research paper topics stereotypes

190 Stereotypes Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on stereotypes, ✍️ stereotypes essay topics for college, 👍 good stereotypes research topics & essay examples, 🌶️ hot stereotypes ideas to write about, 🎓 most interesting stereotypes research titles, 💡 simple stereotypes essay ideas, 📌 easy stereotypes essay topics, ❓ research questions about stereotypes.

• Gender Stereotypes in Western and Eastern Culture
• Gender Stereotypes: Should Real Men Wear Pink?
• Reducing Stereotype, Prejudice, and Discrimination
• Mass Media: Critical Thinking Skills, Images, and Stereotypes
• Horse Riding Stereotype Among the Native Americans
• The Thai Culture: Stereotypes and Generalizations
• Race and Gender Stereotypes in Literature
• Stereotypes in “Moonlight” Film by Barry Jenkins “Moonlight” chronicles the life of a queer black boy singled out for being too soft, but transforms himself to a menacingly muscular drug dealer with gold teeth grills.
• How Gender Stereotypes Affect Society Gender stereotypes are harmful because they only teach men and women to act in certain ways; they confine people to a set of behaviors associated with their gender.
• Social Stereotypes: Unconscious Biases The paper researches unconscious bias, expands on its meaning, explores places and spaces where we see it and provides specific examples.
• How Music Reinforces Stereotypes? The contemporary entertainment world is mostly covered by music from renown artists all over the world such as Michael Jackson, Ja Rule, etc.
• Gender Stereotypes in “Frozen” Animated Film The shift in gender stereotypes is presented in “Frozen.” The contrast between Elsa and Anna is a conflict between the past stereotypes and emerging perceptions.
• Mass Media: Stereotypes Impact on People This paper discusses of stereotyped advertisements in different media, and explain the use of this term in it.
• Sibling Birth Order Personality Stereotypes and Structure The purpose of this paper is to explore various perspectives surrounding sibling birth order personality stereotypes and structure.
• Role of Gender Stereotypes in Advertising The paper states that it is of great significance to understand the reasons behind the advertisers’ attachment to socially constructed gender differences.
• Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes in the Movie “Crash” The movie Crash is a brutally honest film that depicts the harsh realities in today’s society. It tells of a convoluted story that shows how intertwined the lives are of people from all walks of life.
• “I Am Not Your Asian Stereotype” TED Talk by Canwen Xu This paper is a response to the Ted talk “I am not your Asian stereotype”, which describes the difficulties in the reconciliation of Chinese heritage with American identity.
• Gender Stereotypes in Families: Parental Influence on an Adolescent’s Career Choice Gender stereotypes are still persistent in societies that often seem to be egalitarian. These stereotypes are transmitted to younger generations that copy their parents’ role models.
• African-American Stereotypes in Film Is Rooted in How American Society Perceive African-Americans The issue of race is still a controversial topic inside the United States. This is true even after Americans elected the first black president in their history.
• Stereotypes and Prejudices in Human Resource Industry Group influence is important in determining how individuals behave in a society or at workplace. In a group, individuals regard each other as one and share collective influence.
• Biology and Culture of Gender Color Stereotypes This paper attempts to answer this question and determine whether the indicated color genders are biologically based or culturally embedded.
• Criminology and Victimology: Victim Stereotypes in Criminal Justice The paper shall look at this matter in relation to female perpetrated violence as well as male experiences of sexual violence and racial minority victims.
• Gender Stereotypes and Misunderstanding Stereotypes predetermine a human life and a female life, in particular, explaining the approaches that can change the situation, and defining the power of stereotypes.
• Gender Stereotypes in Academic and Family Settings Gender stereotypes refer to the assumption about gender features and roles that every woman or man is expected to possess or depict.
• Reinforcement of Sexist Stereotypes in Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” The novel “Pride and Prejudice” describes the love story of a young lady Elizabeth Bennett and an aristocrat Mr. Darcy, developing in the complex context of the English society.
• Latinos in US Media: Stereotypes, Values, Culture Media determines the way of how people accept each other. This paper pays attention to Latinos and how they are represented in US media.
• Gender Stereotypes’ Effects Career and Mental Health This paper discusses the stereotypes about women and shows how they limit the professional development of women and put them at risk of domestic violence and mental health issues.
• Cultural Differences and Stereotypes in “Coffee and Cigarettes” by Jim Jarmusch This paper aims to discuss cultural issues addressed in the movie “Coffee and Cigarettes” in terms of cultural identities, differences, stereotypes, traditions, conflicts, and misunderstandings.
• Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination This work explores why stereotypes are difficult to change, describes Devine’s two-step model of cognitive processing, and defines prejudice and its difference from discrimination.
• Dating Stereotypes and Relationships Development As opposed to earlier stereotype that men must dominate women in social interaction and ask them out, this paper argues that “women should ask men out.”
• “Single Stories” and “Stereotype Threat” Issue “Single stories” and “stereotype threat” are critical social issues that obstruct the freedom and identities of many people around the world.
• Mass Media Impact on Stereotype Creation Stereotypes can be useful in helping people make sense of the world by relying on stereotypes to determine how to react to certain events and people.
• South Tennessee Culture and Stereotypes Southern Tennessee culture is deep and has many milestones worth admiring; it is the unofficial musical capital of the world and the state of the most passionate football fans.
• Sociology: Stereotypes and Their Influence This paper analyzes stereotypes and their influence on perception and listening. Stereotypes get into all spheres of our life.
• Futurama Series Speaks Against Gender Stereotypes Although Futurama may seem to be a sexist series, at first sight, a closer examination reveals several directions in which this work speaks against gender stereotypes.
• Gender Stereotypes and Their Role in Advertising Now it is difficult to imagine life without advertising. In modern society, there is still a principle of building advertising on gender stereotypes.
• The Problem of Gender Stereotypes Gender stereotyping seems to be an element of the traditional gender ideology that describes average differences between males and females.
• The Problem of Stereotypes and Labelling in Interpersonal Communication The short film series “How You See Me” involves members of different social and racial groups that are most often labeled in society discussing how they perceive stereotypes.
• Cross-Cultural Competence and Stereotypes Cross-cultural proficiency refers to “ways of assessment and behaving that allows members of one cultural, ethnic, or linguistic group to work efficiently with members of another”.
• Stereotypes in Ortiz Cofer’s Essay Short essay “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” brings out the kind of stereotypes perpetuated by the media against the Hispanic women.
• Aging Stereotypes and Cultural Perspective This paper draws attention to the value of staying young as long as possible, stereotypes and stigmas associated with aging, and alternative views on elderly people.
• Media Developing Stereotypes About Minorities This paper discusses the impact of social media on stereotypes towards minorities to clarify if it is possible to decrease the negative stereotyping or not.
• Gender in the 21st Century: Fighting Dangerous Stereotypes Women happen to be the victims of gender stereotyping, men also suffer from the clichés concerning masculinity, which authors address in essays.
• Stereotypes of Gender Roles The paper details the scientific justification, impacts, development, prevention strategies, and how gender role stereotypes can be addressed.
• Racial Representation and Stereotypes in Media The paper discusses the representation of races in media sources. Newspapers, social networks, movies, and TV series were analyzed.
• How Stereotypes About Asian Americans Influence Their Lives Stereotypes have always existed around racial minority groups’ representatives in the United States, influencing their roles in society, self-perception, and access to resources.
• Age Stereotypes and Ageism in Hospitals Despite the fact that medical advancements have made humans more long-lived, prejudice and discrimination still plague people’s prospects for longer lives.
• Stereotype and Marginalized Groups A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization but the widely fixed idea of a person, group, or thing in a particular setting.
• Stereotypes of Chinese Immigrants China is one of the nations with the highest number of immigrants into the American territory surpassing India, which also has a large community in the United States of America.
• Gender Stereotype in Advertisement One of the common examples of stereotypes is an advertisement proposed by Scott, a promotion of washing powder called Tide in the 1950s.
• Gender Stereotypes Have Changed by Eagly et al. Gender Stereotypes Have Changed by Eagly et al. investigates the changes in gender stereotypes over a long period and the historical and social processes that contributed to this.
• Negative Racial Stereotypes of African American The death of African American George Floyd after being detained by the police provoked protests and riots not only across America but also beyond its borders.
• Racial Stereotypes and Prejudice in Modern Society A skilled black person with a degree cannot get a job, while at the same time, some white man with less professional knowledge has higher chances to receive an offer.
• Stereotype Threat and Arousal Effects on Women’s Math Performance The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of stereotype threat on women’s performance during a math test.
• Asian Stereotypes and Misrepresentation Stereotypes are extremely common and refer to almost every group of individuals. Asians are also frequently marginalized through misrepresentation.
• Learning Through Social Stereotypes Social stereotypes play a significant role in the life of a modern person. There are an infinite number of examples of the influence of stereotypes on a man.
• “Beyond Stereotypes” by David Mazzucchelli This work focuses on the analysis of the article by David Mazzucchelli “Beyond Stereotypes”, which examines the literary work Asterios Polyp.
• Reflection Paper: Stereotypes in Health Care Ageism, sexism, racism, other stereotypes, and social discrimination represent a severe challenge to the healthcare system.
• Stereotypes & Biases and Cultural Competence We can only become culturally competent if we discover all the community’s social, cultural, religious, economic, and political aspects and interpret the findings without bias.
• Stereotypes in “The Myth of the Latin Woman” by Cofer “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” by Cofer discusses impact of stereotypes on how Latino women are perceived in English-speaking countries.
• Bald Genius Stereotype: Raymond Reddington From “The Blacklist” Raymond Reddington is a “bald genius” stereotype portrayed through the events that occur from the first episode of “The Blacklist ” to where it is currently.
• Effects of the War on Drugs on Latinos in the US and the Role of Stereotypes Analysis of the effects of the war on drugs in the US on the Latino community, including the link to mass incarceration and the role of stereotypes in the anti-drugs efforts.
• Appearance and Nationality: Stereotypes and Myths An award-winning Puerto-Rican poet, essayist, and novelist Judith Ortiz Cofer raises the issue of the stereotypes associated with people’s appearances in her own example.
• Gender Stereotypes in Advertisements Gender-stereotyped portrayals remain perverse in ads and other promotional activities in conventional print and broadcast media and digital and social networking platforms.
• Stereotype as a Method for Categorizing Society The global arena’s factor of strength creates biased judgments about those places that do not have sufficient financial and historical potential compared to less developed regions.
• Gender Stereotypes in Commercials Home appliances or makeup commercials are typically directed at women. Automobile advertising, on the contrary, tends to concentrate on the male audience.
• Gender Norms, Roles, and Stereotypes: Act Analysis Gendered roles, norms, and stereotypes play a highly significant role in any community all over the world in any stage of its development.
• The Link Between Pop Culture and Stereotypes The majority of movies in the military and action genre involved Russians as primary antagonists. Such films used the stereotypical version of Russians.
• The Problem of Inaccurate and Biased Stereotypes Stereotypes are often based on race, culture, and gender and may facilitate the promotion of preconceived perceptions about a group of people.
• Gender Stereotypes in the Modern World The About Face project aims to oppose a culture that promotes the belief that women are weak, and have a particular set of duties and responsibilities that should be obeyed.
• Social Sciences: African American Stereotypes Dating back to the colonial years of settlement, stereotypes have been part of America, especially after inheriting slavery.
• Representations of Chavs: Stereotypes and Prejudices Further, even where working-class students are well-educated, further barriers exist for entry into many professional careers.
• Creating Stereotypes: Rhetoric and Stereotypes Stereotyped perceptions on many professions, but in a number, these perceptions are proved to be wrong in many cases.
• Subject-Informal Logic: Rhetoric & Stereotypes The fundamental learning process indicates that stereotyped examples will always remain. Evaluating people based on stereotyping is unfair and a flawed method.
• Rhetoric and Stereotypes in Society Stereotyping has been used as a tool in persuading others to embrace a certain cause. Different individuals will be viewed differently in society.
• Ethnic and Racial Stereotypes in American Media and Literature This paper looks at racial and ethnic stereotypes in American media. Stereotypes may become the basis of discrimination.
• Seeing Africa: The Destruction of Stereotypes This essay will use historical displays of Africa by Western countries to demonstrate the role of representation in knowledge.
• Working with Adolescents: Stereotypes and Best Practices Some stereotypes about adolescents influence public opinion, which negatively affects the characteristics of relationships among people of different ages.
• African American Stereotype Threat The present paper reveals the reasons for and outcomes of the stereotype threat and emphasizes the prospective advantages of such a kind of influence.
• Social Psychology: Prejudice and Stereotypes This work defines prejudice, explains how do stereotypes and discrimination contribute to prejudice, and describes ways to reduce prejudice.
• Gender Stereotypes of the US Women This work is a proposal study concerning experiences that influence US women’s attitudes towards their roles in society, gender stereotypes, distribution of power.
• Gender Stereotypes: Data Presentation Strategy This report examines gender stereotypes from a quantitative perspective, including data presentation strategy and strategy of credibility, dependability, and transferability.
• Data Analysis Proposal: Gender Stereotypes This paper presents a data analysis proposal of the study that focuses on developing females gender stereotypes using an empirical phenomenology approach.
• Gender Stereotypes: Research Question This work is a research proposal on the topic of what factors affect the development of opinions in women concerning gender-related issues as seen by working females.
• Males’ Stereotypes in Professional and Family Life The study in question dwells upon the way males’ stereotypes are manifested in such domains as professional life and family life.
• Gender Stereotypes in Family and Academic Settings The persistence of gender stereotypes in the USA as well as the rest of the world is one of the most burning issues.
• Gender Stereotypes and Employment’ Correlation The paper discusses will science faculty members reveal preferential evaluation of a male science student to work in the laboratory settings?
• The Gender Stereotypes in the Workplace The gender stereotypes in the workplace were the focus of the discussion. Different studies exploring issues related to gender stereotypes in the working environment were analyzed.
• Racial Stereotypes, Identity and Intersectionality One of the racial stereotypes deals with the appearance, so-called butt-stereotypes, described in the article by Erin J. Aubry “The Butts: Its Politics, Its Profanity.”
• Gender Stereotypes in Family: Research Methods Family is one of the most important factors that affect the development of children’s perceptions concerning gender roles.
• Arab Stereotypes in the Media Many countries are involved in the confrontation with terrorists, which causes the formation of certain stereotypes of a typical Arab portrayed in the popular and news media.
• Gender Stereotypes in Families: Parents’ Gender Roles and Children’s Aspirations Psychologists have paid significant attention to gender stereotypes, and many important trends have been identified and evaluated. Researchers use various methodologies.
• Gender Stereotypes Formation in Children This paper focuses on a study that explores the extent to which parents model gender roles to their children and dwells upon the development of gender stereotypes in children.
• Gender Stereotypes Developed Within Families The researchers hypothesized that parents’ views on gender roles as well as their stereotypes would be adopted by their children.
• Health and Illness in Community: Stereotypes Medical decision-making and the overall attitudes in healthcare settings are often impacted by stereotypes that create observable threats and risks to patients’ health.
• Women’s Views on Long-Existing Gender Stereotypes Women are still seen as creatures fit for child-rearing and keeping households. Men still think that women cannot perform certain tasks and take up some responsibilities.
• Women’s Stereotypes of Gender Roles Distribution The study will attempt to unveil the reasons for the persistence of females’ gender stereotypes concerning the distribution of gender roles in society.
• Gender Stereotypes in Women’s Opinion Study This study focuses on the opinions of women and their perspectives on the prevalence of gender stereotypes. The qualitative research will best fit the purpose of the study.
• African Americans Stereotypes and Prejudices From the 16th century, African American people were facing racial discrimination. As they had a different color of skin, they were treated unfavorably and even violently.
• Rhetoric and Stereotypes: Feminists, Tattooed Persons, Politicians, and Senior Citizens Stereotyping takes place in people’s lives at one point of their lives concerning people who they view as outsiders.
• Lesson About Gender Stereotypes
• Myths and Stereotypes About Gays and Lesbians
• Stereotypes and English Language Learning
• Replace the Old Stereotypes and Myths in Our Society
• Racialized and Gendered Stereotypes Analysis
• Male and Female Gender Stereotypes
• Stereotypes About Russia: True or Not
• Racial Stereotypes and the Breakdown of Them
• Gender Stereotypes Among Children’s Toys
• Socialization and Its Relationship to Gender Stereotypes
• Gender Differences and Gender Stereotypes From a Psychological Perspect
• Gender Stereotypes Within the 20th Century
• Gender Differences and Stereotypes in the Beauty Contest
• Social Stereotypes: Beneficial, Detrimental, or Neutral
• Men Who Defy Gender Stereotypes
• American Born Chinese and Stereotypes
• Racial Stereotypes and Three Racial Paradigms
• Stereotypes About Kentucky Residents
• Racial Stereotypes and Racial Groups and Ethnicity
• Gender Differences and Stereotypes in Financial Literacy: Off to an Early Start
• Gender Stereotypes and Their Effect on Children
• Stereotypes Americans Have Not Visited a Third World
• Gender Stereotypes and Its Impact on Our Society
• Gender Stereotypes Within the Classroom
• Skinheads, Stereotypes, and Their Kind of Music
• Gender Labeling and Gender Stereotypes
• Raising Children Without Gender Stereotypes
• Positive and Negative Stereotypes Among Community College
• The Portrayal and Solidification of Stereotypes by the Media Throughout History
• Stereotypes, Discrimination and the Gender Gap in Science
• The Godfather and the Sopranos Italian American Stereotypes
• The Negative Stereotypes About Bisexual Lifestyle
• The Difference Between Prejudices and Stereotypes
• Stereotypes and How They Relate to Group Dynamics
• The Superhero Effect: Idealism and Stereotypes in Comic Books
• Stereotyping Students: Improving Academic Performance Through Stereotypes
• Will Affirmative Action Policies Eliminate Negative Stereotypes
• The Women’s Rights Movement and Changing Gender Roles and Stereotypes
• The Positive and Negative Effects of Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes in the Workplace
• Understanding Cultural Diversity and Effects of Stereotypes According to the Role Theory
• Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence From Immigrants in Schools
• Stereotypes Affecting Haitian People in the Us
• African Americans and the Issue of Stereotypes
• Racial Stereotypes During the Roman Empire
• How Stereotypes for Women Came to Be
• Racial Stereotypes and How They Affect Everyday Life
• Sexism and Gender Stereotypes in the Public Relation Industry
• Stereotypes About Americans and the American Culture
• The Most Common Misconceptions and Stereotypes About Gay and Lesbian People
• The Criminal Black Stereotypes in Detail
• The Stigma and Stereotypes of Mental Illness
• The Factors Causing the Persistent Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes
• The Stereotypes Against Black Teenagers in America
• The Myths and Stereotypes Surrounding African American Athletes
• The Extent That Fairytales Reinforce Stereotypes
• Television Commercials and How They Perpetuate Gender Stereotypes
• Understanding Native Americans and the Role of Stereotypes in the Native People’s Domination
• The Different Stereotypes That Exist in Clothing
• Why People Should Abandon the Stereotypes About Menstruation
• Why Are Stereotypes Dangerous and What Can Be Done to Reduce Them
• How Modern Media Images Challenge Racial Stereotypes and Redefine Black Identity?
• How Society Stereotypes Women?
• How Did Photography Reflect the Values and Stereotypes That Underlay European Colonialism?
• How Advertising Reinforces Gender Stereotypes?
• How Jane Eyre and the Works of Robert Browning Subvert Gender Stereotypes?
• How Ignorant Can Society Be Stereotypes?
• Are Gender Stereotypes Perpetuated in Children’s Magazines?
• How American Minorities Are Stereotypes in American Drama Series?
• How Does the Proliferation of Gender Stereotypes Affect Modern Life?
• Are Sexist Attitudes and Gender Stereotypes Linked?
• How do Stereotypes Affect Society?
• How do Attitudes and Stereotypes develop?
• How Contemporary Toys Enforce Gender Stereotypes in the UK?
• How Racial Stereotypes Affect Society?
• How Minorities and Women Are Misrepresented in the Media Through Stereotypes?
• How Does Superhero Fiction Present Stereotypes?
• How Are Class Stereotypes Maintained in the Press?
• Why Are Stereotypes Dangerous and What Can Be Done to Reduce Them?
• Does Mainstream Media Have a Duty to Challenge Gender Stereotypes?
• Do Pride and Prejudice Reinforce or Erode Sexist Stereotypes of Women?
• How Does Ridley Scott Create and Destroy Gender Stereotypes in Thelma and Louise?
• How Gender Roles and Stereotypes Affect Children?
• How Do Gender Stereotypes Affect Today’s Society?
• How Hispanic Bilinguals’ Cultural Stereotypes Shape Advertising Persuasiveness?
• How Have Gender Stereotypes Always Been a Part of Society?
• Are Continuum Beliefs About Psychotic Symptoms Associated With Stereotypes About Schizophrenia?
• How Gender Stereotypes Warp Our View of Depression?
• How Magazines Create Gender Stereotypes?
• How Can Stereotypes Contribute to Inequality?
• How Does the Film “The Breakfast Club” (1985) Perpetuate Teen Stereotypes?

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StudyCorgi . "190 Stereotypes Essay Topics." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/stereotypes-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "190 Stereotypes Essay Topics." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/stereotypes-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Stereotypes 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 December 28, 2023 .

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152 Stereotypes Essay Topics: Impressive Ideas List

Many students struggle to choose stereotypes essay topics. That’s because teachers and professors expect them to write about unique titles. However, stereotype covers many aspects of human life because it’s oversimplified, fixed, and widely held idea or image of a person or thing.

Since humans are different, living without assumptions becomes difficult. While some expectations are harmless, others lead to discrimination. Overall, stereotyping plays an influential role in people’s interactions. Some individuals impose specific behaviors on others without sufficient evidence.

Therefore, choosing stereotype topics for essays requires a careful understanding of this concept. Also, you must learn to recognize stereotypes in society-wide thinking patterns and everyday life to know what the educator expects you to write about in your paper. This article explains what stereotype is while listing 150-plus topics for stereotype essays. It’s a helpful article because it provides knowledge and ideas to students struggling to pick stereotype topics for their papers.

What Is a Stereotype?

A stereotype is a fixed idea several people have about a group or a thing that is partly true or untrue. Social psychologists define stereotype as an over-generalized, fixed belief about a specific class or group of people. When people stereotype others, they infer that people have a wide range of abilities and characteristics that others assume every member of that particular group possesses.

Educators ask students to write about stereotypes because it’s a prolific issue in society. Apart from being a preconceived idea about a specific group, a stereotype is a degree of people’s expectations for individuals in that class. And these expectations are centered on a particular belief, attitude, and personality.

Stereotypes are often inaccurate, and they create misconceptions about a community. While they sometimes help people understand a group, its heritage, and culture, stereotypes are over-generalized. And this over-generalization can harm some individuals in a group because people aren’t entirely identical to those preconceived ideas.

How To Write Good Essay On Stereotypes

Has your college or university lecturer assigned you a stereotype essay? If so, you want to write a good essay and score the top grade in your class. These steps will help you write a winning essay about stereotypes.

Choose an interesting topic : Selecting a topic for a stereotype essay might seem easy for some learners. However, it requires a careful understanding of stereotypes and what the educator expects to read in your paper. Outline your essay : Use the essay prompt to outline your paper. Your outline should highlight where your thesis statement will go and the content to include in your stereotype essay introduction, body, and conclusion. Brainstorm for ideas : Once you have an outline, brainstorm for the issues to write about in your paper. That way, you will save the time you spend rewriting and reorganizing some parts of your paper. Read stereotype essay samples : If you have the time, read good samples of stereotype essays before writing. That way, you will know how the educator expects you to organize and present information. Research : Take your time researching and gathering information for your essay. Your research should gather relevant examples and evidence to support your arguments. Write the essay : Follow your outline to write the paper using the information you gathered in your research. Present your argument with supporting evidence for every point you make in the body section. Conclude your essay : Wrap up your piece, summarizing your main points with unique words. Don’t introduce anything new in the conclusion. Write the bibliography : Include a reference for all the information sources, including journal articles and books that you used to research your topic. Proofread your essay : Read through the paper, eliminating all typos, spelling, and factual errors.

Some stereotypes are highly controversial. Therefore, present information that won’t offend your readers if you opt to write about such topics. If you don’t want to face those doubts alone, english essay writers from our team will be glad to solve this problem for you.

The Best Stereotype Essay Topics

Once you’ve known how to write a stereotype essay, you may want the best topics for your paper. This list has the best ideas to consider for a stereotype essay.

• A formal critique for the men bashing stereotype
• How society has traditionally stereotyped female characters
• Racism issues- Stereotypes and looks
• The trap music and women- Is it succumbing to this stereotype or empowering females?
• How video games depict stereotypes for boys
• Alcohol in Canada and aboriginals stereotype
• How movies reflect the Chinese stereotypes
• How the media propagate white women stereotypes
• Reviewing stereotypes- Arousal and treat
• The female’s math performance stereotype- What are the effects?
• How the media presents different stereotypes
• Do the media promote stereotyping?
• How activating gender stereotypes influence females
• Stereotype threat- How does it affect a person’s education?
• How television perpetuates gender stereotypes
• The American citizens’ stereotypes
• Is learning to stereotype others a lifelong process?
• Describe the Canadian stereotypes
• Stereotypes, lies, and sex- Is being prejudiced due to inequalities correct?
• Is the mathematics achievement gap a reality or stereotype for African American students?
• Stereotype image and rhetoric aspects
• Stereotypes and culture- What’s the correlation?
• Superheroes and gender stereotypes
• Are gender stereotypes relevant in gender studies?
• The stereotype and hoodies- Is it good or bad?
• What is a stereotype threat?
• Do modern toys perpetuate gender stereotypes?
• Are stereotypes significant in communication?
• What stereotypes do people have towards the Chinese?
• Evaluating culture and gender stereotypes- What’s the relationship?
• Using anthropology to evaluate stereotypes
• Stereotypes of Muslims and Islam in the west

Pick any of these topics if you want to research and write about something your teacher will find interesting to read.

Hot Topic Ideas For An Essay On Stereotype

Maybe you’re looking for a hot topic to research and write about in your stereotype essay. In that case, consider these ideas.

• Evaluating workplace gender stereotypes
• Prejudices and stereotypes within the human resource sector
• Racial stereotypes, intersectionality, and identity
• Family gender stereotypes- Do they exist?
• Gender stereotypes and race in literature
• Sociology- The influence of stereotypes
• Stereotypes and rhetoric
• African-Americans prejudices and stereotypes
• Fighting gender stereotypes- Which methods are the best?
• Misunderstanding and gender stereotypes- What’s the difference?
• Do the media develop stereotypes about minorities in society?
• Cultural perspectives and aging stereotypes
• Gender roles distribution and women stereotypes
• How women perceive the long-existing gender stereotypes
• How Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight film presents stereotypes
• How gender stereotypes affect mental health and career
• How families perpetuate gender stereotypes
• Illness and health in the community- What’s the role of stereotypes?
• How families develop gender stereotypes
• How children develop gender stereotypes
• Evaluating gender stereotypes in eastern and western cultures
• How the media perpetuate Arab stereotypes
• Relationship development and dating stereotypes

Choose and write about any of these ideas if looking for a hot topic. However, consult some information sources to write an informative essay.

Interesting Stereotype Paper Topics

Do you want to write an essay on an exciting stereotype topic? If so, consider the following exciting ideas.

• Stereotype and objectivity in sexual media advertisements
• How stereotype threat affects age differences in terms of memory performance
• Americanization- The Indian stereotype creation
• Investigating stereotype in Robert Luketic’s Dumb Blonde in Legally Blonde film
• The Female Taming stereotype in time in The Taming of the Shew by Shakespeare
• Women stereotype in a Patriarchal society
• Using stereotype cues in the perceived mathematics level
• Understanding the Macho-Man Myth’s gender stereotype
• Hurston’s Sweat- How stereotypes influence women’s role
• Gender stereotype imposition by modern society
• How stereotype and race affect justice
• Racist stereotype- What is its function in Blackface Minstrelsy?
• Females are worse drivers than males- Is it a stereotype?
• Can Stereotype threat affect women’s performance?
• The schemer stereotype- Understanding its metamorphosis
• Thinking like a monkey- Analysis of the Animal Social Dynamics in reducing stereotype threat
• Marketing advertisers and sports media- A Hyper masculine stereotype
• Stereotype, discrimination, prejudice and Out-group vs. in-group
• Racial stereotyping- How Merriam define a stereotype
• A high-achieving Asian-American stereotype

Choose and develop any of such ideas as your essay topic idea. However, take your time investigating various sources to write a winning paper.

Good Topics For Essays About Stereotyping

A good topic is easy to research and write about without compromising your grade. Consider these ideas for a good essay topic.

• The average media stereotype and the aboriginal people’s problems
• Macho-Men stereotype plaguing in modern men- A detailed analysis
• Ending the stereotype- Aboriginals in urban areas have the highest happiness score
• How does society perpetuate the teenage driver stereotype?
• How does the violent African-American stereotype affect rap music?
• Joseph Conrad’s African Characters in the Heart of Darkness- Analyzing stereotype
• The adverse stereotype of the Jewbird’s Jewish race and the Last Mohican
• The stranger stereotype and Alice Sebold
• Pros and cons of fitting into a stereotype
• Analyzing the masculinity stereotype in the early 1800s
• Analysis of stereotype and conventional character roles in achieving the author’s purposes
• Stereotype and perspective in detective novels
• Criminality stereotype and its impact on poverty
• Women’s depiction of Women Essay- Marketing, brand stereotype, and Gen
• Erasing male stereotype and feminine autonomy in the Paycoc and Juno
• The Chief Illiniwek history- A Racist stereotype and university of Illinois Mascot
• Women’s role and society’s stereotypes
• Body type or blood type genotype- Are they the basis of stereotypes?
• Are television ads stereotyping men and women’s roles in society?
• Stereotype Italian-American in the Cable Show, Sopranos, in the United States
• How stereotype threat impacts women’s ability
• American cheerleader- The stereotype, the icon, and the truth

Choose and work on any of these ideas to write an excellent essay about stereotypes. However, some of these ideas require extensive research and analysis before writing.

Social And Gender Stereotype Essay Topics

Do you want to write a paper about gender and stereotype? If so, consider these ideas for your stereotype essay.

• Investigating the correlation between employment and gender stereotypes
• Gender stereotypes in academic and family settings
• Dominant male stereotypes
• Reasons to research gender stereotypes
• Gender stereotypes- Data analysis
• Gender stereotypes and data presentation
• The U.S. women and gender stereotypes
• How the U.S. media presents Latinos gender stereotypes, culture, and values
• Social psychology- Stereotypes and prejudice
• Stereotype threat among African-Americans
• Stereotypes and cultural differences in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes
• Is stereotype discrimination and bias?
• Adolescents workmates- Best practices and stereotypes
• Seeing Africa- How to destroy stereotypes
• What are the roots of African-American stereotypes?
• Stereotypes and ethnocentrism in Crash, the movie
• Ortiz Cofer’s Essay- Investigating stereotypes
• Mass media- How stereotypes affect people
• The racial and ethnic stereotypes in the American literature and media
• Stereotypes and rhetoric in modern society
• Subject-informal logic- Stereotypes and rhetoric
• Can music reinforce stereotypes?
• Cross-cultural stereotypes and competence

These ideas are suitable for an essay on gender and social stereotypes. However, research your topic extensively before writing.

Easy Stereotype Essay Ideas

Maybe you need an easy topic for your stereotype paper. If so, pick any of these ideas for your essay on stereotypes.

• How cultural diversity affects stereotypes
• Positive and negative impacts of ethnic and racial stereotypes
• How the women’s rights movement changed stereotypes and gender roles
• How gender stereotypes affect children
• Stereotypes that Americans hold before visiting the third world
• How gender stereotypes affect society
• Classroom gender stereotypes
• Gender stereotypes and gender labeling
• Can children grow without gender stereotypes?
• How stereotypes affect community colleges
• Revealing stereotypes among immigrants in schools
• How stereotypes affect Haitians in the U.S.
• The Roman empire and racial stereotypes
• How racial stereotype impacts everyday life
• Gender and sexism stereotypes in the P.R. sector
• Stereotypes about the American culture
• Common stereotypes and misconceptions about lesbians and gays
• Stereotypes and stigma of mental illness
• What causes persistent ethnic and racial stereotypes?
• Stereotypes that Black-American teenagers face
• How television commercials perpetuate gender stereotypes
• The role of native Americans’ stereotypes and Native people’s dominance
• Are stereotypes dangerous- How can society reduce them?
• Menstruation stereotypes- Why society should abandon them
• Clothing and stereotypes
• The negative stereotype that the community has towards a bisexual lifestyle
• How stereotypes differ from prejudices
• How stereotypes relate to groups’ dynamics
• The superhero impact- Stereotypes and idealism in comic books
• Stereotyping students- How to improve academic performance via stereotypes
• How socialization relates to gender stereotypes
• Social stereotypes- Are they detrimental, beneficial, or neutral?

Whether you choose cliché essay topics or the latest stereotypes, research your topic extensively to write a winning paper.

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How to approach ‘prejudice’ and ‘stereotypes’ qualitatively: The search for a meaningful way

• Magda Petrjánošová

This paper is partly a theoretical and analytical exploration of different ways to do research about stereotypes and prejudice, and partly a confessional tale of my journey. It is a journey that has been about looking for a meaningful and useful way of approaching empirical material collected in different research projects over more than 15 years, in an attempt to say something about how ordinary social actors talk (and possibly think) about prejudice and stereotypes. There is an immense volume of social psychological writing on this topic, and from that I discuss in detail several new(ish) discursive, critical and constructional approaches and the (im)possibility of applying them to my empirical material.

Introduction

Over time, this article has evolved from a short, simple conference presentation focusing on a few interesting extracts concerning prejudice and stereotypes. When I began writing the article in “discussion” with other (cited) authors, looking for potential new ways of analysing the same extracts, it got far more complicated than I had anticipated. It now takes the form of part theoretical and analytical paper about stereotypes and prejudice, and part confessional tale ( Van Maanen, 1988 ) of my journey. It is a journey that has been about looking for a meaningful and useful approach to analysing empirical material I have collected in different research projects over more than 15 years, in an attempt to say something about prejudice and stereotypes.

The study of prejudice became central to social psychology with the work of Allport (1954) . Allport, who focused mainly on negative ethnic prejudice, defined it as “an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group” ( Allport, 1954 , p. 9). As Billig (2012) notes, prejudice was initially defined more broadly but at the beginning of the 20 th century it narrowed to refer to negative opinions and to focus on categories of ethnicity and race [2] . Today (in mainstream social psychology) this concept can mainly be found in the triad of prejudice, stereotypes/stereotyping and discrimination; prejudice is usually defined more specifically as a complex attitude to a specific group, stereotypes/stereotyping as the attribution of specific characteristics to this group and discrimination as a non-neutral behaviour towards this group and its members (e.g. Dovidio, Hewstone, Glick, & Esses, 2010 ). Alternatively, this triad is understood slightly differently in the three-part model of attitudes (sometimes called the ABC model), in which stereotypes are seen as the cognitive aspect, prejudice as the affective aspect and discrimination as the behavioural aspect of attitudes towards a group ( Fiske, 1998 ). Moreover, in recent writing numerous more specific concepts have appeared that have a more or less clear connection to the concept of prejudice and that can be used as dependent measures which tap into the ABC model. These include social distance, intergroup trust, perceived threat, and so forth (for an incomplete but rather voluminous and recent overview, see Lášticová & Findor, 2016 ).

Nonetheless there is immense variation in the social psychological work done on prejudice. As Condor and Figgou (2012) summarize more generally, in social psychology, prejudice has been studied as a matter of “instinct, drive, motivation, emotion, categorization, social identity, attribution, personality, executive control or rhetoric” (p. 202). There have also been many different opinions on the reasons for prejudice and the mechanisms by which it comes about. Dovidio (2001) describes how these have changed over time—the early works saw prejudice as a personality fault, later it was viewed as imperfect information processing and recently more and more researchers have focused on unconscious and automatic prejudices.

Again, when we look at how prejudice has been researched, there is great diversity. Very different methods were used at different times and by researchers working within different paradigms. Prejudice has been researched using qualitative (e.g. interviews, focus groups), quantitative (e.g. questionnaires, social distance scales), as well as experimental (e.g. pupil dilation, response latency) methods. The predominant methods, though, are perhaps those that are most easy to use: direct self-report questionnaires (for an excellent overview see Fiske & North, 2014 ). Usually those researched give their views (personal or for their whole group [3] ) on different groups defined for example according to race/ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation or other criteria, and researchers measure the attitudes of one group towards the other while working with different components according to the theory they subscribe to—competence, trust, warmth, and so on.

The role of the researchers is omnipotent here—they get to say what is (and is not) prejudice and whether and to what extent someone is prejudiced (or not); in short the researchers are the “standard setters” of truth (Kruglanski, 1989 in Dixon & Levine, 2012a , p. 306). As Durrheim and colleagues argue (2016) , social psychologists have “generally sought to develop authoritative definitions and measures of prejudice” (p. 18) and these from top down definitions “have been superimposed on ordinary people’s attitudes in order to identify prejudiced individuals” (p. 18). Moreover, there is a problem with these definitions. As Condor and Figgou (2012) state, they are not very precise and have not exhibited a “high level of consistency over the past century” (p. 201). Despite social scientists’ claims that they have 1) been making the definition more and more accurate over time in line with scientific progress, and 2) that they are much more specific and precise than ordinary social actors—lay men and women—in fact their definitions are not so very different. However, as Durrheim, Quayle and Dixon (2016) state, in everyday communication what counts or does not count as prejudice is context dependent in the given situation and sometimes even fought over “with considerable passion and no little skill” (p.18), mainly because casting the same idea as prejudice or as a rational and legitimate attitude has very different consequences in the real world. Because of all the real-life complications with a clear-cut definition of prejudice, and because of other more generally critical voices (e.g. Whetherell, 2012), I have placed the terms “prejudice” and “stereotypes” in quotation marks in the title and also in important places in the article as a reminder that these are just labels.

Inspired by these insights and following my old suspicion of measurement tools, in this article, I am not interested in measuring the extent to which someone (a person or group) could be considered prejudiced, or how that changes after such and such an intervention [4] . Neither am I interested in the content, what exactly the potentially prejudiced opinion is about or which characteristics are ascribed to the group of people in question. What I want to look at are the opinions of the participants, but I plan to approach prejudice from a meta position, so as to better understand what the participants say and possibly think ABOUT prejudice, rather than what their explicit definitions of it might be. Thus in this article I shall attempt an approach to stereotypes and prejudice where I am interested in how the research participants THEMSELVES refer to the existence and validity of prejudice/stereotypes (in themselves and others), what they think about how the stereotypes are shared within their own and other groups, how they personally (dis)agree with them, how carefully they express an opinion that could be socially unacceptable, how they work around this complication, and so on. All this is possible only in contexts where the participants can articulate their opinions (not for example in closed questions in a questionnaire). Thus the methods of empirical material collection already determine which approaches can and cannot be used with the material. Here I am using extracts from interviews, focus groups and (open limit) answers to an open question in a questionnaire. Another possibility would be to use statements that did not originate in a research setting, but that are “natural” [5] —like newspapers articles or political speeches (see e.g. Wodak & Meyer, 2001 ).

I would like to make two small points before I present the empirical material collected and the analytical perspective: First, as mentioned above, implicit definitions of prejudice do not appear to differ so greatly in lay discourses and in scientific writing. However, in my experience, if ordinary social actors use (and often they do not) an explicit term when referring to something they consider prejudiced/one-sided/stereotypical, they tend not to distinguish between the concepts of stereotypes and prejudice but use both terms synonymously, or they sometimes use “prejudice” in reference to negative opinions only, and “stereotypes” for both positive and negative opinions. That is why I use both terms in this article, and, of course, I use the term the participants use in each extract from the empirical material. Second, in this article I deal only with nationally defined groups, often defined on the basis of state citizenship because this was the perspective from which our earlier research projects were conducted. This is despite my agreeing that nationalities are labels and that in real life issues around membership in nationally defined groups is often complicated, complex and not at all clear-cut (see also methodological nationalism , Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002 ).

Empirical material and analytical perspective

In 2003–2004 we used semi-structured interviews and commented drawings of the borderland in an Austrian–Slovak project about young adults from the borderland and their perceptions of their own nation and the other nation (32 Slovaks, 32 Austrians, aged 16–24, selected using quota sampling taking into account age, gender, education, size of dwelling and (not) having a better experience of the other nation) (see Spannring et al., 2005 );

in 2005–2007 in a project on the lives, attitudes and feelings of home of Slovaks travelling regularly (mostly daily) to Austria for study or work we used focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews and commented drawings of the borderland (26 Slovaks, aged 24–46, selected using quota sampling taking into account age, gender, education and size of dwelling. We then looked for and added “contrasting cases”) (see Lášticová & Petrjánošová, 2014 );

in 2009–2010 in a project on the everyday lives of a “community” of Slovak short-term migrants to Ireland we used semi-structured interviews with 8 (male and female) Slovaks who had different leadership roles in the Slovak group in Ireland (see Lášticová & Petrjánošová, 2013 );

in 2010–2012 in a research project on intergroup attitudes in central Europe we analysed answers to an open question about experiences of the neighbouring nation. The respondents were Czechs and all their neighbours—Austrians, Germans, Poles and Slovaks (1,260 female and male university students from the respective borderlands) (see Graf, Hřebíčková, Petrjánošová, & Leix, 2015 ).

The theoretical perspective I adopt in this article was inspired and influenced mainly by the traditions of discursive analysis (e.g. Condor, 2011 ), critical discursive analysis (e.g. Wodak & Krzyzanowski, 2008 ; Van Dijk, 1984 ) and rhetorical approach (e.g. Billig, 2012 ). Much of the texts, especially the older ones, deal with the tensions around expressing prejudice in a world and era where there is a broadly shared prejudice against prejudice or a “general cultural norm against ‘prejudice’” ( Billig, 2012 , p. 141) and a tendency to consider prejudiced attitudes to be objectionable on ethical grounds and irrational in nature. [6] Researchers have focused on the micro-level of strategic self-monitoring, self-presentation (relying on Goffman’s work) or more generally on identity management issues in expressing prejudice but avoiding the stigma of being evaluated as prejudiced ( Condor, 2000 ; Augustinos & Every, 2007 ) or even more generally on “careful negotiation and identity construction around the topic of prejudice” ( Wetherell, 2012 , p. 168). For example Van Dijk explored specific semantic, pragmatic and conversation strategies of “adequate self-expression, positive self-presentation and effective persuasion” (1984, p. 116) when formulating “ethnic opinions” (p.116). Recently, the writings have focused even more on the “social” side—not on the verbal acts of individual actors but rather on how prejudicing and stereotyping happens as a result of the joint discursive action of several speakers (e.g. Condor & Figgou, 2012 ) or even of speakers and hearers (as a result of implicit allusions on one side and understanding of contextual information and shared categorical associations, e.g. Durrheim et al., 2016 ). [7]

Thus, when looking now (in 2018) at the older materials, I am mainly interested in how people speak ABOUT “stereotypes” and “prejudice”, and for instance how they assess their accuracy and whether they admit to expressing views that can be considered prejudiced. In connection with the last point I assume that there are many more negative stereotypes around, which did not come up in the research projects, because the participants did not want to “admit” to them, meaning they did not consider it socially desirable to share them with us, the researchers, in that interaction. [8]

In the following part I will show, using specific extracts from the empirical material, examples of different approaches to stereotypes/prejudice, the way the research participants talk/write and possibly think about them. From the wide range of aspects that could be focused on, I shall look in this article, in the following order, at prejudice as a source of knowledge; stereotypes declared as shared within the ingroup and (dis)agreement with them; different discursive ways of dealing with personal experience that contradicts a shared stereotype; and at a declared change in a stereotypical attitude following personal experience.

Prejudice as a source of knowledge about the other group

In the following extract from a semi-structured interview with a young Austrian man from the Slovak–Austrian borderland we can see how he tries to meaningfully answer a question on the differences between his national group and the neighbouring national group. The interview took place in 2003, shortly before Slovak accession to the European Union—a small number of people from Slovakia had been studying in Austria, and a larger number went shopping there or on trips, but the border controls still existed and officially it was impossible for Slovaks to work in Austria. In general there was much less contact in the wider borderlands, including the capitals Vienna and Bratislava, than there is today, in 2018.

Extract 1: I don’t know of any prejudice about Slovaks

Interviewer: and what are the differences between slovaks and austrians.

Participant: (...) perhaps wealth. And if anything, then the lifestyle, they do not have it so far, but are on the way. But I don’t know of any prejudice about Slovaks from which I could infer the differences between them and Austrians [9] (answer in a semi-structured interview, 2003, male participant from Austria, age 25, completed upper secondary school, Vienna)

Unfortunately, the interviewer did not press the participant to explain what exactly he meant by “prejudice” when he used the concept in this rather unusual context. More detailed questioning might have revealed more information on his “ethnotheory of prejudice”, on what he thinks about the accuracy of such information or if and how he goes about verifying it. Here, we ultimately lose the advantage obtained by the researcher not asking directly about prejudice but some participants spontaneously thematizing it, which could hopefully have made the answer less socially desirable than if the question had been ‘are you prejudiced against your eastern neighbours?’ This is an extract from a semi-structured interview covering several topics, and so the researcher moves on to the next topic and we learn nothing more than this interesting fragment of information. We could extrapolate that the participant does not know a lot about Slovaks, perhaps because of the socio-political context mentioned above, that perhaps they do not interest him (as he lives in a higher status state), and that he has almost certainly never visited Slovakia, but that nonetheless he still (unsurprisingly) tries to answer the question. Only very seldom do participants tell us straight away that they do not know. In his answer this young Austrian man begins by mentioning economic differences (the most frequently mentioned specific difference from the Slovak participants, too, see Spannring et al., 2005 ). His reference to ‘lifestyle’ probably means standard of living and without giving the adjective, he means a high, higher or perhaps an average European standard of living, seen from the Austrian side of the border. Then, quite quickly he states explicitly that he does not have enough information about Slovaks to answer the question and suggests the reason is he does not know of any prejudice about Slovaks. This could be viewed as supporting the idea that stereotyping and prejudice are innocent attempts at categorizing the unknown. The problem is that it is not innocent when the prejudice is explicitly negative and when it is the cause of people from different groups having no contact with one another and remaining permanently unknown to each other. It is also interesting to see how he (probably lacking the personal experience) automatically looks for any socially shared information about the other group accessible to him, even if it is just hearsay. Not having any information he logically cannot take the next possible step of testing/questioning the accuracy of such information, in contrast to the participants cited in the next part.

Stereotypes declared within the in-group and (dis)agreement with them

In this part I will look at the stereotypes the participants refer to as known or more or less broadly shared within their own group (in-group). It will then be interesting to see whether they declare an agreement or disagreement with them and the reasons they give.

I would like to add a more general note here—if the empirical material collected allows for a comparative perspective, it is useful to look at how the two sides (two groups, for example members of two nations) see each other and what are the differences. In the fourth cited research project involving Austrians, Czechs, Germans, Poles and Slovaks we had this opportunity and found that interesting asymmetries emerged, including in relation to how many stereotypes each group mentioned in reference to the other groups or what the ratio was of positive to negative stereotypes about the same group. If one group (nationally defined, for example) has more stereotypes about the other group than vice versa, this could be interpreted as indicating the second group is particularly interesting to the first group for some, historical, economical or other, reasons. A big difference of this kind was noticeable in relation to Czechs and Germans for instance, with the first group reporting many more stereotypes about Germans than the Germans did about Czechs. [10] Moreover, where it was possible to guess the emotional valence [11] , clear differences emerged in the ratio of “negative” to “positive” stereotypes. For example, all the Austrian stereotypes mentioned in relation to Czechs were negative, but of the reported Czech stereotypes regarding Austrians half were negative and half positive. As mentioned above, I was not interested in statements like The Czechs are close-fisted, which is a hypothetical statement that could have been evaluated as prejudiced from the researcher’s position. Rather I focused on explicit references to the existence of stereotypes/prejudice like Here they say, that Czechs are close-fisted which is another hypothetical statement where it would be interesting to see for example whether and how the speaker maintains the constructed distances from the stereotype (because it is not ´we´ who is saying it, but it is ´they´) in her/his next sentences.

The next extract introduces the theme of agreeing or disagreeing with a stereotype that seems to be broadly shared within the in-group. Sometimes the participants reported agreeing with such a stereotype or that they had experienced it being validated. More often they mentioned such cases when the stereotype was contested, possibly because in these instances it is easier to recognize that stereotypes shape our thinking.

Extract 2: In contrast to what we say here

(...) In contrast to what we say here about Germans, these two girls were much more spontaneous and friendly than me at the time (answer to a single open question “what is your experience of Germans?” in a questionnaire on intergroup contact and attitudes comprised of closed questions except for this one, 2010, Czech statement about Germans, female participant, age unknown, statement no. 1432).

The participant, speaking about a student exchange some time ago during secondary school, does not explicitly say what they “ say here about Germans ”. Again, if it was in an interview, at least it would have been possible for a vigilant interviewer to ask for more details about what “they” say and who “they” are, and whether the speaker thought so before, too. But we do not have this fuller answer and can only infer—for example, from the context of the positively coloured statement about receiving a friendly welcome while on the exchange, we could assume that this thing that is generally said about the Germans is quite the opposite of the speaker’s experience of the two spontaneous and friendly young German girls. This situation repeated itself several times, and always when the participants did not specify the stereotype or prejudice referred to, from the context it was clear that they were negative.

Different discursive ways of dealing with a personal experience that contradicts a stereotype broadly shared within the in-group

Where personal experience did not confirm a stereotype reported to be shared within the in-group, participants used different discursive strategies to deal with this in a meaningful and logical way. Sometimes they just reflected on the difference, as was the case with the statement in extract 2. In some cases they declared an exception to the rule—someone from another national group who did not act in accordance with the stereotype was declared to be an exception, but the stereotype remained uncontested. [12] Sometimes there were so many exceptions that whole exceptional subgroups of the big national group were declared. An example could be (a fictional) statement like The Austrians who are my friends are ok, but in general it is true that as a nation they are all big-headed. These subgroups could be defined according to knowledge of the person, as in the example, but also according to region of origin, age, gender and so on. Only in a few cases from all the material collected did an “antistereotypical” personal experience lead to an (at least declared) change of opinion or abandonment of the stereotype.

Declared change in stereotypical belief

Where there was a (declared) abandoning of a stereotypical opinion, it was often narrated as a story progressing over time in stages: stereotypical information—personal experience—change of opinion/abandonment of stereotype, and this makes the change of opinion sound reasonable and logical.

Extract 3: Ireland is beautiful.

(…) I have heard that the Irish just drink and take drugs and that Ireland is ugly and it’s always raining, but I came here and they are friendly and Ireland is beautiful.(…) (extract from an interview about experiences in Ireland and the existence of a Slovak “community” there, speaking about the decision to go abroad, 2009, AZ, age 29, male participant, short-term Slovak migrant in Ireland)

The personal experiences required for such a change were often not one-off, but repeated and/or long-term. [13] Personal experience of the members of another national group does not always improve relationships and lead to the stereotypes being abandoned (see also Allport’s famous conditions for positive inter-group contact influence, in Allport, 1954 ). In the empirical material there were several cases mentioned where this reportedly did not work (cf. Paolini et al., 2010 ). For example, in one reported story, following personal contact among Czech and German secondary school students that did not go well a new negative stereotype was created (about what Czech secondary school students are like) and the whole exchange program was stopped.

Concluding remarks

I think stereotypes and prejudice are both a fascinating research issue and a topic with real everyday consequences for all of us. Given my vague suspicion of measurement tools such as direct self-report questionnaires, [14] I felt enlightened and inspired when I discovered the work of several scholars that can be mainly grouped under the discursive and critical approaches to stereotypes/prejudice, [15] who were not interested in how many people in group A would tick negative categorical evaluations of the members of group B. They had found so much more to investigate and problematize!

In this article I wanted to apply what I saw them doing with their extracts to the empirical material we had collected over many years and from many projects. Using a qualitative analysis inspired by the discursive approaches allowed me to observe how participants explicitly talk (and possibly think) about stereotypes—for example, how often and how exactly they mention them, assess their accuracy, (dis)agree with them, explain changes in their own originally stereotypical opinions, explain logically two contradictory assessments of members of the same national group in one short statement. However, I did not look at the most “classic” tension points, at the way speakers mitigate or manage expressions that could be judged as prejudiced in order to avoid being judged as prejudiced themselves. I was more interested in what I could learn about stereotypes/prejudice from the viewpoint of the participants, so in this article I have not used extracts containing prejudice/stereotypes (that I the researcher would have to evaluate as such) but ones ABOUT prejudice/stereotypes. That coincides with the claim of Condor and colleagues (2012) that the research on lay understandings of prejudice is surprisingly sparse, and with Billig’s recommendation (2012) that the research should include what ordinary people understand by “prejudice”, given that the concept is so important in lay discourse.

However, I kept to the individual level, just as the majority of measuring approaches do. Condor and Figgou (2012) criticize methodological individualism, [16] as the main tendency among all the different approaches to prejudice and suggest that an alternative could be to think of prejudice in terms of collaborative cognition. In this approach groups or networks, not individuals, are the units of analysis. They show the construction, expression and suppression of subtle or blatant prejudice in a different light: first, they show the workings of so called “social scaffolding”—the way a more skilled person helps a less skilled person, instructing him/her in and facilitating the production of a logical (in this case racist) narrative. Second, they focus on how the pejorative portrayal of Others can be the result of joint action, where the contributions of each person are contextually important to the contributions of other participants, in this case allowing escalation in the expression of negative opinions. Third, they provide examples of joint inhibition, where one individual relies on others instead of self-monitoring and regulating his own expression of prejudice. Thus the display of prejudice is regulated through the interaction of several people—either through correcting the use of prejudiced categories or by openly admonishing the prejudicial talk of some of them— and not in the individual’s mind.

Moreover, Durrheim (2012) , when writing about implicit prejudice in interaction, demonstrates how “stereotypes are formulated in the context of social interaction and that they can take an implicit form in which the hearer must help to stereotype” (p.190). In the same spirit, Durrheim and colleagues (2016) present an identity performance model of prejudice that focuses attention not only on how the expression of prejudice is responsive to norms and audiences but also how it shapes those norms. They also show how contestation of the very definition of what can and cannot count as prejudice, can be used either to mobilize hatred against out-groups (if their negative opinion of them is presented not as prejudiced but as reasonable), and to cement or change identities and norms. Regarding the latter they give an interesting example of paedophile people attempting to cast themselves as a “minor-attracted sexual orientation group” and the negative attitudes towards them as prejudice, which would result in very tangible real-life changes, in law for example. Further they illustrate how accusations and denials of prejudice “help to preserve categories, meanings and boundaries” (p. 26) and how repression of prejudice “can be viewed as a collaborative identity performance” (p. 29) in which all participants avoid the potential shame associated with uttering or hearing prejudice. Thus denials as well as accusations often remain inexplicit, but still the “work of reproducing the racial order” (2016, p. 29) has been done. Their article is a persuasive plea for a new agenda in social research that would attempt to “understand how the very definition of ‘prejudice’ is jointly defined and negotiated and deployed in social interactions to achieve social and political outcomes” (p. 32).

I consider these recent constructionist and critical psychological approaches to be highly inspirational but realize they cannot be applied to my empirical material—which I had at first hoped to do in order to obtain a kind of higher level analysis. Of course, having the empirical material that would allow for qualitative analysis (e.g. interview transcripts) is here not enough. To be able to “shake-off” the individual focus and to pay attention to the social or interactional, I would need “interactional” material—transcripts of conversations, for example. Ideally if I am to approach real-life situations these should not be elicited conversations (at the researcher’s request or in answer to a direct question) but either “natural” ones (see my explanation above) or ones that do not at least primarily focus on the issue interesting to the researchers (cf. Condor & Figgou, 2012 ). This last approach is exactly what I was trying to apply in this article when I began looking at older empirical material with a new topic and new perspective in mind.

To be more precise and honest, I wanted to put together material from over a long period and from several research projects, look at it with a new focus and then show how it could be analysed on several levels, inspired by the “classic” and more recent discursive analytical writing. Then I realized just how far the newest approaches have moved on and how inadequate my empirical material is for that.

I still think that the original idea of looking at the topic of stereotypes/prejudice using empirical material in which participants mention it spontaneously and not when prompted is a good one. But as became immediately clear, this does not work if there was not opportunity for letting them elaborate on the issue once touched upon. There are several reasons for this—the impossibility of asking further more detailed questions in the case of open questions in a questionnaire; interviews having a different focus at the time they were conducted and researchers wanting to cover too many topics in a single encounter in the case of interviews, and I would now say even the inability to explore the unexpected “jewel” of new and interesting information.

Thus in this article I was only able to go as far as the collected empirical material allowed, but exploring these new approaches has given me some new ideas for research that will be more difficult to realize but that will hopefully prove more helpful in the struggle to understand prejudice/stereotypes in the social reality of everyday life.

1 This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency contract No. APVV-14-0531; however, the empirical material it is based on was collected as part of several earlier research projects (for details, see part 2. Empirical material). An earlier and much shorter version of this article appeared (in Slovak) in Community psychology in Slovakia: Proceedings from a scientific conference ( Petrjánošová, 2015 ).

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

• Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
• Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
• How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
• How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
• How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
• How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

• What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
• How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
• How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
• Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
• How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
• How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
• What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
• What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
• Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies  (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
• Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
• Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
• Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
• Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
• Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
• What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
• Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
• Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
• Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
• How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
• Should graduate students be able to form unions?

• What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
• How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
• Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
• How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
• How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
• Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
• Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
• Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
• Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
• Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
• Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
• Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
• Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
• Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
• How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
• Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
• What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
• What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
• Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
• Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
• Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
• What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
• How does stress affect the body?
• Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
• What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
• How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
• What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
• What were the causes of the Civil War?
• How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
• Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?
• Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
• What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
• How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
• What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

• Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
• Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
• How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
• How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
• What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
• What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
• How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

• How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
• How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
• Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
• Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
• How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
• How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
• What are the pros and cons of fracking?
• What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
• What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
• How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
• Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
• Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
• What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
• What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
• How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
• Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
• How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Has social media made people more or less connected?
• What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
• Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
• When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
• Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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5 facts about religion and americans’ views of donald trump.

For most of the last decade, observers have been trying to understand why so many highly religious Americans have a favorable view of Donald Trump, asking how values voters can support a candidate who has been divorced twice, married three times and found liable for sexual abuse . Is Trump viewed most positively by those who might be described as “Christians in name only” – people who identify as Christians but aren’t actually religious?

The latest Pew Research Center survey sheds light on these and related questions. Here are five facts about religion and views of Trump, based on our survey of 12,693 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 13-25.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore the connection between religion and views of Donald Trump.

For this analysis, we surveyed 12,693 respondents from Feb. 13 to 25, 2024. Most of the respondents (10,642) are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel, an online survey panel recruited through national random sampling of residential addresses, which gives nearly all U.S. adults a chance of selection.

The remaining respondents (2,051) are members of three other panels, the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, the NORC AmeriSpeak panel and the SSRS opinion panel. All three are national survey panels recruited through random sampling (not “opt-in” polls). We used these additional panels to ensure that the survey would have enough Jewish and Muslim respondents to be able to report on their views.

The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, religious affiliation and other categories.

For more, refer to the ATP’s methodology and the methodology for this survey .

Among religious groups, White evangelical Protestants continue to have the most positive opinion of Trump. Overall, two-thirds of White evangelical Protestants say they have a favorable view of the former president, including 30% who have a very favorable opinion of him.

Roughly half of White Catholics (51%) express positive views of Trump, as do 47% of White nonevangelical Protestants and 45% of Hispanic Protestants.

But in every other U.S. religious group large enough to be analyzed in this survey, large majorities have unfavorable opinions of Trump, including:  

• 88% of atheists
• 82% of agnostics
• 80% of Black Protestants
• 79% of Jewish Americans

These religious patterns largely reflect partisan differences . Most White evangelicals tend to vote for Republicans, as do smaller majorities of White Catholics and White nonevangelical Protestants. By contrast, most atheists, agnostics, Black Protestants and Jews tend to vote for Democrats.

Trump’s favorability rating is similar among Christians who attend church regularly and those who don’t. Some observers have pointed out that Trump’s political base consists largely of people who call themselves Christians but don’t go to church. However, our survey shows that Christians who regularly go to church express equally favorable views of Trump as those who don’t often attend religious services.

Among Christians as a whole, 47% of those who attend church at least monthly say they have a favorable view of the former president. That’s on par with the 46% of non-church-attending Christians who say the same.

Among White evangelical Protestants, 68% of regular churchgoers have a positive view of Trump – similar to the 64% among White evangelicals who don’t attend church regularly.

The only exception to this pattern is among White Protestants who do not identify as born-again or evangelical. In this group, Trump is viewed more favorably by those who don’t attend church regularly than by those who do (52% vs. 32%).

Many of the people who view Trump favorably don’t go to religious services regularly – but very few are nonreligious. Overall, 64% of respondents who have a favorable view of Trump say they attend religious services a few times a year or less often, while 35% say they go to services at least once or twice a month. (Among all respondents, 69% say they attend religious services a few times a year or less, while 30% go at least monthly.)

Religious attendance is just one way of looking at religious commitment. Another common way we measure it is to combine survey questions about attendance at religious services, how often people pray and how important religion is to them.

U.S. adults who attend religious services at least weekly, pray daily and say religion is very important in their lives are categorized as highly religious. Those who seldom or never attend services, seldom or never pray and say religion is not too important or not at all important in their lives are counted as having low religious commitment. Everyone else is counted as having medium religious commitment.

Looked at this way, 23% of U.S. adults with a favorable view of Trump are highly religious, including 11% who are highly religious White evangelical Protestants.

Another 62% of Americans with a favorable view of Trump have medium levels of religious commitment, including 13% who are White evangelicals.

Just 15% of people with a favorable view of Trump have low levels of religious commitment. By far the biggest subgroup within this category is religious “nones” – people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” Overall, 18% of people with a positive view of Trump are religious “nones,” including 10% who are “nones” with low levels of religiousness.

Very few of the people who have a positive view of Trump are White evangelical Protestants with a low level of religiousness. Indeed, self-described White evangelical Protestants who are not religiously observant account for less than 1% of the overall U.S. population. Even if a candidate wanted to form a coalition rooted in support from nonreligious evangelicals, there just aren’t enough of them to be a national political base.

Most people who view Trump positively don’t think he is especially religious himself. But many think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like theirs. Just 8% of people who have a positive view of Trump think he is very religious, while 51% think he is somewhat religious and 38% say he is not too or not at all religious .

But 51% of those with a favorable view of Trump think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like their own, including 24% who think he does this a great deal and 27% who say he does this quite a bit.

Among White evangelical Protestants with a favorable view of Trump, just 9% view him as very religious. But roughly two-thirds think he does a great deal (32%) or quite a bit (35%) to stand up for people with religious beliefs like theirs.

Religious “nones” who are culturally Christian view Trump a bit more positively than religious “nones” who aren’t.

One way to measure for differences between “cultural” and “practicing” Christians is to compare Christians who do and don’t do go to church regularly, as we did above. Another is to look at religiously unaffiliated respondents, or “nones” – people who describe themselves, religiously, as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” In our new survey, we asked these Americans whether they think of themselves as Christians “aside from religion … for example ethnically, culturally or because of your family’s background.”

Religious “nones” who identify as culturally Christian have a modestly more favorable opinion of Trump than “nones” who do not identify as Christian in any way. Still, large majorities in both groups express negative views of the former president.

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Two-thirds of Republicans want Trump to retain major political role; 44% want him to run again in 2024

A partisan chasm in views of trump’s legacy, how america changed during donald trump’s presidency, trump’s approval ratings so far are unusually stable – and deeply partisan, most americans don’t see trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s christian, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Silicon Valley is pricing academics out of AI research

With eye-popping salaries and access to costly computing power, ai companies are draining academia of talent.

Fei-Fei Li, the “godmother of artificial intelligence,” delivered an urgent plea to President Biden in the glittering ballroom of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel in June.

The Stanford professor asked Biden to fund a national warehouse of computing power and data sets — part of a “moonshot investment” allowing the country’s top AI researchers to keep up with tech giants.

She elevated the ask Thursday at Biden’s State of the Union address, which Li attended as a guest of Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) to promote a bill to fund a national AI repository.

Li is at the forefront of a growing chorus of academics, policymakers and former employees who argue that the sky-high cost of working with AI models is boxing researchers out of the field, compromising independent study of the burgeoning technology.

As such tech behemoths as Meta, Google and Microsoft funnel billions of dollars into AI, a massive resources gap is building with even the country’s richest universities. Meta aims to procure 350,000 of the specialized computer chips — called GPUs — that are essential to run the gargantuan calculations needed for AI models. In contrast, Stanford’s Natural Language Processing Group has 68 GPUs for all of its work.

After attending State of the Union speech #SOTU tonight, I had a brief exchange w/ President Biden @POTUS . Me: “Mr. President, you gave a historical speech by mentioning AI in the SOTU speech for the first time in history.” @POTUS (smiling): “Yes! And keep it safe”. 1/ pic.twitter.com/cJ7vs440fx — Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) March 8, 2024

To obtain the expensive computing power and data required to research AI systems, scholars frequently partner with tech employees. Meanwhile, tech firms’ eye-popping salaries are draining academia of star talent.

Big tech companies now dominate breakthroughs in the field. In 2022, the tech industry created 32 significant machine learning models, while academics produced three, a significant reversal from 2014, when the majority of AI breakthroughs originated in universities, according to a Stanford report .

Researchers say this lopsided power dynamic is shaping the field in subtle ways, pushing AI scholars to tailor their research for commercial use. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s independent AI research lab would move closer to its product team, ensuring “some level of alignment” between the groups, he said.

“The public sector is now significantly lagging in resources and talent compared to that of industry,” said Li, a former Google employee and the co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. “This will have profound consequences because industry is focused on developing technology that is profit-driven, whereas public-sector AI goals are focused on creating public goods.”

This agency is tasked with keeping AI safe. Its offices are crumbling.

Some are pushing for new sources of funding. Li has been making the rounds in Washington, huddling with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar, dining with the political press at a swanky seafood and steak restaurant and visiting Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers working on AI, including Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.).

Large tech companies have contributed computing resources to the National AI Research Resource, the national warehouse project, including a $20 million donation in computing credits from Microsoft.

“We have long embraced the importance of sharing knowledge and compute resources with our colleagues within academia,” Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz said in a statement.

Policymakers are taking some steps to address the funding gaps. Last year, the National Science Foundation announced a $140 million investment to launch seven university-led National AI Research Institutes to examine how AI could mitigate the effects of climate change and improve education, among other topics.

Eshoo said she hopes to pass the Create AI Act, which has bipartisan backing in the House and the Senate, by the end of the year, when she is scheduled to retire. The legislation “essentially democratizes AI,” Eshoo said.

But scholars say this infusion may not come quickly enough.

As Silicon Valley races to build chatbots and image generators, it is drawing would-be computer science professors with high salaries and the chance to work on interesting AI problems. Nearly 70 percent of people with PhDs in AI end up in private industry compared with 21 percent of graduates two decades ago, according to a 2023 report .

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

Big Tech’s AI boom has pushed the salaries for the best researchers to new heights. Median compensation packages for AI research scientists at Meta climbed from $256,000 in 2020 to $335,250 in 2023, according to Levels.fyi , a salary-tracking website. True stars can attract even more cash: AI engineers with a PhD and several years of experience building AI models can command compensation as high as $20 million over four years, said Ali Ghodsi, who as CEO of AI start-up Databricks is regularly competing to hire AI talent.

“The compensation is through the roof. It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not an uncommon number to hear, roughly.”

University academics often have little choice but to work with industry researchers , with the companies footing the bill for computing power and offering data. Nearly 40 percent of papers presented at leading AI conferences in 2020 had at least one tech employee author, according to the 2023 report . And industry grants often fund PhD students to perform research, said Mohamed Abdalla, a scientist at the Canada-based Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners and incoming assistant professor at the University of Alberta, who has conducted research on the effect of industry on academics’ AI research.

“It was like a running joke that, like, everyone is getting hired by them,” Abdalla said. “And the people that were remaining, they were funded by them — so, in a way, hired by them.”

Google believes private companies and universities should work together to develop the science behind AI, said Jane Park, a spokesperson for the company. Google still routinely publishes its research publicly to benefit the broader AI community, Park said.

David Harris, a former research manager for Meta’s responsible AI team, said corporate labs may not censor the outcome of research but may influence which projects get tackled.

“Anytime you see a mix of authors who are employed by a company and authors who work at a university, you should really scrutinize the motives of the company for contributing to that work,” said Harris, who is now a chancellor’s public scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. “We used to look at people employed in academia to be neutral scholars, motivated only by the pursuit of truth and the interest of society.”

These fake images reveal how AI amplifies our worst stereotypes

Tech giants procure huge amounts of computing power through data centers and have access to GPUs. These resources are expensive: A recent report from Stanford University researchers estimated that Google DeepMind’s large language model, Chinchilla, cost $2.1 million to develop. More than 100 top artificial intelligence researchers on Tuesday urged generative AI companies to offer a legal and technical safe harbor to researchers so they can scrutinize their products without the fear that internet platforms will suspend their accounts or threaten legal action.

The necessity for advanced computing power is likely to only grow as AI scientists crunch more data to improve the performance of their models, said Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech research project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which studies progress in computing.

“To keep getting better, [what] you expect to need is more and more money, more and more computers, more and more data,” Thompson said. “What that’s going to mean is that people who do not have as much compute [and] who do not have as many resources are going to stop being able to participate.”

Tech companies, including Meta and Google, have historically run their AI research labs to resemble universities where scientists decide what projects to pursue to advance the state of research, according to people familiar with the subject who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters.

Those workers were largely isolated from teams focused on building products or generating revenue, the people said. They were judged on influential papers they published or notable breakthroughs — similar to metrics used for their university peers, the people said. Top AI Meta scientists Yann LeCun and Joelle Pineau hold dual appointments at New York University and McGill University, blurring the lines between industry and academia.

Top AI researchers say OpenAI, Meta and more hinder independent evaluations

In an increasingly competitive market for generative AI products , research freedom inside companies could wane. In April, Google announced it was merging two of its AI research groups — DeepMind, which it acquired in 2014, and the Brain team from Google Research — into one department called Google DeepMind. Last year, Google started to take more advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing research papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, The Washington Post has reported .

Meta has also reshuffled its research teams. The company placed its Fundamental AI Research team, known as FAIR, under the helm of its virtual-reality division, Reality Labs, in 2022 and last year reassigned some of the group’s researchers to a new generative AI product team. Last month, Zuckerberg told investors that FAIR would work “closer together” with the generative AI product team, arguing that while the two groups would still conduct research on “different time horizons,” it was helpful to the company “to have some level of alignment” between them.

“In a lot of tech companies right now, they hired research scientists that knew something about AI and maybe set certain expectations about how much freedom they would have to set their own schedule and set their own research agenda,” Harris said. “That’s changing, especially for the companies that are moving frantically right now to ship these products.”

A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Google acquired DeepMind in 2010. Google acquired the AI start-up in 2014. The article has been corrected.

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

Paola belingheri.

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

Filippo Chiarello

Andrea fronzetti colladon.

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

3 Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Paola Rovelli

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

Associated Data

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data collection

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

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

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

Text processing and keyword extraction

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

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

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

Classification of research topics

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

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

Evaluation of semantic importance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overview of main topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compensation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision-making

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

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

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

Career progression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization

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

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

Human capital

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

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

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

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

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

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

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

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

Research gaps and conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

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

Funding Statement

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

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