capable of storing, retrieving, distributing, analyzing, and digitally processing medical images, has become an essential tool in clinical work today [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. However, due to hardware and software limitations, the use of PACS in radiology education remains somewhat limited [ 6 , 7 ]. Currently, most radiology education still relies heavily on textbooks and traditional computer media such as PowerPoint or Word files both of which lack student interaction. PACS offers advantages such as interactive image viewing, 3D reconstruction capabilities, and the ability to simulate real-life radiology practice, which traditional methods lack. These features enhance students’ understanding and interpretation of radiological images, addressing the shortcomings of conventional methods. There is a minimal probability for a medical student to see whole images like a real radiologist in class. It is often a challenge for them to understand 3D anatomical images, as well as a comprehensive view of diseases. Consequently, some students may attempt to independently identify abnormal findings and analyze and formulate radiological diagnoses. According to one study, only a limited number of final-year medical students had satisfactory basic radiology interpretation skills, which necessitates the search for a more effective method of training [ 8 ].
Recent advancements in radiology teaching methods have previously been reported in addition to face-to-face teaching, including problem-based learning (discussion of a case or scenario consistent with curriculum objectives and students’ independent research to complete subject knowledge and share findings), case-based learning (showing several radiographs of the same subject and discussing them), and team-based learning (student collaboration by creating learning groups) [ 8 ].
In contrast to these conventional methods, a new method was created under the concept of learning from experience. This virtual method is based on individual learning in the PACS software environment, enabling students in the role of radiologists to interpret and diagnose radiology in a simulation environment. All common items are shown to the student using PACS instead of selected specific images. Students are allowed to see the whole image, do basic reconstructions of the images freely, and find specific features of the image by themselves. During this process, students can access PACS and clinical information, integrating clinical knowledge and 3D reconstruction ability, essential to arriving at radiological diagnoses PACS enables efficient archiving and transfer of medical images. Initially developed in the U.S. in the 1980s, it later expanded to Europe and Asia, including China, Japan, and Korea [ 9 ]. Iran has also implemented PACS, improving its medical imaging infrastructure with global DICOM standards.
The goal of this learning method was to compare the effectiveness of practical radiology training through traditional face-to-face interactive lectures with the virtual practical radiology training method based on individual learning in the PACS software environment for medical students.
The use of PACS in healthcare in Iran has only recently become widespread, primarily for patient management and diagnosis, and is rarely used for educational purposes. Iran, as a country with a rapidly developing healthcare system, faces unique challenges in medical education. This study seeks to compare radiology education in Iran with existing literature and to understand its context in relation to the region and worldwide. Managing medical education effectively is a significant challenge. And this research addresses this by introducing innovative teaching methods. Specifically, current study investigates the effectiveness of using PACS on medical students radiology education compared to traditional methods.
The research population was the medical students of the Islamic Azad University of Mashhad during the academic year 2021–2022. The entry criteria were: being a medical trainee student, consent to enter the study, and the exclusion criteria were: students who had previously graduated in radiology or other medical sciences and students who had renewed their course in radiology. participation in the study was voluntary, and students were informed that it would not impact their end-of-section evaluation After obtaining informed consent, they participated in the study. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Virtual University of medical sciences with the reference number [IR.VUMS.REC.1400.022]. This proposal was implemented after being approved by the ethics committee and obtaining the code of ethics.
The sample size was calculated using power analysis to ensure the study had sufficient power to detect a statistically significant difference between the control and intervention groups. Assuming an effect size of 0.5, a significance level (alpha) of 0.05, and a power of 0.80, it was determined that at least 50 participants were needed. To account for potential dropouts and ensure robustness, a total of 53 students were included in the study. According to the calculated sample size, four rotations of radiology internship students were included in the study for each of the control and intervention groups (each rotation is about 5–10 students). Due to the prevention of contamination, the first four rotations were assigned to the control group and the next four rotations to the intervention group.
The validity of the tools used in this study was established through expert review and pilot testing. Content validity was confirmed by 10 faculty members specializing in radiology. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s Alpha, yielding a coefficient of 0.91, indicating high internal consistency. In this study, three tools were used: measuring the level of knowledge, measuring the level of performance, and measuring the satisfaction of students in both groups (Appendix 1 ) and self-evaluation for PACS learning in the intervention group (Appendix 2 ). After one month of class, the final exam was taken which was a combination of 20 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer type questions (description and image recognition). The scores of the questions were collected as an objective assessment. To provide a subjective assessment of radiology learning, all students were invited to complete a satisfaction questionnaire on how radiology was taught. Also, the students of the intervention group were invited to complete a questionnaire for their self-evaluation of the amount of PACS learning. A 5-point Likert scale was used in both researcher-made questionnaires. The questionnaire used was created for this study. Informed consent was obtained from each patient whose data was used in the study, ensuring they were fully aware of how their medical images would be utilized for educational purposes.
Before starting the study with the PACS system, students were given an introductory session that covered the basics of PACS functionality, including how to navigate the software, view and manipulate images, and use the various tools available for image analysis.
In the knowledge section, questions evaluated theoretical content, and the performance section involved diagnosing radiographic image. Students described the type of radiography, pathological signs, and the final diagnosis. Multiple-choice questions and short answer questions were used to assess knowledge and performance The specific type of radiography used in this study included plain radiographs, computed tomography (CT) scans, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These imaging modalities were chosen to cover a broad spectrum of radiological techniques relevant to the medical curriculum. In the subject of knowledge, 20 multiple-choice questions were proposed based on the objectives of the lesson and the blueprint, which was approved by two colleagues of the radiology department, which must have been consistent with the objectives of the lesson. In the discussion of the performance of 5 of radiology images, which again corresponded to the objectives of the lesson and the blueprint, and it was approved by two colleagues of the radiology department that the objectives of the lesson were covered, they were provided to the students, and the students had to describe and diagnose the radiographies. The radiology images in both groups adequately covered the goals, but they were taught to the students in two different ways described.
This questionnaire aimed to determine student’s satisfaction with the educational method. It consisted of ten questions graded on a 5-point Likert scale the range of scores was between 10 and 50 and higher scores indicating greater satisfaction. The content and form validity were confirmed by 10 faculty members and reliability was obtained by Cronbach’s Alpha test of 0.91.
This questionnaire evaluated the learning rate of the PACS teaching method. It consisted of twelve questions graded on a 5-point Likert scale, and the range of scores was between 12 and 60, and higher scores indicate learning. Content and form validity were confirmed by 10 faculty members and reliability was assessed with a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.91.
The teaching strategy involved traditional face-to-face interactive lectures using PowerPoint presentations. The practical part included demonstrating selected radiographic images on slides and discussing their interpretation.
This method aimed to develop the student’s ability to diagnose and interpret radiographs through structured lectures and guided discussions. A pre-test was conducted in the first session to determine the student’s initial knowledge and performance levels. The classes were held daily in person. After teaching the theoretical part with a PowerPoint presentation, radiographic images were shown to the control group for interpretation and discussion. This conventional method aimed to develop the ability to diagnose and interpret radiographs. The post-test to determine knowledge and performance was performed and the education satisfaction questionnaire was completed at the end of each rotation.
Bias caused by human factors during the teaching of the two groups was controlled by standardizing the teaching materials and methods across both groups. Additionally, the instructors were blinded to the group assignments to prevent any conscious or unconscious bias in teaching and assessment.
The stages of developing the training course using PACS software and DICOM were as follows: 1). Initial planning and curriculum alignment, 2) Selection of relevant radiographic cases, 3) Configuration of PACS workstations, 4) Training faculty on PACS software, and 5) Implementation of PACS-based learning sessions for students, followed by assessment and feedback.
After the control group, the rotations of the intervention group were included in the study, and the pre-test was administered to the students of the intervention group. Assessment of knowledge with multiple choice questions and performance with radiographic images was with short answer questions. The classes were held daily in person. In the intervention group, after participating in the theoretical part of the course, which was similar to the control group and was held face-to-face, for the practical part, they were trained in a virtual way with Adobe Connect software, and there was no face-to-face class for radiography images. In this way, students were given access to PACS Radiant software (installation on personal desktop). Following the teaching of the theoretical part, based on the goals of the radiology course for medical trainees, a number of images of the brain, lungs, bones, urinary tract, and digestive system (including radiography, CT and MRI) were assigned to the students of the intervention group, and the images of these patients were completely at their disposal.
The computers used were personal desktops with standardized configurations. Adjustments and calibrations were made to ensure all students could view images with consistent quality and brightness, replicating the clinical environment as closely as possible. This software enables students to perform basic operations with images, such as windowing, comparing different MRI sequences, and performing cross-sectional reconstruction (MPR) or 3D reconstruction, exactly as a radiologist does and has the facilities. After studying the material and checking the images, the students were required to announce the completion of their study to the teacher and they were given the opportunity to review the pictures, ask questions, and solve problems with the teacher in the virtual space.
The post-test to determine knowledge and performance was performed in the intervention group. The education satisfaction questionnaire was completed at the end of each rotation. The self-assessment questionnaire for PACS learning was completed at the end of each rotation.
The data was analyzed with SPSS-17 software, IBM, US. Central and dispersion indices were used in the descriptive statistics report, and a T-test was used in the analytical section, independent t-test, paired t-test and, chi-square test were used to compare the data. The confidence level was set at p < 0.05.
A total of 52 students entered this study, 28 students in the intervention group and 25 in the control group. The students were similar in terms of age, gender, and overall academic average ( p = 0.05) (Table 1 ). The average age in the control group is 26.04 ± 3.96 and in the intervention group is 24.29 ± 2.14. The result of the independent t-test shows that the average age in the two groups is not different ( P = 0.060). The average overall academic grade point average of the medical course in the control group is 15.73 and in the intervention group is 16.01, which has no difference ( P = 0.383) (Table 1 ).
The control group included 25 people, 16 of whom were women and 9 of whom were men, and the intervention group included 28 people of whom 16 were women and 12 were men. The result of the chi-square test shows that the two groups do not differ in terms of gender ( P = 0.610). Evaluation result: At the beginning of the exam, there were two parts of a multiple-choice test and a short answer for the interpretation of radiology images (pre-test). The same exam was done twice at the end of the one-month session (post-test). It was a multiple-choice test to check knowledge and a short answer test to check performance.
The result of the independent t-test shows that the score of the multiple-choice test before and after the intervention, as well as the changes in the test score, are not different in the two groups. ( P = 0.084, P = 0.883, P = 0.764) The result of the paired t-test shows that the multiple-choice test scores of the students before and after the intervention differ between the case and control groups, and it is higher after the intervention. ( P < 0.001, P < 0.001) (Table 2 ) The result of the independent t-test shows that the score of the student’s short answer test, which was for the interpretation of radiology images, is not different before and after the intervention ( P = 0.002 and P = 0.444, respectively). The changes in the test scores are different in the two groups and are more in the intervention group. ( P < 0.001) The result of the paired t-test shows that the score of the short answer test of the students before and after the intervention is different according to the case and control groups, and it is higher after the intervention. ( P < 0.001, P < 0.001)
The result of the independent t-test shows that there is no difference in the level of satisfaction with the teaching method between the two control groups with a score of 39.44 ± 7.76 and the intervention group with a score of 36.54 ± 5. ( P = 0.129) (Table 3 ).
The analysis of the satisfaction questionnaire in the intervention group showed that most students were satisfied with the organization (64%) and interaction of the learning activity (64%) (Table 3 ). Most students use this learning activity to learn radiology (85%). They found it useful. More importantly, a large percentage of students stated that PACS training encouraged personal interest in radiology (82%) as well as satisfaction with the quality of learning (71%). Also, in the intervention group, based on the self-evaluation form, they stated that with the abilities of PACS (75%), the principles of CT (71.4%) and its interpretation (64.3%), choosing the appropriate window (75%), the location of different organs in the image (82.9%) and their vicinity (85.7%) are familiar (Table 3 ). An evaluation of the impact of the intervention on participants’ knowledge is included, showing significant improvements in their understanding and diagnostic skills, highlighting the effectiveness of the PACS-based training method.
Traditional practical radiology training that continues to be used today provides only a cross-section of the entire routine imaging. While this teaching method may be useful in helping students manage the features of routine imaging, it may be inadequate for learning anatomy [ 10 ]. Hence, students may have difficulty interpreting images independently during clinical practice when they are expected to do so [ 11 ]. Although a variety of radiology educational models such as problem-based learning and the use of dynamic images can solve part of this problem, images of the main workplace are the most ideal learning method [ 12 , 13 ]. The experiential learning theory, developed by Dewey, Kolb and others provide explanations for how students learn things in their own way as they react to their perceptions of a real experiences. This concept is explained by principle of constructionism, which is the base of experiential learning [ 13 ].
During this study, a training course using PACS software and DICOM viewer was developed to simulate a work environment that reflects the typical clinical work of a radiologist. The results of the study indicated that this educational approach allows for better clinical guidance, which is necessary to help students form a holistic view of anatomy and pathology. Most importantly, this educational method helps students to develop critical thinking and a systematic approach to formulating imaging interpretation and differential diagnosis, which may be partially due to the exploratory atmosphere of the experiential learning mode. Apart from the objective improvement in imaging descriptions and interpretations, subjective improvements in self-confidence from students’ feedback to self-assessment questionnaires, as well as skills including determining the order of imaging reading, choosing the appropriate window, and also choosing the reconstruction method, which may result under the influence of direct activity during The course of learning and discussion should be free. In addition, the experiential approach allows for better interactions that increase interest in radiology [ 14 ].
To provide students with access to the Radiant PACS software (installed on their personal desktops), following the theoretical section and based on the objectives of the radiology course for medical trainees, a number of images from the brain, lungs, bones, urinary, and gastrointestinal systems (including radiography, CT, MRI) were assigned to the intervention group. These patient images were fully available to them. This software enables students to perform basic operations on images, such as window adjustment, comparing different MRI sequences, and performing multiplanar reconstruction (MPR) or 3D reconstruction, exactly as a radiologist does within the PACS system.
To resolve the issue of patient confidentiality, all patient identifiers were removed from the images before they were made accessible to students. Additionally, access to PACS was restricted to ensure that students could only view and analyze the images without accessing sensitive patient information.
Undergraduate students had limited access to PACS, ensuring they could not modify or delete any content. Additional software controls were implemented to restrict access and prevent any unauthorized changes. This ensured that the integrity of the medical images was maintained, and patient care data was not compromised.
Our study shows the effectiveness of PACS in training in the study of anatomical imaging. Anatomy is the basis of radiology training. In theory, reading CT and MRI images is a good way to study anatomy because continuous scanning helps students understand the three-dimensional concepts of the relative adjacencies of body parts [ 15 , 16 ]. Globally, they concluded that anatomical imaging increases the quality and efficiency of teaching human anatomy [ 17 ]. However, it is difficult to discern the entire anatomical structure from a single cross-section of the image, which increases students’ confusion [ 16 ]. The results of this study provide evidence that continuous scan reading improves students’ comprehensive understanding of anatomy. Furthermore, by using multiple reconstruction methods, 3D images are more comprehensively examined by students, which has been confirmed by other studies [ 18 ].
The integration of PACS in medical education has been shown to enhance the learning experience by providing students with interactive and practical tools for understanding radiological images. Recent advancements in healthcare technology acceptance highlight the importance of user-friendly interfaces and training for successful implementation [ 19 ]. Moreover, the current state of medical education in the UK emphasizes the adoption of advanced technologies like PACS to improve educational outcomes and prepare students for real-world clinical environments [ 20 ]. The utilization of big data technologies in conjunction with PACS further enhances the management and analysis of medical images, facilitating a more personalized and effective learning experience for medical students [ 21 ]. Additionally, recent market reports indicate a steady growth in the adoption of medical imaging technologies, including PACS, driven by advancements in AI and machine learning, which are poised to revolutionize medical education [ 22 ]. These developments collectively underscore the critical role of PACS in modernizing medical education and improving the quality of training for future healthcare professionals. Also, the implementation of PACS could significantly enhance radiology education by providing access to digital imaging resources that may otherwise be unavailable.
Compared to Chen et al.‘s study [ 1 ], the study was conducted on 101 students, but our study was on 52 students. Satisfaction with PACS training in Chen’s study was on average 80% and in our study, it was about 65%. The percentage of being interested in radiology in this study and Chen’s study was almost similar. Also, in our study, similar to Chen’s study, there was no difference in pre-test scores between the two intervention and control groups. Also, the final scores in Chen’s study and our study were not significantly different, but the scores of interpretations of pictures, which in our study were equivalent to a number of stereotypes in the form of PowerPoint with short answer questions, showed a significant difference in both our study and Chen’s study.
In the study of Restauri [ 6 ] and Soman [ 23 ], as in our study, PACS was used to teach medical students, and at the end of the course, only a survey form was filled by the students, and the impact of using PACS on the ability to interpret radiology images by students was not done. In the above two studies, after using PACS, students stated that they gained more confidence on interpreting images and would use PACS in the future, which was similar to the survey results in our study. It takes a lot of effort to do this kind of training. PACS and a suitable DICOM viewer represent basic software requirements for training and to protect patient privacy, DICOM data from PACS rather than linking to the original PACS. Copied In this way, a PACS simulation for medical education was obtained [ 6 ]. In addition, teacher guidance is a vital element in education. A minimum of 3 instructors with experience in standard radiology training is required for a class, as team discussion is a major component of the training. In experimental courses, students need educational help both to guide reading the picture and to answer the questions. Therefore, teaching professors need specific work experience in the radiology department. Having said that, the lack of a radiology professor prevents the use of this training and this training model acts as a limitation on a larger scale. There are several limitations to the study. First, due to the limited number of supervisors, the sample size was correspondingly limited. Secondly, it was a single study center. Thirdly, due to the limitation of the operation, some students did not answer some of the questions in the questionnaire. Although the probability is very low, it still has the chance to bias the result. Fourth, although we control for faculty and teaching standards between the two groups, human bias is still a factor that cannot be completely avoided in practice. Fifth, although we used objective assessment measures, the study also revealed the weakness of our assessment system in radiology education. The study instrument consisted of paper and pencil tests, with most questions consisting of objective items that test memory, such as multiple-choice questions and short answer questions. Furthermore, the mental items used to test application ability are limited. As a result, only a small part of the final test reflects the difference between the experimental training group and the control group. Other test forms such as bedside examinations and multi-station examinations should be used in the future for better evaluation [ 24 , 25 ]. In this study, according to the curriculum, students entered the radiology department with different numbers during different periods, and 4 periods of students were entered into the study for each group. The exams were held at the end of the one-month section, so the exam was held in the control group and in the intervention group at different times, although we tried to make the questions the same in terms of number and content similarity. In the study of Chen et al [ 8 ], the test was conducted at the end of the semester and simultaneously for two groups. If this study is conducted with a larger number of students and in multiple centers, the results will be more valid.
PACS-based training is beneficial for medical students, enhancing their diagnostic and analytical skills in radiology. Further research with larger sample sizes and robust assessment methods is recommended to confirm and expand upon theses results. We believe that our findings suggest that PACS which is used routinely in healthcare diagnostic context, can also be used in medical students’ education and healthcare can be integrated in education.
The demographic and clinical datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author (Dr. Farnood Rajabzadeh ) upon reasonable request.
Picture Archiving and Communication System
Computed Tomography
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Grade Point Average
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
Multi planar Reconstruction
Artificial Intelligence
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Farbod Rajabzadeh for helping in data gathering, Ladan Goshayeshi for helping in editing, Lena Goshayeshi for helping in editing.
This study was supported by the Smart university of medical sciences and Mashhad Azad University of Medical Sciences.
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Department of e-Learning in Medical Education, School of Medicine, Center of Excellence for E- learning in Medical Education, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Mojtahedzadeh Rita & Mohammadi Aeen
Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, Mashhad Medical Sciences, Islamic Azad university, Mashhad, Iran
Farnood Rajabzadeh
Department of Community Medicine, University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
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RM, FR, designed the study. FR was involved in the data gathering and interpretation of the results. AM and SA performed analyses. FR wrote the first draft of the manuscript. FR and RM edited the final version of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Correspondence to Farnood Rajabzadeh .
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This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Smart University of Medical Sciences (ethics code: IR.VUMS.REC.1400.022, 4/12/2021) and conformed to the ethical principles contained in the Declaration of Helsinki. For experiments involving human participants the participants signed an informed consent form before the study.
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Rita, M., Aeen, M., Rajabzadeh, F. et al. Using PACS for teaching radiology to undergraduate medical students. BMC Med Educ 24 , 935 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05919-9
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