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Research Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

* E-mail: [email protected]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor: Elisa Ughetto, Politecnico di Torino, ITALY

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data collection

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

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

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

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t001

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t002

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.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g001

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

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g002

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

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g003

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

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.g004

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

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

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256474.t003

Compensation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision-making.

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

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

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

Career progression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization.

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

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

Human capital.

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

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

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

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

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

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

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

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

Research gaps and conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting information

S1 text. keywords used for paper selection..

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

Acknowledgments

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

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Promoting Gender Equality: A Systematic Review of Interventions

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• Volume 35 , pages 318–343, ( 2022 )

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• Michaela Guthridge   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5157-9839 1 , 3 ,
• Maggie Kirkman 2 ,
• Tania Penovic 4 , 5 &
• Melita J. Giummarra 1 , 5  

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More than four decades have passed since the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was adopted. Now is an opportune time to consider whether the interventions seeking to realise CEDAW’s aspirations have brought us closer to achieving gender equality. This systematic review aimed to identify and synthesise evidence for the effectiveness of social justice, cognitive, or behaviour-change interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women or girls. Interventions could be implemented in any context, with any mode of delivery and duration, if they measured gender equity or discrimination outcomes, and were published in English in peer-reviewed journals. Papers on violence against women and sexuality were not eligible. Seventy-eight papers reporting qualitative (n = 36), quantitative (n = 23), and multi-methods (n = 19) research projects met the eligibility criteria after screening 7,832 citations identified from psycINFO, ProQuest, Scopus searches, reference lists and expert recommendations. Findings were synthesised narratively. Improved gender inclusion was the most frequently reported change (n = 39), particularly for education and media interventions. Fifty percent of interventions measuring social change in gender equality did not achieve beneficial effects. Most gender mainstreaming interventions had only partial beneficial effects on outcomes, calling into question their efficacy in practice. Twenty-eight interventions used education and awareness-raising strategies, which also predominantly had only partial beneficial effects. Overall research quality was low to moderate, and the key findings created doubt that interventions to date have achieved meaningful change. Interventions may not have achieved macrolevel change because they did not explicitly address meso and micro change. We conclude with a summary of the evidence for key determinants of the promotion of gender equality, including a call to address men’s emotional responses (micro) in the process of achieving gender equality (micro/meso/macrolevels).

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Introduction

The adoption of CEDAW was a remarkable achievement in the history of the women’s movement. Its ultimate aim was to catalyse social transformation that transcends cursory legislative reform (Facio & Morgan, 2009 ). Article 3 of CEDAW promotes this social transformation, calling for state parties to ‘take all appropriate measures’ to achieve gender equality. In practice this has included, but has not been limited to, gender-blind strategies, awareness raising, litigation, international advocacy, art and social media activism, and gender mainstreaming (see Table 1 for definition).

The Global Gender Gap Index 2022 benchmarks 146 countries on the evolution of gender-based gaps in economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment (World Economic Forum, 2022 ). Although the Index measures gender parity (defined in Table 1 ) rather than substantive equality, it is a useful tool for analysing progression and regression. With scores depicting the distance to parity on a scale of zero to one hundred, the 2022 Report found the average distance completed to parity was 68 per cent. With the present trajectory, it will take 132 years to close the gender gap and 151 years to achieve equal economic participation and opportunity (World Economic Forum, 2022 ). Moreover, these estimates are predicted to worsen as the world faces crises in politics, economics, health, food, and the environment. Now more than ever we must assess our successes and failures in attempting to reduce gender inequality and discrimination.

The aim of this systematic review was to identify and synthesise evidence of the effectiveness of social justice interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women and girls. Because recent systematic reviews have examined the effectiveness of interventions targeting violence against women and sexuality (e.g. Karakurt et al., 2019 ; Bourey et al., 2015 ; Yakubovich et al., 2018 ) we did not include these types of interventions. We were unable, however, to identify systematic reviews examining other interventions targeting gender equality. Therefore, this review focused on interventions that sought to achieve gender equality in any political, social, cultural or economic context, except violence against women and sexuality.

Theoretical Framework

The truism ‘context matters’ is pertinent to this systematic review. According to contextual social psychology, effects brought about at a microlevel are modified by the mesolevel and macrolevel, and vice versa (Pettigrew, 2021 ). In this review, microlevel variables include individual characteristics, including biology, beliefs, behaviours, values, and emotions, such as empathy and resentment. Mesolevel contextual factors include interpersonal interactions in family, work, and school etc. (e.g. gender segregation), and macrolevel context includes broader social and cultural norms, including religion and politics. Social norms in this context are “rules of action shared by people in a given society or group; they define what is considered normal and acceptable behaviour for the members of that group” (Cislaghi & Heise, 2020 , p. 409). In this sense, social norms exist within the mind, while gender norms exist outside it, and both are produced and reproduced through social interaction. In contextual social psychology, beliefs are embedded in institutions that affect our relational behaviours. While there are psychological causes of macrophenomena (Pettigrew, 2021 ), these phenomena (such as patriarchy) also influence individual affect. For example, affirmative action laws (macro) should increase contact between genders (meso), which in turn should reduce individual prejudice (micro). While this is a top down example, it also works from the bottom up, whereby micro behaviours can affect macrophenomena. In this context, prejudice against women and girls is a “multilevel syndrome” (Pettigrew, 2021 , p. 74).

“Systems thinking” also recognises the intersection between problems and processes from local to global levels (Arnold & Wade, 2015 ). Systems thinking is a complex interplay of a multitude of constantly evolving factors (Banerjee & Lowalekar, 2021 ). According to systems thinking, gender equality will be realised when interventions at the micro, meso and macrolevel are configured holistically, rather than individualistically. Interventions at any level need to consider and accommodate the role of processes and factors that may support or hinder the effectiveness of the intervention to yield population benefits. The different contextual levels that impact on gender inequality may be successfully tackled by feminist movements, but integrating the interventions pluralistically rather than monistically remains elusive as feminist movements appear to continue to work in silos. In undertaking strategies across different contexts, however, we are more likely to achieve substantive equality. But we need to address this complexity in the three contextual levels (micro, meso, macro) in order to predict, modify and eliminate discrimination against women and girls. These theoretical frameworks are used throughout this review to aid the synthesis of the evidence and identification of implications for practice.

Review Design

The Sample, Phenomena of Interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type (SPIDER) tool was used to design the review (Cooke et al., 2012 ). SPIDER is appropriate for systematic reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and multi-methods research. We use the term multi method rather than mixed method because mixed method studies could be considered to have used multiple methods of data collection/analysis, but not all multi-methods studies follow “mixed methods” procedures as they do not always provide an integrated synthesis of findings across the methods used (Creswell, 2009 ). The search terms are documented in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2. The review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Page et al., 2021 ). Rapid review methods were used for citation screening and data extraction (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ). Papers were eligible according to the criteria defined below.

The sample could include people of any age, race, or gender in local, global, or transboundary intervention contexts. The phenomena of interest included any social justice, cognitive or behaviour-change interventions that sought to reduce gender inequality, gender bias, or discrimination against women, with any mode of delivery and duration. Interventions could be any type of program (e.g. behaviour change), policy (e.g. gender mainstreaming), process (e.g. awareness raising) or experimental condition that aimed to influence gender-focused outcomes. An intervention was categorised as achieving its aim (e.g., having a beneficial effect on gender equality or reducing discrimination), partially achieving its aim, not achieving its aim according to the assessment in the paper (i.e. if the analyses in the respective paper found that the intervention did not work), or having a harmful effect (i.e. resulting in increased discrimination or inequality).

The intervention being investigated could have been administered by any party, including expert advocates, government or non-government organisations (NGOs), social justice enterprises, or academic researchers. The research design did not need to include a comparator or control group, but must have incorporated a between-groups or pre-post comparison, or retrospective assessment of the impact, feasibility or acceptability of the intervention or program. The primary outcome for evaluation was any measure of actual or perceived level of, or change in, gender (in)equality, gender bias, or discrimination against women or girls. Secondary outcomes were the perceived level of inclusion, solidarity, awareness, empowerment, or equity. The research methods could include qualitative, quantitative, and mixed- or multi-methods. Eligible papers were published in peer-reviewed journals in English from 1990 to 2022. Whilst CEDAW was adopted in 1979, this timeframe was selected to ensure contemporaneity. A protocol for the review was developed a priori, but not registered.

Search Strategy and Eligibility Screening

As this was a review of research across multiple disciplines, three databases were used: Scopus, ProQuest, and psycINFO, in addition to reviewing reference lists and recommendations by experts. Search terms were adapted to each database. After screening the first search results it was evident that the terms were not broad enough, so a second search including additional terms was undertaken (see Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 for terms of both search strategies). All search results were uploaded to Covidence for eligibility screening and duplicate removal by reviewer one. Using Abstrackr, a second author screened a minimum of 10 percent of citations, consistent with rapid review methods (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ), or until < 50 percent of citations were predicted to be relevant. Abstrackr is a machine-learning program that generates predictions of the likely relevance of records based on judgements made by the reviewer (Wallace et al., 2012 ), which has been found to have excellent sensitivity and to generate significant workload savings (Giummarra et al., 2020 ). After titles and abstracts were screened, full text articles were assessed against the eligibility criteria, noting reasons for exclusion. Both reviewers met to discuss any conflicts; if consensus could not be reached a third author was consulted. The authors included experts in gender equality who provided significant input into the search strategy, identification of relevant literature, and synthesis.

Quality Assessment

The quality of research was assessed by the first author using a standard method (Kmet et al., 2004 ) with the added criterion of whether papers reported approval by a formally constituted human research ethics committee. Supplementary Tables 3–5 specify the quality criteria. Overall quality was classified as poor (studies meeting < 0.50 criteria), adequate (0.50–0.69), good (0.70–0.80), or strong (> 0.80) consistent with previous studies (Parsons et al., 2017 ).

Data Extraction and Synthesis

Data were extracted in three categories: The authors and publication year of the paper ; research aims, theoretical approach, methods, sample size, eligibility criteria, and sample characteristics; and, the intervention , aim, type, sector, geographic region, description, duration, targeted outcomes, effects, and short- and long-term impacts. Figures to summarise the proportion of studies from different geographic regions were generated using www.sankeymatic.com/build/ . Ten percent of the full-text articles were randomly selected, stratified by research method, for independent data extraction by a second author, consistent with rapid review methods (Plüddemann et al., 2018 ). The data extracted from both reviewers was cross-checked for accuracy and completeness. Sources of heterogeneity were noted, particularly variation in study samples, settings, contexts and intervention designs or aims. Given the heterogeneity of the interventions and the research, meta-analysis and meta-synthesis were not appropriate. Therefore, the findings were thematically synthesised according to intervention sector (e.g. education, employment etc.) and context (i.e., micro, meso and macro levels).

A total of 7,832 records were screened for eligibility with the last search conducted on 18 July 2022 (Fig.  1 ). Seventy-eight papers, each reporting a single intervention and using qualitative (n = 36), multi (19), or quantitative (23) methods, met the inclusion criteria. The characteristics of qualitative, quantitative, and multi-methods studies are summarised in Supplementary Tables 6, 7, and 8, respectively. The intervention effects for each study are summarised in Supplementary Tables 9 and 10.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocol (PRISMA) Flow Diagram

Five interventions were at the microlevel, 37 were at the mesolevel, and 17 were at the macrolevel. The final 19 interventions straddled micro-meso, meso-macro, or micro–macro. No intervention covered all three levels or took a systems thinking approach.

The overall quality of each paper is detailed in Supplementary Tables 6–8, and ratings for each quality domain are in Supplementary Tables 3–5. Studies using quantitative methods (range 0.58–1.00; median = 0.92, Q1 = 0.82, Q3 = 1.00) had significantly higher quality than qualitative (range 0.41–0.91; median = 0.73, Q1 = 0.67, Q3 = 0.79; χ2(1) = 13.71, p  < 0.001) and multi-method studies (range 0.48–0.94; median = 0.76, Q1 = 0.63, Q3 = 0.82; χ2(1) = 21.96, p  < 0.001). There was no difference in the quality of qualitative and multi-methods studies ( p  = 0.97).

All quantitative studies articulated the research question and reported the results adequately. Randomisation and blinding were used in most studies. While estimates of variance and controlling for confounding were not consistently reported, 18 studies using quantitative methods were considered to be strong quality, and seven had a perfect score.

In reports of qualitative studies, the study design, context, and conclusion were generally addressed well. However, only six studies used verification processes (see Table 1 for definition). No qualitative study received a perfect score; 20 studies were considered to be good quality.

For multi-method studies, the objective, context, data collection, analysis, and conclusion were generally reported well. Blinding was not applicable, and estimates of variance and control of confounding were generally not reported. No multi-method study received a perfect score although the quality of six of multi-methods papers was assessed as good.

Corresponding authors were contacted to confirm ethics approval; authors of two papers confirmed that the study did not receive ethics approval, and authors from 16 studies did not respond or confirm whether they had ethics approval. The omission of evidence of ethical approval is concerning and should be addressed in all future research with humans. The 18 studies with respect to which we either could not confirm ethics approval or did not receive ethics approval were all published in highly ranked journals. Furthermore, it was not, in general, clear in the majority of papers which agency or organisation conducted the intervention or undertook the study (e.g. government agency, NGO, academic researchers) making it difficult to assess reflexivity, and the prospect of future implementation.

Included Interventions

Intervention sectors.

Interventions were implemented and evaluated in various sectors: education (26 interventions); politics (10); employment (8); information, communications, and technology (6); legal (5); economics (6); health (3); sustainable development and land rights (3); sport (3); and women’s and girls’ rights (2). Interventions in the areas of conflict and of water, sanitation, and hygiene were reported in one paper each.

Intervention Settings

Interventions were set evenly throughout the Global South (35 papers) and the Global North (39 papers). Interventions were evaluated in Africa (15), Europe (12), North America (19), Asia (10), Latin America (6), the Middle East and North Africa (4), the United Kingdom (6), and the Pacific (4). Just under half of the Global South interventions were conducted in rural settings (16/35), whereas Global North interventions tended to be urban (22/39) (Fig.  2 ).

Settings for interventions in Global North and South Countries

Research Participant Characteristics

Twenty-seven interventions included both women and men as participants, 30 included only women, and one intervention included only men. Thirteen studies did not report the gender of the sample, and in seven studies gender of the sample or population was not applicable (e.g. intervention sought to affect a broad population approach irrespective of gender, such as a new law that applied to the whole population in order to improve gender equality, or a collective political party that sought to influence gender issues in parliament). Thirty papers did not report other participant demographic characteristics. Where sample characteristics were reported, participants were 10–80 years of age, with education level ranging from none to post-graduate.

Study Characteristics

All papers but one (Devasia, 1998 ) were published after 2005. Most papers reported data gathered across years, with twelve interventions taking place over hours or weeks. The timeframe did not appear to be associated with whether or not the intervention had a significant beneficial effect on the aims of the intervention. For example, McGregor and Davies’ ( 2019 ) two year study of the effects of a pay equity campaign achieved its aim (legislation was enacted), but Hayhurst’s ( 2014 ) girls’ entrepreneurship study that ran for several years had harmful effects (girls income was taken by men). Similarly, Zawadzki et al., ( 2012 ) board game intervention that takes 60–90 min achieved its aims but Krishnan et al. ( 2014 ) conditional cash transfer study over a month had no effect on social change.

In the qualitative and multi-method studies, theoretical frameworks were rarely reported. The few papers that did report theoretical frameworks used feminist standpoint theory, post-structuralist feminist theory, or social constructivist theory. Qualitative data collection methods were diverse: interviews (41 studies), focus groups (19), document analysis (18), observations (15), case studies (2), and visual techniques (e.g. PhotoVoice) (2). Quantitative and multi-method studies predominantly used surveys and questionnaires (22), with one study each using of the following tools: Gender Equitable Men’s Scale (Gottert et al., 2016 ), the Knowledge of Gender Equity Scale, the Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng et al., 2009 ), the Feminist Identity Scale (Rickard, 1989 ), and the Gender Related System Justification scale (Jost & Kay, 2003 ).

Few interventions aimed to achieve gender equality per se. Rather, they aimed to achieve components of gender equality (see Table 1 for definition), which ranged from gender neutrality through to striving towards a feminist revolution. Overall aims included greater awareness, inclusion, empowerment, parity, equity, and substantive equality (Supplementary Tables 6–8, column 3). The evaluation of whether interventions achieved their aims was usually assessed through surveying participants. The most common aim was to enhance “empowerment” (n = 18), which was generally not clearly defined. The interventions had various levels of effectiveness, with 37 studies having a significant beneficial effect on the aim of the intervention (i.e., they achieved their aims); 31 having a partial beneficial impact on the aim of the intervention; four studies having no beneficial or harmful impact on the aim of the intervention; and six studies having a harmful effect on the aim of the intervention (e.g., the intervention led to increased discrimination, inequality, or abuse). Examples of harmful effects include the ‘Girl Effect’ program in Uganda which resulted in participants being abused or robbed of the money they had earned (Hayhurst, 2014 ), and a girls’ resiliency program in the USA that resulted in increased abuse from male peers (Brinkman et al., 2011 ).

Intervention Design and Effectiveness by Sector

Education and training interventions.

Evaluations of education and training interventions were reported in 18 papers (6 qualitative, 6 quantitative, 6 multi-methods). Education interventions covered a range contexts (3 micro-meso, 11 meso, 3 meso-macro, 1 macro). Most interventions (14) used awareness-raising workshops targeting individual change, and reported only partially achieving the aim of the interventions. Five workshops were assessed in randomised controlled trials. Two qualitative studies targeted increasing girls’ enrolment in formal education in Morocco (Eger et al., 2018 ) and India (Jain & Singh, 2017 ), both of which achieved the aims of the interventions. One qualitative study in the Democratic Republic of Congo targeted behaviour change in men only (Pierotti et al., 2018 ), which had a partial beneficial effect because men increased their willingness to contribute to household chores but maintained control over the broader gender system. This intervention was an eight-week long mesolevel men’s discussion group focused on “undoing gender” through social interaction (e.g. promoting a more equal division of labour in the household, improving intra-household relationship quality, and questioning existing gender norms).

Gender parity in schools did not signal an end to, or transformation of, gender inequities in the schools or communities studied (Ralfe, 2009 ). To bring about education policy reform, Palmén et al. ( 2020 ) found that top-down institutional commitment to gender equality was essential to create change. However, bottom-up strategies were also needed as teachers had to foster cooperative learning that encouraged working together and valuing different abilities across genders (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ). Sufficient resources, in addition to monitoring and evaluation of education initiatives, were found to be a key to intervention success (Palmén et al., 2020 ). Ultimately, social norms did not change beyond the school environment (Chisamya et al., 2012 ; Jain & Singh, 2017 ).

While interventions in traditional education contexts only partially achieved their aims, experiential learning was found to be a powerful process to deliver knowledge about gender equity in a nonthreatening way (Zawadzki et al., 2012a ). Zawadzki’s study was a mesolevel intervention that used a board game to teach participants the cumulative effect of subtle, nonconscious bias, to discuss how bias hinders women’s promotion in the workplace, and to find solutions for what can be done to reduce that bias. They found that the delivery of information was less effective when new knowledge did not promote self-efficacy or lead participants to resist perceived attempts to influence their beliefs or behaviours. Furthermore, they established that learning about gender inequity was not sufficient for knowledge retention. Rather, participants had to link the knowledge to their own experiences and be empowered to feel that they could act on that knowledge.

Awareness-raising interventions in education and training generally only partially achieved the aims of the interventions, and did not necessarily translate into behaviour change (Ralfe, 2009 ). In the strong quality (0.93) quantitative mesolevel study by Moss-Racusin et al. ( 2018 ), the Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS) intervention was found to achieve significantly greater awareness of bias in participants compared to the non-intervention control condition; however, effects on behaviour were not assessed. This intervention presented participants with short videos about findings from gender bias research in one of three conditions. One condition illustrated findings using narratives (compelling stories), the second presented the same results using expert interviews (straightforward facts), and a hybrid condition included both narrative and expert interview videos.

A lack of awareness, knowledge, or understanding of women’s human rights was found to be a key barrier to the achievement of gender equality in education-based interventions (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Gervais ( 2010 ) reported that awareness-raising can have direct effects on participants by giving them confidence to speak up against violations of their rights, although they noted that this might anger violators. Similarly, education was found in some cases to enable women to negotiate power-sharing with their husbands, while other women were verbally abused and threatened because their husbands disapproved of the education program (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Similar to the study by Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ), Murphy-Graham ( 2009 ) sought to “undo gender” by encouraging students to rethink gender relations in their everyday lives (mesolevel). Including men together with women in education programs enabled women to gauge men’s reactions to social change in a safe environment (Cislaghi et al., 2019 ). Potential harmful effects of interventions are further summarised under the ‘The problem of hostile affect’ header below.

STEM Education

Among education interventions were a subset of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) education interventions. These specifically targeted secondary school girls as a pathway to tertiary STEM education, and were reported in eight papers (1 qualitative, 3 quantitative, 4 multi methods). The design of interventions varied from science clubs, outreach programs, after school sessions, residential camps and immersion days. Archer et al. ( 2014 ), however, took a multipronged approach. Their intervention included school excursions, visits from STEM Ambassadors and a researcher-in-residence, a STEM ‘speed networking’ event, and participation in a series of teacher-led sessions for girls aged 13–14 years. Despite this significant investment, the intervention did not significantly change students’ aspirations of studying science, although it did appear to have a beneficial effect on broadening students’ understanding of the range of science jobs.

All STEM education interventions were aimed at the mesolevel and were located in the urban Global North. While the long-term impact (e.g. increased enrolment of women into tertiary STEM education) were inconsistent among studies. Gorbacheva et al. ( 2014 ) found that secondary same-sex education had no influence on this objective. Alternatively, Hughes et al. ( 2013 ) found having role models was more critical than sex segregation. Finally, Lackey et al. ( 2007 ), Lang et al. ( 2015 ) and Watermeyer ( 2012 ) all established that a network of support (e.g. family, school, industry) made a positive difference to girls equality in STEM education.

Employment Interventions

Eight interventions focused on women’s employment: 4 qualitative, 2 quantitative, 2 multi-methods studies. They covered a range of contexts (1 micro/meso, 5 meso, 2 meso/macro). Three interventions addressed women’s promotion (Eriksson‐Zetterquist & Styhre, 2008 ; Grada et al., 2015 ; Smith et al., 2015 ). Two interventions evaluated microenterprise; one produced harmful effects (Hayhurst, 2014 ), and the other only partially achieved its aim (Strier, 2010 ). Hayhurst ( 2014 ) evaluated an intervention auspiced by the Nike Foundation and concluded that it had an unfair and deleterious effect by placing the burden of social change on girls. In this intervention, focusing on the mesolevel, girls were taught to be entrepreneurs to enable them to escape abuse, buy land, grow food, and work. In practice, this economic empowerment strategy led to increased abuse by men who wanted to take the girls’ money to pay their own taxes and fines. This study was good quality (0.73). Participants in the study by Strier ( 2010 ) thought that microenterprise promised self-realisation and escape from the slavery of the labour market, but they found it to be a false promise, characterising the informal sector as both a disappointment and a fraud. Overall, employment interventions led to unreliable and inconsistent outcomes.

Economic Interventions

Six interventions (1 qualitative, 2 quantitative, 3 multi-methods studies) addressed various contexts (1 micro, 1 micro/macro, 2 meso/macro, 2 macro interventions) that targeted economic empowerment. Overall, the interventions partially achieved their aims. For microfinance interventions, women benefited less than men because they were given smaller loans for less lucrative businesses (Haase, 2012 ). Krishnan et al. ( 2014 ) conducted a good quality (0.79) multi-method study of a micro–macro level intervention that provided conditional cash transfers in India, and found minimal positive effects from the implementation of this scheme to address social behaviours related to valuing girls. In this study, parents had to register the birth of their daughter in order to receive financial benefit, but this did not transform the social mindset that daughters are a burden. In another study, the size and frequency of cash transfers directly influenced outcomes: large but infrequent payments enabled investment that could facilitate economic transformation (Morton, 2019 ). Lump-sum payments also challenged stereotypes about what women could invest in, and could transform the gender asset gap. Institution of a social protection floor (e.g. welfare benefits) enhanced women’s power and control over household decision-making in financial matters and household spending in South Africa (Patel et al., 2013 ). While a social protection floor had benefits for women’s empowerment at the microlevel, it did not transform unequal and unjust gendered social relations of power at the macrolevel.

Legal Interventions

Five interventions (3 qualitative, 2 quantitative studies) in two contexts (1 meso/macro, 4 macro) reported on legal interventions. In Zartaloudis’s ( 2015 ) qualitative macrolevel study of an employment strategy in Greece and Portugal, legislation was found to have an important but not transformative effect on gender equality in employment. Three other studies found that changes in law must be accompanied by incentives and penalties in order to be effective (Kim & Kang, 2016 ; Palmén et al., 2020 ; Singh & Peng, 2010 ). While the decline in levels of discrimination was at first sharp after enacting anti-discrimination legislation, its implementation plateaued over time, calling into question the long-term sustainable effects of law reform without adequate enforcement mechanisms. In this macrolevel study by Singh and Peng ( 2010 ), the Ontario Pay Equity Act was effective because it was proactive in persuing pay equity, rather than being complaint based.

Legal opportunity and litigation were strategic choices in campaign strategies in one study, playing an important role in effecting change to prevent discriminatory pay for work typically performed by women (McGregor & Davies, 2019 ). The strong quality (0.92) macrolevel study by Mueller et al. ( 2019 ) increased access to legal services in order to improve legal knowledge in rural Tanzania. It found that, despite increased access to legal services, women still had moderate to low knowledge of marital laws, and only 2.7 percent of women would refer someone to a paralegal for problems with a widow’s assets, divorce, or marital disputes. Mueller et al. ( 2019 ) concluded that an increased investment in access to justice needed to be made through informal channels (mesolevel change) in addition to the macrolevel law reform.

Political Interventions

Ten papers (4 qualitative, 3 quantitative, 3 multi-methods studies) that covered a variety of contexts (1 micro/meso, 2 meso, 2 meso/macro, 5 macro) reported assessments of political interventions. Electing women to council increased other women’s access to councillors because women had greater heterosocial networks (i.e., comprising women and men), but did not affect men’s access to councillors (Benstead, 2019 ; Levy & Sakaiya, 2020 ). However, increasing the number of women in public office did not necessarily improve equality (McLean & Maalsen, 2017 ). For example, an evaluation of gendered outcomes of Hon. Julia Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister of Australia saw increased gender-based denigration and vilification of her leadership (McLean & Maalsen, 2017 ).

A qualitative macro study using interviews and ethnography to explore the impact of political gender quotas in Mali (Johnson, 2019 ) found that savings groups, together with political gender quotas, were important for catalysing the first steps towards social and political transformation. In Mali, gender quota laws required political parties to field a minimum of 30 percent women candidates, and to include a woman within the first three places on a party’s candidate list. In this context, savings and credit associations developed women’s self-efficacy and increased their confidence to become political candidates (Johnson, 2019 ).

An example of discursive change based on political activism was found by Cowell-Meyers’ ( 2017 ) multi-method study examining the impact of a new feminist political party in Sweden. Near consensus by political parties that gender equality needed to be tackled through government intervention was achieved through the efforts of the small women’s rights party. However, another multi-method mesolevel study examining the effects of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) in Europe found that they either ignored or subverted gender mainstreaming language (S. Lang, 2009 ). Gender mainstreaming policy interventions were found to have only partially achieved their aims, but were successful when law and policy detailed specific roles and responsibilities for action (Kim & Kang, 2016 ). Policymakers in two other studies were found to avoid the responsibility of implementation not because they opposed gender mainstreaming itself, but because they objected to being forced into it (Hwang & Wu, 2019 ; Kim & Kang, 2016 ). Therefore, the attitude of bureaucrats (microlevel) was considered to be an important factor in implementing gender equality initiatives at the macrolevel.

The strong (perfect quality score) quantitative study by Saguy and Szekeres ( 2018 ) reported on the effect on gender-based attitudes (microlevel) following exposure to the 2017 Women’s March across the US and worldwide in response to Donald Trump’s inauguration. The research found that large-scale collective action had a polarising effect on those exposed to it. Over time, men who identified more closely with their own gender increased the degree to which they justified gender inequality after exposure to the protests, suggesting a backlash reaction (mesolevel). People who were found to be positively affected by collective action were already in favour of the protesters’ cause. The backlash found for high-identifying men was explained by reactance theory (Brehm, 1966 ) whereby people become motivationally aroused by a threat to or elimination of a behavioral freedom (Brehm, 1989 ).

Barriers to Achieving Gender Equality: The Problem of Hostile Affect

No study accounted for men’s and boys’ emotions (microlevel change) as part of the aim and design of the intervention, but their significance became apparent in the results of several studies. Men and boys reported feeling hostility, resentment, fear and jealousy when social norms were challenged. Attempts at addressing gender inequality were found to threaten men’s sense of entitlement, and it was theorised that boys expected to be the centre of attention (Brinkman et al., 2011 ). In the meso study by MacPhail et al. ( 2019 ) that evaluated a men’s participation program in South Africa, participants reported equality as a zero-sum game that meant respecting women equated to disrespecting men. In that intervention, activities included intensive small group workshops, informal community dialogue through home visits, mural painting to stimulate discussions of key messages, informal theatre, soccer tournaments, and film screenings. In another study, women’s oppression was maintained by men because they feared losing control of ‘their’ women (Devasia, 1998 ). In several studies, men shared their fear of being perceived as weak or feminine in front of their peers or community (Bigler et al., 2019 ; McCarthy & Moon, 2018 ; Murphy-Graham, 2009 ; Pierotti et al., 2018 ; Singhal & Rattine-Flaherty, 2006 ). Male participants in the study by Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ) believed that allowing women to be leaders in households would disintegrate society. They believed that upholding men’s lack of accountability and position as ‘boss’ was important to maintaining the fabric of society.

In contrast, Cislaghi ( 2018 ) found that men in Senegal did not resist increased political participation of women. And a radio program in Afghanistan that addressed gender equality was found not to offend men’s cultural or religious beliefs, and ultimately succeeded in changing attitudes and behaviours towards women and girls (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). The outcome included changes in the community, such as giving permission to women to leave their home alone, to vote, to go to school, and to reject child marriage. While participants expressed increased empowerment (micro), they also acknowledged that they may have their rights, but can never make decisions pertaining to their rights (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). For example, women may have the right to vote (macro), but they cannot go to vote or decide who to vote for without male guardianship (meso). In that study, 15 h of civic education material was promoted by radio, focusing on peace, democracy, and women’s rights. At the community level, interviews and focus groups with participants revealed that there was no resistance to listening to the radio program from men or families. However, the Sengupta et al. study was not longitudinal and had a relatively small sample of 115 people (72.2% women), and the women in the study may not have been in a position that allowed them to admonish the men in their community.

It was found in one study that resistance and backlash can be ameliorated by including men and boys in the development and delivery of interventions (Sengupta et al., 2007 ). Behaviour change in men required an increase in empathy to achieve the aim of gender equality (Becker & Swim, 2011 ). Hadjipavlou ( 2006 ) and Vachhani and Pullen (2019) found that empathy was a viable alternative feminist strategy. In their qualitative study, Hwang and Wu ( 2019 ) in Taiwan found that trust-building between civil servants and advocates reduced resistance and hostility. Activists in this intervention used four strategies: (1) Giving praise and encouragement instead of criticism and blame; (2) Engaging civil servants on a personal level to create bonding; (3) Appeasing fears about being blamed by offering assistance; (4) Attempting to invoke their identification with the values of gender mainstreaming through informal educational efforts, all of which are mesolevel strategies.

Promoting Social Change to Reduce Gender Inequality

There was a wide array of types of change in different aspects of gender equality, with interventions varying in their success across settings and contexts. Table 2 summarises the types of change (e.g. legal, financial, behaviour, social) and the context (i.e., micro, meso, macro) that were identified and whether interventions aims were fully or partially achieved, or were not achieved, or had a harmful effect. Physical change, such as increased physical presence of women through inclusion or solidarity (meso) was the most consistently achieved beneficial outcome. Interventions targeting macrolevel social change, however, predominantly failed to achieve their aims or had harmful effects, reflecting how hard it is to realise social change, especially from a single, usually localised, intervention. Quotas could perhaps achieve their aim, although this finding was derived mostly from one good quality study (Johnson, 2019 ). The largest group of interventions were those implemented in education-based contexts, but these generally only partially achieved their aims, and focused mostly on physical changes (e.g., inclusion, solidarity). Most gender mainstreaming interventions did not achieved their aims.

Altogether, the findings confirm that social transformation is not automatic, easy, nor necessarily sustainable (Murphy-Graham, 2009 ). Furthermore, economic transformation is constrained if it is not supported by concurrent social transformation (Haase, 2012 ). One researcher, reporting a good quality meso-macro multi-method educational study in rural Bangladesh, claimed to have achieved social transformation (Sperandio, 2011 ). The appointment of women into roles that are traditionally occupied by men (in this case, teaching) led to widespread acceptance and normalisation of women in other non-traditional roles in a conservative village. Because the researcher did not interview or survey members of the community in which the intervention was evaluated, it is not clear whether broader social change was achieved.

It was found in several studies that dialogue was key to creating change in gender norms (Hwang & Wu, 2019 ; MacPhail et al., 2019 ; McGregor & Davies, 2019 ; Murphy-Graham, 2009 ; Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ). However, Matich et al.’s ( 2019 ) qualitative study of the #freethenipple campaign and Boling’s ( 2020 ) study of the #ShePersisted campaign found that small steps bring about only small changes. For instance, in the #freethenipple campaign, women took control of how they were represented (microlevel) in order to challenge patriarchal gender norms (macrolevel). The authors noted that, despite good intentions, a hashtag cannot erase stereotyping. Pierotti et al. ( 2018 ) also found that small changes (micro) in quotidian tasks (e.g., participation in household chores) did not lead to substantive social change (macrolevel change). That is, while changes in tasks occurred with relative ease, social transformation through the cumulative effect of small steps towards egalitarianism did not occur.

In comparison, the qualitative study by McCarthy and Moon ( 2018 ) examined a women’s program in Ghana and found that changing everyday practices did matter, but becoming cognisant of the need for revolution led people to become overwhelmed and immune to change efforts. The researchers found that a key challenge in achieving social transformation was the need to bring about changes in daily interactions. For instance, one participant stated that if a person is not empowered at home, no matter how much money you give them, they are going to need more (McCarthy & Moon, 2018 ).

All genders need to participate to achieve a re-socialisation (Brinkman et al., 2011 ). Sengupta et al. ( 2007 ) concluded that their radio program would have alienated men if it had targeted only women. By including all genders, potential resistance to change can be neutralised (Devasia, 1998 ). In summary, social transformation is possible, but transformation is not likely to be universal or successful across all contexts (Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2018 ), particularly from any single monistic intervention. Holistic responses that take account of system thinking may create the change needed.

Overall, despite concerted effort, it seems that in the past thirty years we have not uncovered the keys to social change in order to enhance gender equality and non-discrimination against girls and women. Perhaps the reviewed interventions did not achieve macrolevel change because they did not simultaneously and explicitly address meso and micro change. Whilst CEDAW seeks the ‘elimination of all forms of discrimination’, achievement of that aim is far from complete, although it is not surprising that no single intervention could catalyse social change that achieves CEDAW’s objective. This review demonstrates that it will take time and a variety of endeavours to achieve gender equality.

To summarise the substantive lessons from this systematic review, we offer the following distillation as a summary of the findings to date. This distillation includes definitive statements that should be viewed only in the context of this review and may not generalise across all efforts towards gender equality in all societies.

What is Ineffective in Promoting Gender Equality

Small changes do not lead to big changes. Small concessions are granted to maintain peace, while big changes are often denied to maintain power.

Men and boys can feel the micro effects of fear, hostility, resentment, and jealousy when meso-macro gendered social norms are challenged.

Increased confidence, agency, empowerment, or individual leadership (micro) is not sufficient to promote the structural changes required to increase gender equality (macro).

A lack of change in mindsets (micro) and poor enforcement can mean that laws (macro) are not realised or have little effect at the community level (meso).

The overall focus on women ignores the real problem, and the need to engage with all members of society.

Education and awareness-raising may establish the right to education but do not necessarily create gender equality.

Raising awareness alone does not translate into behaviour change (meso to micro).

Transnational advocacy networks are not effective.

Protests in western democracies can have a polarising and backlash effect.

Gender mainstreaming efforts generally fail to achieve positive outcomes.

Economic transformation does not automatically lead to social transformation.

What is Effective in Promoting Gender Equality

Eliciting positive affect in interventions garners positive outcomes.

Empathy is a viable feminist strategy, although evidence is limited.

All genders need to participate in re-socialisation of gender norms.

Dialogue is a key to success.

A large number of women must behave differently for new behaviours to be accepted (micro to meso).

Experiential learning is a powerful way to embed knowledge about gender equity in a nonthreatening, lasting way.

Investment in access to justice must include informal channels of the justice system.

Social transformation can be achieved in households through daily interactions (meso to macro).

Enabling environments (macro) are more effective than individual empowerment (micro), but should include top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Quotas are effective.

Laws must be proactive as well as reactive or complaint based.

The contextual levels of analysis developed by Pettigrew ( 2021 ) has also been adapted from these lists into Fig. 3 . These distillations challenge our thinking about how to achieve gender equality and therefore require greater discussion amongst feminist activists, advocates, and the general population for ecological validation. The key findings of this review have implications for policy and practice because they call into question the type of change sought by feminist movements, the type of intervention used to achieve that change, and whether that intervention is likely to be effective in practice. Overall, this review gives pause for thought. We hope it will inform future decisions about how to achieve gender equality.

Contextual levels of analysis for this review, adapted from Pettigrew ( 2021 )

Strengths and Limitations

Our broad inclusion criteria identified relevant interventions across a range of political, economic, social and cultural contexts, published over a thirty year period. Consistent with the recommendations by Garritty et al. ( 2021 ) we used rapid review methods; this may have led to the omission of some eligible studies. However, the use of a machine learning approach by reviewer two to rapidly screen a sample of the records predicted to be most relevant helped to limit the omission of relevant studies. Moreover, our restriction of literature to 1990 onwards may have omitted some studies conducted since the adoption of CEDAW in 1979. Given that only one study was published from 1990–2000, however, it is unlikely that this restricted timeframe had a significant impact on the review. Excluding papers not published in English is a limitation, and may have led to the omission of studies in some settings. We urge those who have non-peer-reviewed evaluations to submit them to peer-reviewed journals for future inclusion in reviews like the present one. The results of the large number of studies included in the review are difficult to generalise given the heterogenous study methods, intervention designs, populations, and settings. Because of a lack of reflexivity in most qualitative and multi-method studies, it is impossible to discern (for example) whether research undertaken in the Global South was conducted by Global North researchers. Moreover, there was no evidence of the ethical conduct of 16 studies and two studies did not have ethics approval. Together, these limitations may indicate potential problems with informed consent and implicit racial or other biases, although none were explicitly identifiable. There was insufficient evidence to assess whether and how culture played a part in attempts to achieve gender equality. Furthermore, while 86 percent of interventions predominantly or partially achieved their aims, this may inflate the effectiveness of such interventions because of reporting biases that favour publication of positive results (Sengupta et al., 2007 ; Sperandio, 2011 ).

This review has taken stock of successes and failures in seeking to promote gender equality. The findings reveal that undue reliance has been placed on the presumed efficacy of awareness raising, and that the race to achieve gender parity has not yet catalysed the desired social transformation. Entrepreneur programs can be exploitative, and legal actions have had limited effects, potentially failing because of men’s feelings about change. This review has shown that men can be fearful, resentful, jealous, and angry towards acts that disrupt the status quo . Until we adequately address these emotions and biases, the change that women (and potentially all genders) want, and the equality we all need will not be realised. Social context and systems thinking have shown us the importance of holism when tackling systemic discrimination. In this context, to be fully human is to be emotionally fulfilled. Ergo , human rights will be realised when there is dignity, humanity and positive emotionality among genders. Only then is the promise of CEDAW likely to be fulfilled.

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Gender and transitional justice.

• Maria Martin de Almagro Maria Martin de Almagro University of Ghent
•  and  Philipp Schulz Philipp Schulz Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, University of Bremen
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.669
• Published online: 19 October 2022

Transitional justice (TJ) refers to a set of measures and processes that deal with the legacies of human rights abuses and violent pasts, and that seek to aid societies transitioning from violence and conflict toward a more just and peaceful future. Much like the study of armed conflict and peacebuilding more broadly, the study and practice of transitional justice was traditionally silent on gender. Historically, gendered conflict-related experiences and harms have not been adequately addressed by most transitional justice mechanisms, and women in particular have been excluded from the design, conceptualization, and implementation of many TJ processes globally. While political violence perpetrated against men remained at the center of TJ concerns, a whole catalogue of gendered human rights abuses perpetrated primarily against women has largely remained at the peripheries of dominant TJ debates and interventions.

Catalyzed by political developments at the United Nations within the realm of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda and by increasing attention to crimes of sexual violence by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), however, the focus in the 2000s has been radically altered to include the treatment of gender in transitional contexts. As such, considerations around gender and sex have increasingly gained traction in TJ scholarship and praxis, to the extent that different justice instruments now seek to engage with gendered harms in diverse ways. Against this background, to the authors review this growing engagement with gender and transitional justice, offering a broad and holistic overview of legal and political developments, emerging trends, and persistent gaps in incorporating gender into the study and practice of TJ. The authors show how gender has been operationalized in relation to different TJ instruments, but the authors also unearth resounding feminist critiques about the ways in which justice is approached, as well as how gender is often conceptualized in limited and exclusionary terms. To this end, the authors emphasize the need for a more sustained and inclusive engagement with gender in TJ settings, drawing on intersectional, queer, and decolonial perspectives to ultimately address the variety of gendered conflict-related experiences in (post)conflict and transitional settings.

• transitional justice
• truth and reconciliation commissions
• queer perspectives
• structural violence
• criminal courts
• reparations
• gender justice
• masculinities
• sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)

Gender and Transitional Justice: An Overview

In July 2020 , the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of nonrecurrence issued a report on gender perspectives in transitional justice (TJ), which “considers multiple aspects of adopting a gender perspective in transitional justice processes” ( United Nation’s Special Rapporteur, 2020 , p. 4). This report came at a time when there had been much progress in gendering peacebuilding and transitional justice work ( Weber, 2021 ), but also when gender sensitivity in transitional justice work still remained elusive ( Ní Aoláin, 2019 ) and numerous gendered blind spots persisted in delivering justice for various gendered conflict-related harms and experiences.

Much like the study of armed conflict more broadly ( Sjoberg, 2016 ), the field of transitional justice was traditionally silent on gender ( Buckley-Zistel & Stanley, 2012 ; O’Rourke, 2013 ), leading feminist scholars to pose the question of “where are women, where is gender and where is feminism in transitional justice?” ( Bell & O’Rourke, 2007 , p. 23).

Partly in response to these questions, there has been a radical shift in viewing the role of gender in transitional justice, which has witnessed an increasing feminist curiosity ( Enloe, 2004 ) about gender justice in postconflict transitions ( Buckley-Zistel & Stanley, 2012 ). As such, considerations around gender and sex have increasingly gained traction in the growing TJ literature, to the extent that as of the early 21st century , gender constitutes “a burgeoning focus of investigation within TJ scholarship and practice globally” ( O’Rourke, 2017 , p. 117). For one, considering gender is important for participation and representation ( O’Rourke, 2013 ) in terms of ensuring equal participation and involvement of men, women, and persons with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) in the design and implementation of these processes—for instance, as active protagonists and beneficiaries but also as witnesses. At the same time, incorporating gender lenses and perspectives is crucial for broadening conceptions of gender, peace, and security ( Rees & Chinkin, 2015 ) and the types of violence addressed by different TJ processes—including, for instance, gendered socioeconomic harms ( Lai, 2020 ) or gender-based violence ( Aroussi, 2011 ). In particular, women’s movements around the world have led important efforts to ensure that gender justice is put at the center of political, legal, and humanitarian agendas of transitional justice ( Bell & O’Rourke, 2007 , p. 24); that sexual violence is considered a war crime ( Aroussi, 2011 ); and that transitional justice also addresses social, economic, and cultural rights, as well as collective rights to socioeconomic development ( Roht-Arriaza & Mariezcurrena, 2006 ). Collective reparations are based on a redistribution of resources and wealth to the most marginalized, and the concept extends the definition of “victims” not only to include those physically affected but to compensate for the social effects of war, such as hunger, disease, or forced displacement to which women are particularly vulnerable. In policy terms, much of this engagement with gender and transitional justice unfolds within the realm of the U.N. Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (WPS), spearheaded by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 , which, inter alia, focuses on access to justice, the rule of law, and the investigation and prosecution of wartime sexual violence ( Martin de Almagro, 2017 ).

Yet, despite this increasing engagement with gender, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin has reminded us that gender lenses and a “feminist presence in transitional justice is complex, multilayered and still in the process of engagement”( Ní Aoláin, 2012 , p. 205). As such, 15 years after Bell and O’Rourke’s call for feminist theorizing in TJ, “gender parity remains elusive in transitional justice implementation” ( Ní Aoláin, 2019 , p. 1), and numerous gendered blind spots persist. As such, various gendered experiences remain largely unaccounted for in the implementation and practice of dealing with the past, and existing TJ processes across the globe have largely fallen short in advancing actual transformations for women. In particular, structural forms of gender-based violence and discrimination, rooted in patriarchal value systems, need to be engaged with more comprehensively by TJ processes to continue to address violence across time and space, spanning from conflict to peace and beyond ( Cockburn, 2008 ). At the same time, an engagement with gender in transitional justice must be broader and more inclusive, moving beyond a singular focus on women (and on sexual violence against women, in particular) to also include masculinities and queer perspectives.

The objective of this article is to offer a concise yet comprehensive overview of developments and debates in scholarship and policymaking concerning gender and transitional justice. As such, the article aims to provide a state-of-the-field assessment of how an incorporation of gender into transitional justice processes and debates has unfolded since 2000 , and what gendered blind spots, gaps, and avenues for further engagement nevertheless persist. To this end, the section titled “ Historical, Political, and Legal Advances in Transitional Gender Justice ” will discuss the key historical and legal advances in transitional gender justice in a post-Cold War context. The section titled “ Gendering Transitional Justice Instruments ” then outlines how different transitional justice mechanisms have tried to deal with gender specific harms and women’s experiences from war, in retributive justice, truth seeking, and reparation processes. Based on this overview, the section titled “ Reparations ” offers dominant feminist critiques of these advances to transform women’s lives before moving on to an assessment of persisting gendered blind spots with regard to masculinities and queer perspectives in TJ. The article concludes by proposing some new avenues and strategies for transformative transitional gender justice.

Historical, Political, and Legal Advances in Transitional Gender Justice

Broadly referring “to the set of measures implemented [. . .] to deal with the legacies of massive human rights abuses” ( de Greiff, 2012 , p. 34) in the aftermath of armed conflicts or authoritarian regimes, the study and implementation of transitional justice (TJ) has significantly expanded and globalized since the beginning of the 21st century ( Teitel, 2015 ). Transitional justice mechanisms and institutions thereby seek to redress past wrongs, institutionalize the rule of law, and construct new legal and normative frameworks in postconflict contexts or in societies that have dealt with occupation or authoritarian regimes so as to prevent violent conflict from reemerging. Traditionally, transitional justice measures are a set of judicial and nonjudicial instruments and mechanisms, such as trials, truth commissions, lustration, or memorials. The aims of TJ are thereby often linked to the normative objectives of democratization, nation-building, and the primacy of the rule of law but also fostering a free market economy ( Rees & Chinkin, 2015 , p. 1012). This approach is embedded within a liberal peacebuilding model ( Sriram, 2014 ), which often unfolds through a primary focus on civil and political rights placed over an engagement with socioeconomic and cultural rights ( Hamber, 2016 ).

While there is not a predetermined set of standards on how and where transitional justice should be applied, the practice of TJ has frequently been critiqued for following a standardized toolkit or “one-size-fit-all” approach ( Sharp, 2013 ). At the same time, various scholars have emphasized that TJ mechanisms and their implementation must vary depending on geographical contexts ( Teitel, 2003 , p. 76), hence requiring a localization and contextualization of TJ processes ( Shaw & Waldorf, 2010 ). These dynamics in many ways also apply to the ways in which gender perspectives in TJ are conceptualized and understood, which often follow a standardized procedure but neglect the locally-contingent meanings of “justice” and “gender” in different geopolitical regions ( Schulz, 2019 ).

While many of the foundations of TJ date back to the post-World War II Tokyo and the Nuremberg criminal tribunals, the first time the actual concept of TJ was used was in the context of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the reordering of geopolitical dynamics in Africa, South and Central America, and Eastern Europe ( Bell, 2009 , p. 7). Whereas certain countries descended to civil wars, particularly on the African continent, others started transitioning from authoritarian to democratic rule. This is important because since then, there has been a normative assumption that transitional justice needs to ensure the basis of a peaceful transition toward Western-like democracies based on liberal individualism ( Arthur, 2009 ; Rees & Chinkin, 2015 , p. 1212; Teitel, 2003 , p. 75). This historical origin has conditioned the horizon of possibilities of what justice means and which kind of measures are necessary to ensure it. While prosecutions, truth-telling commissions, reparations, and institutional reform of authoritarian and centralized states were deemed necessary, distributive socioeconomic justice was not ( Arthur, 2009 , p. 326). This liberal notion of justice has gendered and gendering consequences, as the discussion to unfold throughout this article demonstrates.

Over the decades, then, the study, praxis, and implementation of transitional justice in many ways experienced its own transition ( McEvoy, 2007 ), emerging from its initially exceptionalism origins toward becoming a standardized, institutionalized, and globalized practice ( Teitel, 2015 ). As such, transitional justice expanded to include a whole variety of processes, measures, and instruments, and to be applied to a wide range of violence-affected situations. Not only the points of departure, however, but also the end-goals of transitional justice processes are increasingly recognized as being more diverse than initially assumed, and transitional justice has been increasingly emancipated from the bonds of the assumingly linear transition from war to peace ( Sharp, 2013 ), which cannot live up to the complexities and nonlinearity of lived realities in times of violence, conflict, and peace ( Hamber, 2008 ). As part of this expansion process, transitional justice has over the years also been increasingly localized ( Shaw & Waldorf, 2010 ), turned its attention to (post)colonial dynamics ( Bueno-Hansen, 2015 ) or to socioeconomic aspects ( Lai, 2020 ), and has also become more attentive to the gender dynamics of political transitions ( O’Rourke, 2013 ).

Historically, however, the experiences of women have not been adequately addressed by transitional justice mechanisms and processes. Women experience direct violence, such as sexual violence, domestic and sexual slavery, forced displacement, and forced marriage. They also have more difficulties rebuilding their lives after war because gender norms and traditional women’s societal roles make it difficult for women to access property, land, and jobs, as well as health and education services. Nevertheless, the gendered nature of direct and structural violence as well as different gendered experiences that men, women, and people with diverse gender identities faced during war have rarely been a concern of transitional justice projects ( Fobear, 2014 ; Franke, 2006 ).

In terms of design and procedure, the first decades of transitional justice processes did not provide sufficient participation and representation of women and minorities ( O’Rourke, 2017 ). This led to the reproduction of patriarchal logics and discourses about what transitional justice is for, and what human rights violations and crimes should be addressed and how ( Ní Aoláin, 2012 ). While political violence most suffered by men has been at the center of transitional justice, the systemic violence most commonly experienced by women—such as poverty, internal displacement, lack of access to public infrastructure, and unequal access to land, employment, or education ( Martin de Almagro & Ryan, 2019 )—was not recognized or redressed ( Ní Aoláin, 2009 ; Weber, 2021 ).

While much of an engagement with gender in transitional justice has taken place in scholarship evidenced through a growing body of literature (see Fobear, 2014 ; Franke, 2006 ; Ní Aoláin, 2012 ; O’Rourke, 2013 ), there are also legal, normative, and political developments that have addressed gender and transitional justice. Much of this policy engagement is unfolding within the realms of the United Nations Security Council and its mandate to maintain international peace and security, and specifically under the umbrella of the U.N. Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) framework ( Martin de Almagro, 2017 ). As a result of intensive efforts by a transnational coalition of women’s movements and feminist organizations, the agenda specifically calls for increased representation of women in decision making at all levels in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict; the protection of women’s rights in conflict; the prevention of violence against women in conflict; and the importance of gender-sensitive humanitarian assistance, relief, and recovery ( Aroussi, 2011 ). Under this mandate, the WPS agenda also specifically engages with gender and transitional justice, which comprises a vast set of tools to fight against gender injustices ( Martin de Almagro, 2017 ). For instance, United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1888 focused on access to justice; the rule of law, legal; and judicial reforms; investigations; and prosecutions specifically for victims of wartime sexual violence. UNSCR 2106 specifically asked to punish sexual violence in conflict, and UNSCR 2242 recommended “reparation for victims as appropriate” ( United Nations Security Council, 2015 , p. 7), while reminding that the Security Council can enact sanctions against those who commit conflict-related sexual violence. The Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 also called on the United Nations and its member states to “prioritize the design and implementation of gender sensitive reparations programs with transformative impact” ( UN Women, 2015 , p. 124).

Similarly, the resolution of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council that in 2011 established the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence—through which much of the U.N.’s engagement with transitional justice unfolds—specifically referred to gender, emphasizing that the Special Rapporteur must integrate gender lenses throughout its work (see O’Rourke, 2017 ). Outside the realm of the United Nations, the monitoring Committee of the Convention and Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women (CEDAW) similarly developed normative guidance in gender and transitional justice. As Catherine O’Rourke observed, “the Committee’s General Recommendation Number 30 on the rights of women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations calls on state parties to address transitional justice mechanisms as part of broader activities to ensure women’s access to justice” ( O’Rourke, 2017 , p. 125). However, the U.N. Special Rapporteur was only established in 2011 , and the CEDAW general recommendation 30 was adopted in 2013 , signaling how TJ as a matter of international peace and security in general, as well as attention to gender and TJ specifically, has become increasingly mainstreamed since the early 2010s.

Gendering Transitional Justice Instruments

As a result of these cumulative efforts, then, gender lenses have been increasingly incorporated into and applied to the different aspects, mechanisms, and instruments of transitional justice, as reviewed throughout this section, structured along retributive and criminal justice, truth-seeking efforts, reparations, and bottom-up TJ mechanisms.

Retributive Justice and Criminal Courts

Much of the engagement with gender in transitional justice unfolds within the context of criminal courts and tribunals, with an emphasis on responding to wartime sexual violence through criminal accountability and retributive justice ( Aroussi, 2011 ; Campbell, 2004 ; Schulz & Kreft, 2022 ). This emphasis on criminal justice thereby mirrors larger trends in TJ, whereby criminal retribution and legal punishment still often are seen as ultimate responses to crimes ( Fletcher & Weinstein, 2002 ).

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, notable progress has been made toward an engagement with gender in international criminal law ( Chappell, 2011 ). Progressive developments by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR) in the 1990s contributed toward the recognition of crimes of rape and sexual violence as constitutive of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide ( Mibenge, 2013 ). Throughout the literature, these two ad hoc tribunals are generally credited with the responsibility for the contemporary evolution of jurisprudence on conflict-related sexual violence ( Haffajee, 2006 ), and are seen as having established landmark and precedence cases concerning sexual violence.

These developments also set the precedent for other hybrid tribunals—such as the Special Courts for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)—as well as the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), which has heard several cases that include charges of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV; Chappell, 2014 ). Since 2014 , prosecuting gender-based violence (GBV) has been among the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor’s (OTP) key strategic goals, reflected in the “Policy Paper on Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes.” Since then, as of 2018 , 16 out of 23 cases pending at the International Criminal Court have included charges of SGBV. This process of ensuring accountability for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is important, and has “contributed toward documenting the patterns and dynamics of sexual violence” ( Schulz & Kreft, 2022 , p. 7) across contexts, in addition to contributing to the development of international jurisprudence on sexual violence. At the same time, testifying in a court of law about their experiences of sexual abuse may for some survivors be healing, empowering, and a “cathartic process that equips them with a sense of agency and enables them to articulate their voices” ( Schulz & Kreft, 2022 , p. 13; see also Mertus, 2004 ).

Yet, despite growing attention, the track record of actually delivering justice for sexual violence survivors remains limited. And while the ICC’s conception of SGBV has broadened over the years to also include crimes of forced marriage and pregnancy alongside sexual torture or crimes of rape, the emphasis remains on sexual violence over other forms of gendered violence and discrimination. What is more, despite only a handful of exceptions, most proceedings involving sexual violence at international courts have focused on women survivors, but have tended to sideline sexual violence against men or against persons with diverse SOGIESC ( Schulz, 2020 ). Influenced by and in tandem with these developments in the international criminal justice arena, and in the interest of complementarity, there also is a growing collection of cases concerning CRSV at national and domestic courts—including for instance the Bosnian War Crimes Chamber, or courts in Guatemala, El Salvador, or the Democratic Republic of Congo ( Seelinger, 2020 ).

Despite much of this progress of investigating and prosecuting crimes of sexual violence, however, the existing caseload of successful convictions remains limited at best. This in many ways mirrors the “justice gap” for SGBV that persists not only in (post)conflict settings but more widely across time and space ( McGlynn & Westmarland, 2019 ). In addition, feminist scholars in particular have identified various legal, political, technical, and gendered shortcomings of criminal proceedings. As such, Houge and Lohne (2017) have cautioned that treating CRSV simply as “a problem of law” overlooks more structurally-engrained forms of violence and discrimination, as well as potential alternative justice conceptions and mechanisms. A growing body of scholarship has also identified more practical limitations, evidencing victims’ and survivors’ dissatisfaction with criminal justice processes ( Henry, 2009 ). This body of work takes note of the fact that many survivors feel “footnoted” in the proceedings, silenced, deprived of any agency ( Mertus, 2004 ), or revictimized ( Franke, 2006 ; see Schulz & Kreft, 2022 ). Focused on the ICTY, Mertus showed that women’s agency during criminal proceedings was severely stunted, and that survivors of wartime rape who participated in criminal trials often felt “like [they were] shouting from the bottom of a well” ( Mertus, 2004 , p. 113). Drawing on an analysis of the SCSL, Kelsall and Stepakoff (2007) similarly showed how women who participated in the trials “were prohibited from speaking about the principal manner in which they were victimized [sexually] during the conflict” (p. 365), and how as a result, women’s experiences were removed from the Court’s records (see Mibenge, 2013 ). As such, “experience[s] of giving testimony [are] likely to be mixed” ( Henry, 2009 , p. 114), leading feminist scholars to question whether criminal proceedings constitute adequate means to deliver accountability for GBV ( Henry, 2009 ; Mertus, 2004 ; Otto, 2009 ).

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

As an alternative to some of these structural limitations with regards to criminal justice, an emphasis on restorative justice, often in the form of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), has gained growing popularity over the decades—perhaps most notably in South Africa as well as across Latin America. In their broadest terms, truth (and reconciliation) commissions are entities that seek to establish facts, causes, and impacts of past human rights violations with a focus on victims’ and survivors’ testimonies, thereby seeking to provide recognition of harm and suffering.

The first Truth Commissions in Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and South Africa did not include gendered harms in their terms of reference; but were instead focused on political crimes to the exclusion of ordinary and structural violence. In these proceedings, women’s testimonies were primarily limited as witnesses of harms committed between men. This had consequences not only for the lack of recognition of violence against women, but also for the ensuing policy recommendations and reparations identified as necessary in the TRC reports. As Sanne Weber (2021) noted, “Truth Commissions have historically tended to leave out women’s particular conflict experiences” (p. 214).

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( 1996–2003 ), established to deal with human rights violations of the apartheid system, was the first to adopt ad hoc gender-sensitive strategies such as holding special women’s hearings, creating gender-sensitive statement-taking protocols, and adding a chapter on women in the final report ( Fiske, 2019 ). After sustained advocacy from key women activists and even though it had not been part of the original plan, the Peru Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( 2001–2003 ) established a specific Gender Unit in charge of examining gendered and sexual patterns of violence, training staff on gender-sensitive approaches to truth and reconciliation, and leading a public hearing on women’s human rights. The Commission’s final report devoted two individual chapters to a gendered analysis of the conflict and the use of sexual violence against women. Nevertheless, the lack of an appropriate budget to support the activities of the Gender Unit prevented it from achieving much and many Peruvian activists saw it as a lost chance for a more systematic and transformative approach for enhancing women’s access to justice ( Nesiah et al., 2006 ).

Later TRCs included a focus on gender in their mandates and tried to actively understand how violence and oppression are gendered ( Bell & O’Rourke, 2007 , p. 28). In particular, the Truth Commissions of Sierra Leone ( 2002–2004 ) and East Timor ( 2002–2005 ) are regarded as best practices. Their reports in 2004 and 2005 included a stand-alone chapter on gender and sexual violence, as well as recommendations for reparations ( Nesiah et al., 2006 ). Furthermore, the Sierra Leone TRC’s procedures for engagement with women were also gender-sensitive. First, it proactively looked for women testimonies, offering material support and counseling for those willing to testify. Second, women could choose whether to provide written or oral testimony and whether to testify at an open or closed hearing. Third, the Commission trained specialized women statement takers to work with sexual violence victims. In general terms, Truth Commissions have been criticized for overtly focusing on sexual violence, and for not taking into consideration how women often face the socioeconomic consequences of conflicts. In the context of the Sierra Leone TRC (SLTRC), however, sexual violence and abuse were the terms of reference under which women could testify as victims, and even though the SLTRC was determined “to capture the experiences of both women and girls in respect of sexual violence, as well as their complete gendered experiences at a political, legal, health and social welfare level” ( Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2004 , p. 87), the commission’s final report focused mainly on rape and other sexual violence crimes committed against women during the conflict. As such, both truth commissions and courts have been criticized for their singled-issue focus on sexual violence at the expense of the complex nature of gender violence in conflict-affected settings.

In addition to these formalized and institutionalized truth commissions, more informal and/or grassroots-level, truth-seeking, and historical memory processes have evolved across a number of conflicts, including most prominently the Gacaca courts in Rwanda ( Bronéus, 2008 ), but also Colombia’s National Centre for Historical Memory , and the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre (NMPDC) in Uganda. These and similar efforts across contexts document and preserve conflict-related experiences and enable survivors to share their experiences in often more informal processes, thereby at times offering more space for diverse stories. At the same time, these informal efforts are also often structured around heteronormative conceptions of gender, thereby restricting the space of what experiences can be openly talked about, and have also been experienced as retraumatizing and threatening by women giving testimony ( Bronéus, 2008 ). This mirrors shortcomings of criminal tribunals as discussed in the subsection “ Retributive Justice and Criminal Courts ,” and of bottom-up transitional justice mechanisms as discussed in the section “ Reparations .”

Reparations

Reparations are typically portrayed to be among the most victim-centric elements of transitional justice ( Hamber, 2008 ). As emphasized by de Greif, reparations provide financial or other material compensations, such as property restitution as a form of corrective justice, obliging the wrongdoer to provide goods to the victim so that the latter find themselves in the original position before the harm ( de Greiff, 2008 , p. 435). In practice and implementation, the U.N. Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation ( 2005 ) lists five components of reparations: (a) restitution, (b) compensation, (c) rehabilitation (including access to medical and psychological care), (d) satisfaction and, (e) guarantees of nonrepetition. Importantly, reparations not only imply material gains for survivors, but crucially “can be profoundly meaningful to victims or survivors at a psychological level” ( Hamber, 2008 , p. 8). In this reading, reparations can be individual and/or collective, and material and/or symbolic ( Hamber & Palmary, 2009 ) as well as prospective and retrospective.

For the most part, however, reparations programs are not “designed with an explicit gender dimension in mind” ( Rubio-Marín et al., 2006 , p. 23), nor have they “focused on the forms of victimization that women are more commonly subject to,” including forms of CRSV. As Ní Aoláin et al. (2015) observed, global discussions aimed at ensuring accountability and ending impunity for CRSV have largely neglected and marginalized reparations.

However, reparations have been increasingly linked to sexual and gender-based violence. In March 2007 , international legal and gender experts and women survivors of sexual violence met in Nairobi (Kenya) to draft the Nairobi Declaration on the Right of Women and Girls to a Remedy and Reparation. The declaration is key because it sought to redefine reparations from a gendered perspective that makes visible the linkages between direct and structural violence. The declaration had two core principles: First, reparations should be transformative, go to the root causes of gender violence, and “must go above and beyond the immediate reasons and consequences of the crimes and violations; they must address structural inequalities that negatively shape women’s and girls’ lives” (Nairobi Declaration, supra n 3, Principle 3[h]). The second core principle is the participation and involvement of women at all stages of the planning, design, and implementation of reparations programs because the involvement of women in the reform of social structures will also lead to recognition and to political empowerment.

This emphasis on structural discrimination and transformation thereby speaks to some conceptual shortcomings of reparations, as well as a recent emphasis on transformational reparations within a broader shift from transitional to transformative justice ( Gready & Robins, 2019 ). As suggested by the Nairobi Declaration, a gender perspective indeed reveals that if reparative justice and reparations aim to quite literally repair conflict-related harms ( Hamber, 2008 ), this can potentially translate into a reconstitution of an unequal preconflict status quo (see Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 ; Rubio-Marín & de Greiff, 2007 ). In transitional and (post)conflict settings, this frequently implies a reparation of and return to hetero-patriarchal societal structures, characterized by vast gendered inequalities and the systematic discrimination of women ( Goldblatt & Meintjes, 2011 ). Rather than transforming unequal gendered and intersectional structures—which may have given rise to conflict and violence in the first place—reparations thus risk reinstating that status quo, thus reinstating patriarchy.

Since then, there has been growing attention within scholarship and policymaking ( Duggan et al., 2008 ; Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 ; Walker, 2016 )—evidenced for instance through the Global Survivors Fund, founded by the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureates Nadia Murad and Dr. Denis Mukwege, which seeks to enhance access to reparations for survivors of CRSV. In particular, the United Nations Secretary-General’s adoption of a Guidance Note on Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence ( 2014 ) marked an important turning point in the area of reparations for SGBV ( Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 ). At the same time, several of the U.N. Security Council resolutions that make up the WPS agenda, such as Resolution 2122 , repeatedly refer to reparations in response to gender-based violence.

This process of repairing preconflict structures specifically for women can often imply a return to an unequal gendered status quo ante and to inferior female subject positioning ( Buckley-Zistel, 2013 ). Rubio-Marín and de Greiff (2007) therefore urged that reparations programs need to ensure that they do “not conform to or contribute to the entrenchment of pre-existing patterns of female land tenure, education or employment” (p. 325). Further, most reparations programs primarily concentrate on civil and political rights, at the expense of other violations, including socioeconomic rights, many of which are often heavily gendered ( Rubio-Marín, 2009 ), thereby mirroring gendered trends and shortcomings in transitional justice more broadly ( Boesten & Wilding, 2015 ; O’Rourke, 2013 ).

As such, there are, as of 2022 , a handful of cases of reparations for gender-based crimes, for instance in the War Crimes Chambers in Bosnia ( Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015 ), and by national courts in Sierra Leone and Guatemala, where “an urgent reparation scheme awarded one-off payments for survivors of sexual violence, together with medical treatment” ( Weber, 2021 , p. 221). In Guatemala, apart from the individual compensation to victims of rape in the case of Sepur Zarco, the judges ordered the construction of a health clinic in the village and the creation of an education scholarship fund for women and girls. In Mexico, the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) and Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) and its “Cotton Field” judgement on femicide cases have contributed precedent-setting cases for the award of reparations in response to gender violence and harms ( Rubio-Marín & Sandoval, 2011 ) and, more precisely, for the development of gender-just transformation processes ( Ketelaars, 2018 ). As explained by Sane Weber (2021) , the Cotton Field judgement “stated that when violations were committed in a context of structural discrimination, reparations should aim to transform this pre-existing situation” (p. 222).

Colombia adopted a transformative approach to reparations and land restitution in its 2011 Victims’ Law. Since land titles are in their majority in men’s names, the Law provides for the allocation of joint land titles to men and women as a way to ensure a better social and economic security in case of divorce or of the husband’s death and in this way transforms gender inequality. In practice, however, transforming attitudes toward women and agricultural work are difficult to achieve and the agricultural projects that have accompanied land restitution in Colombia have focused on men’s agricultural work and have devalued women’s work as just family work to “help make ends meet” ( Weber, 2021 ), reinforcing rather than ending gender inequalities. What is more, most reparations programs globally focus on female victims at the neglect of male survivors and persons with diverse SOGIESC ( Schulz, 2020 ). As noted by Ní Aoláin et al. (2015) , “a limited understanding of who can be a victim of sexual harms means that violence against men is often unseen and unaccounted for when states and other international actors conceive and implement reparations” (p. 97). Challenges therefore remain to ensure that reparations can address the gendered manifestations of violence in their holistic occurrence, and that reparations can cement real gendered progress, in particular for conflict-affected women ( Rubio-Marín & de Greiff, 2007 ) as well as for sexual violence survivors of all genders ( Duggan et al., 2008 ; Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 ; Schulz, 2020 ).

In light of these conceptual and practical gaps of implementing reparations in response to gendered harms and violence, several scholars have emphasized that “a commitment to transformative reparations is critical to gender-sensitive reparations” ( Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 , p. 98; see also Kettelaars, 2018 ; Walker, 2016 ).Transformative reparations, especially in the context of redressing gendered violence, require “go[ing] beyond the immediacy of sexual violence, [and] encompassing the equality, justice and longitudinal needs of those who have experienced sexual harms” ( Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 , pp. 98–99).

Bottom-Up Transitional Justice Mechanisms

In the absence of concrete, tangible results for specific crimes committed against women, an array of civil society-led and locally-embedded mechanisms have seen the day. Much of this growing attention to processes at the grassroots and micro level is embedded within the so-called “local turn” in transitional justice ( Shaw & Waldorf, 2010 ), which has also increasingly engaged with gender ( Baines, 2010 ; Kent, 2014 ). As an illustrative example of such bottom-up initiatives, women’s tribunals have constituted a collective effort at putting women’s experiences of war and violence at the center of truth, justice, and reparation processes necessary to rebuild more gender just societies. In Kosovo, Albano–Kosovar women created an initiative of legal support for victims of sexual violence through the Kosovo Women’s Network, and joined forces with the Serb Women in Black Network Serbia to create the Women Peace Coalition on May 7, 2006 ( Kosovo Women’s Network, 2013 ). Together, they participated in the Women’s Tribunal, a regional initiative of restorative justice led by women survivors of conflict in Yugoslavia ( Mujika Chao, 2017 ).

In Northern Uganda, too—the context in which one of the authors primarily works—a variety of civil society-supported and locally-driven processes exist to deal with past human rights abuses ( Baines, 2007 ). While such processes catalyze a sense of justice on the micro level, in the absence of sufficient processes at the state or international level, however, such processes nevertheless also contain gendered challenges. In many conflict-affected societies—frequently characterized by masculine, patriarchal, and heteronormative constructions of gender—a turn to the local simultaneously often implies a geographical move toward, and a reinforcement of, largely masculinized, homophobic, and sexually conservative societal contexts, which raises challenges for the participation of and roles played by women and youths. For instance, Boege (2006) described how women and girls are often excluded from the administration of these measures and only “become the subjects of these decisions” (p. 16). In Northern Uganda, “the most visible proponents of traditional justice and the most visible participants in the ceremonies are male elders” ( Lonergan, 2012 , p. 1)—excluding women (and youth) from active roles and instead only passively subjecting them to these processes. With regard to the application of justice, Baines (2007) consequentially argued that “it is unlikely that mato oput [one of the most common traditional justice rituals] will be able to reflect [women’s] interests without significant modification” (p. 107).

In addition to gendered participation and involvement, a localization of justice likewise carries implications for the treatment of gendered conflict-related experiences, including women’s structural inequalities and crimes of sexual violence against women and men. In many conflict-affected societies, a localization of transitional justice measures likely implies that taboo and culturally stigmatized crimes of sexual violence against men fall outside the realm and framework of local means of delivering justice ( Schulz, 2020 ).

Feminist Critiques of Transitional Gender Justice

In light of this overview, and against the background of many of these shortcomings and gaps of extant approaches to gender and transitional justice as discussed in the section on “ Gendering Transitional Justice Instruments ,” feminist scholars, activists, and practitioners in particular have articulated profound and resounding critiques of transitional gender justice—which constitute the focus of discussion in this section. In particular, feminist perspectives on justice have argued that violence cannot be understood as separate, single acts, but rather as a continuum—as a manifestation of structural inequality and gendered power relations ( Braithwaite & D’Costa, 2018 ). Therefore, these perspectives have criticized transitional justice mechanisms’ focus on “extraordinary” violence during a specific historical moment—from the war declaration to the signature of a peace accord. They have argued that this focus renders invisible the complexities of individual and collective war experiences ( Bunch, 1990 ; Rao, 2001 ). This, in turn, impairs women’s access to justice ( Fiske, 2019 ). At the same time, a persistent focus of most TJ processes on women as passive, vulnerable victims overlooks and downplays the active roles and agency exercised by women in (post)conflict and transitional settings ( Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015 ), thereby reinforcing essentialist gender stereotypes of female victimhood ( Enloe, 2000 ).

The Experiences of Violence

The differentiation between extraordinary and ordinary violence does not reflect women’s lived experiences during war and in postwar justice efforts and socioeconomic restructuring processes. First, this distinction has resulted in the reinforcement of harmful tropes about sexual violence committed in “ordinary” circumstances in conflict and postconflict settings ( Grewal, 2015 ) and has not addressed rapes and sexual violence committed by peacekeepers, (civilian) men from the same ethnic group, or from the victims’ own families and communities, or any other circumstances than those considered as rape as a strategic weapon of war perpetrated by enemy armed soldiers ( Fiske & Shackel, 2014 ).

Second, this false and binary differentiation between ordinary and extraordinary also ignores the fact that wartime violence is not only physical and direct, but rather is inherently relational and takes many forms, and that these cannot be separated in lived experiences ( Hozić & True, 2017 ). This is due to the fact that acts of violence are “dynamically connected through social, political and economic factors in the surrounding context” ( Krause, 2015 , p. 16). For example, many women become widowed during war and as a result are dispossessed of land and other resources in patrilinear societies ( Shackel & Fiske, 2016 ), are excluded from social life ( Yadav, 2016 ), and are vulnerable to further violence due to their precarious economic situation ( True, 2012 ). In addition, war also blurs the boundaries between production and social reproduction because violent conflict pushes both productive and reproductive activities into private spaces. For example, families need to go into subsistence production to access food and other basic goods; there is an absence of social or public spaces for childcare, healthcare, and the elderly; and the gendered, classed, and racial patterns of everyday violence get exacerbated by militarization and economic collapse ( Elias & Rai, 2019 ; Rai et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, this socioeconomic violence tends to be reproduced in postwar economic and political reforms by the national and the international community.

The Continuum of Violence

Feminist activists and scholars have pointed out that while sexual violence and rape during war have been recognized as crimes against humanity and war crimes, the persistence of physical, sexual, and gender-based violence in the aftermath of conflict is barely given any attention. Nevertheless, the consequences of war, such as a militarized society, impoverishment, unemployment, and posttraumatic stress disorder, as well as men’s feelings of inability to fulfill their perceived gender roles as providers and protectors of their families often lead to domestic and sexual violence ( El Bushra, 2003 ; Ní Aoláin et al., 2011 ; Rubio-Marín, 2009 ).

Furthermore, the focus on sexual violence has ignored that gendered violence takes many forms. For example, the lack of access to social services and infrastructure results in women taking the burden of reproductive work, while often being the only bread winners in separated or destroyed families. Ultimately, feminist have argued for a long time that in contexts of war and peace, transitional justice is “brought” to war-torn countries by the international community ( Nagy, 2014 , p. 217). However, looking at injustices and conflict-related violence also entails accounting for the role that international financial institutions and their postwar reconstruction projects play in reproducing wartime gender-based violence and preexisting economic inequalities through their politics of privatization, liberalization, and austerity ( Lai, 2020 ). The lack of a serious engagement with the socioeconomic legacies of the war and the justice claims deriving from it provokes the sidelining of access to health services, education, and job market policies to the benefit of macrostructural reforms and reconstruction projects of roads, airports, and other transport infrastructure ( Manjoo & McRaith, 2011 ; Martin de Almagro & Ryan, 2019 ; Ní Aoláin et al., 2011 ; Rubio-Marín, 2009 ).

Crucially, the justice model envisioned in liberal peacebuilding reforms often excludes redistributive demands as security and justice are defined in a state-centric manner ( Ní Aoláin, 2009 ), where the reintegration of the state in global markets provide further economic exploitation and exclusion of women through the reestablishment of traditional gender roles and feminized low-paying jobs ( Sassen, 2000 ). These concerns have evolved toward larger debates on redistributive policies and the role of states and markets in postconflict economies. Lai (2020) explained how postwar countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina with a socialist past had social services available to support social reproduction while women were at work. These services disappeared once International Financial Institutions (IFIs) reconstructed the country according to liberal standards, entrenching gendered inequalities and injustices that the war brought with it. While women lost their jobs in the factories, had difficult access to food and water during wartime, and were responsible for the survival of the household, the IFIs reconstruction project did not redress but rather reproduced wartime socioeconomic violence. The transition post-Apartheid period in South Africa also marked a case in point: the South African government started implementing neoliberal policies that negatively affected black people in general, and women’s economic and social conditions in particular ( Hunter, 2007 ).

Feminist Solutions to Achieve Transformative Justice

In light of these dynamics, feminist analytical lenses underscore the continuities between (gendered) public and private violence; distinctions between prewar, war, and postwar violence; and physical to structural violence and inequalities ( Boulding, 1984 ; Enloe, 2000 ; Tickner, 1992 ; True, 2012 ). Such feminist takes contend that gender justice can only happen through the direct and substantive participation by ordinary people, and in particular conflict-affected women and girls ( Rees & Chinkin, 2015 ). Taking their participation seriously, these scholars have argued, will result in a broadening of transitional justice’s scope to include economic, social, and cultural rights ( Nagy, 2014 ; Rees & Chinkin, 2015 ). Feminist scholars thus have claimed that TJ measures should reflect transformative understandings of justice directed at ensuring that gender-based violence will not happen again and at tackling the inequalities, marginalizations, and exclusions that underlie and fuel wars ( Cohn & Duncanson, 2020 ; True & Hozić, 2020 ).

Therefore, for justice to be transformative, transitional justice mechanisms must also operate hand in hand with postwar reforms ( Lai, 2020 ; Martin de Almagro & Ryan, 2019 , 2020 ). As argued, many of the underpinning components of transformative justice, such as a commitment to challenge unequal status quos and structural (often gendered) inequalities as well as a prioritization of socioeconomic rights (see Sharp, 2013 ), have long been advocated for by feminist scholars (see Cockburn, 2008 ). In particular, “for women, periods of societal transition have to aim for the transformation of the underlying inequalities that provided the conditions in which [their] specifically gendered harms were possible” ( Boesten & Wilding, 2015 , p. 1); see also ( Davies & True, 2017 ). As outlined by Ní Aoláin (2019) , transformation and transformative (gender) justice “depend on the redistribution of formal and informal power” and a feminist “commitment to profoundly recalibrate power relationships” ( Ní Aoláin, 2019 , p. 150; also see Enloe, 2000 ). In this capacity, transformative reparations and remedies to conflict-related violations of socioeconomic or “subsistence” rights ( Arbour, 2007 ; Sankey, 2014 ) carry important implications for feminist projects of gender justice and women’s equality in transitional justice in particular ( Boesten & Wilding, 2015 ).

Inclusive Gender: Integrating Masculinities and Queer Perspectives on Transitional Justice

Despite this vastly growing and diversifying engagement with gender in the study of transitional justice, the dominant conceptualization of “gender” in transitional contexts effectively remains an incomplete and exclusive one. Indeed, discussions about gender and TJ often circle around how transitional processes can advance “gender justice” for female victims of violence ( Boesten & Wilding, 2015 ) and for women survivors of wartime sexual violence in particular ( Aroussi, 2011 ). According to these prevailing understandings, “gender” is often synonymous with “women,” and conflict-related experiences are only considered “gendered” when they represent and reinforce “the unequal position of women in society” ( Pillay, 2007 , p. 317). As argued by feminist anthropologist Kimberly Theidon (2007) , in transitional justice, “from gender hearings to gender units and gender-sensitive truth commissions, ‘adding gender’ is policy-speak for ‘adding women’” (p. 353). To illustrate, the implementation of transitional justice measures put forward in several resolutions of the WPS agenda also primarily understand “gender” as “women.” For example, the 2010 U.N. Secretary-General report on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 included both the “number and percentage of transitional justice mechanisms called for by peace processes that include provisions to address the rights and participation of women and girls in their mandates” and the “number and percentage of women and girls receiving benefits through reparation programs, and types of benefits received” ( United Nations Secretary General, 2010 , p. 48).

Without a doubt, owing to the pervasive and structural discrimination of women in conflict-affected and transitional settings globally and the marginalization of women’s perspectives and experiences throughout TJ scholarship and praxis, such a focus remains urgently needed ( O’Rourke, 2017 ). Yet, despite this importance, such a focus also reinforces the on-going exclusion of masculinities and queer perspectives throughout international relations (IR) and conflict research at large, and within the fields of peacebuilding and transitional justice in particular ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Duriesmith, 2016 ; Fobear, 2014 ; Hagen, 2016 ; Schulz et al., 2023 ). In fact, specific masculinities perspectives and careful consideration for men’s and boys’ experiences as gendered—as well as for the lived realities of persons with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC; Daigle & Myrttinen, 2018 )—remain omitted from most gendered TJ analyses. This has slowly begun to change, and emerging critical research has increasingly called for attention to masculinities and SOGIESC questions in transitional justice scholarship ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Fobear, 2014 ; Hamber, 2016 ; Theidon, 2009 ). Yet, as one of the authors cautioned previously, “these few studies thus far exist primarily in silos, and are often characterized by an often unitary focus on either masculinities or sexual and gender minorities” ( Schulz, 2019 , p. 692).

Masculinities Perspectives

In their broadest sense, masculinities are socially constructed gender norms, specifically referring to the multiple ways of “doing male” within and across societies. The foundational work by R. W. Connell (1995) in particular teaches us about the multiplicities and variations of masculinities (in plural) as well as about the inherent power relations within and between masculinities and gender hierarchies more widely. Since the early 2000s, a growing body of literature has begun to pay critical attention to masculinities and their relations to and positioning in the global gender order ( Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005 ), and specifically in relation to armed conflicts ( Duriesmith, 2016 ). However, while a “fairly substantial amount of literature has been generated over the years regarding the forms of masculinity that emerge in times of armed conflict and war” ( Ní Aoláin et al., 2011 , p. 231), this has not yet sufficiently travelled toward postconflict and transitional contexts, with only few exceptions ( Hamber, 2016 ; Theidon, 2009 ). Tracing the marginalization of these intersections over a decade, Hamber (2007 , 2016 ) attested that masculinities perspectives in TJ scholarship presently find themselves in an embryonic state and are only gradually emerging. This is not to suggest, however, that TJ scholarship does not incorporate the voices and views of men. On the contrary, and as convincingly argued by feminist scholars, TJ can largely be seen as inherently dominated by masculine values and actors ( O’Rourke, 2017 ). What remains underdeveloped, however, is careful consideration for men’s experiences as gendered .

If and when there is engagement with masculinities in TJ contexts, this often unfolds against the backdrop of a violation-centric lens. That is, emerging research on masculinities and TJ focuses either on violent and militarized masculinities, so the violations they perpetrate; or on masculine vulnerabilities, and specifically on sexual violence against men, so the (sexual) violations perpetrated against men. A primary concern of this existing literature has centered around questions of how to disarm and transform violent masculinities in postconflict and transitional periods ( Cahn & Ní Aoláin, 2010 ), for instance through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programming ( Theidon, 2009 ). This focus is underpinned by the argument that facilitating transitions from conflict to peace requires that militarized masculinities—embodied by (former) combatants—are successfully transformed. As Cahn and Ní Aoláin (2010) argued, one of the central quandaries for TJ and DDR processes “is how to undo the [violent] masculinities learned during wartime” and its wake (p. 118). Research by Theidon (2009) similarly centralized the importance of sustainably mobilizing former combatants to respond to the security challenges posed by them, as well as to the perceived loss of masculine privilege that often attends such processes. Theidon (2009) argued that “transforming the hegemonic, militarized masculinities that characterize former combatants can help further the goals of both DDR and transitional justice processes [. . .] to contribute to building peace on both the battlefield and the home front” (p. 34).

At the same time, however, previous research has also acknowledged the complexities and difficulties of these transformation processes due to the ways in which these masculinities constructions are socially embedded within patriarchal and nationalistic societal structures. In many ways, this focus on militarized masculinities is reflective of dominant research on men and masculinities within the context of war and insecurities more broadly, which has mostly examined the “violences of men” ( Hearn, 1998 ) and the linkages between certain forms of masculinities and the various forms of violence associated with them ( Myrttinen et al., 2017 ).

Another angle through which an engagement with masculinities has unfolded is based on attention to men’s vulnerabilities, and in particular to sexual violence against men and boys (SVAMB). For a long time, men’s experiences of sexual violence were often overlooked and “tailored intervention to address male-centred sexual harms remains exclusive and marginalized” ( Ní Aoláin et al., 2015 , p. 109). In practical terms, despite a handful of cases involving sexual violence against men in the international criminal justice arena, and in the context of some truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) in Latin America, TJ instruments have thus far almost entirely turned a blind eye to the experiences of sexually violated men ( Schulz, 2020 ).

Despite this prevailing marginalization of sexual violence against men, emerging scholarship has begun to explore how socially constructed masculinities render men vulnerable to gender-based violence in the first place and how sexual violence impacts male survivors’ gendered identities as men in myriad ways ( Myrttinen et al., 2017 ; Schulz, 2020 ). Accordingly, there has also been some attention to the intersections between SVAMB and TJ in the form of growing engagement with the ways in which male survivors conceptualize justice in postconflict settings ( Schulz, 2020 ). Focused specifically on Northern Uganda, previous research by one of the authors has begun to highlight male survivors’ gender-specific justice needs and conceptions ( Schulz, 2019 , 2020 ), as well as how numerous gendered, cultural, and sociopolitical barriers often uphold a vacuum of justice and persisting impunity for those crimes committed against most male survivors of sexual violence globally. Paying attention to male survivors’ lived realities and their justice-related concerns, needs, and priorities is important to address some of the persisting gendered gaps and blind spots.

However, what arguably still requires further examination are the experiences of noncombatant and nonmilitarized civilian men, who arguably constitute the majority of men during most armed conflicts globally, as well as nonheterosexual masculinities, which are still largely rendered invisible by heteronormative frames of conflict and TJ ( Schulz et al., 2023 ). As such, a much needed avenue for further engagement is to consider “how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces ( Hamber, 2016 , p. 30).

Queer Perspectives

Paying sustained attention to masculinities, however, also bears the risk of reinforcing binary constructions of gender, which have been remarkably consistent throughout the study of armed conflict ( Sjoberg, 2016 ). To avoid this, careful consideration for gender and sexualities as fluid spectrums, for the elasticity of gender, as well as the inclusive recognition of people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) is important to fully comprehend gendered understandings of conflicts and political transitions. These nonbinary experiences and perspectives, however, are only seldom taken into account in the context of conflict studies and peacebuilding in general ( Hagen, 2016 ) and in relation to transitional justice processes specifically ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Fobear, 2014 ). As summarized by McQuaid (2017) , “on the subject of the particular justice needs and harms experienced by sexual minorities, much current transitional justice scholarship remains silent” (p. 1). Katherine Fobear (2023) similarly attested that even though the field of transitional justice has grown substantially, including with regard to incorporating gender, the question of “what it would mean to better incorporate and engage with queer bodies and theory in transitional justice is still very relevant today” (p. 2; also see Fobear, 2014 ). Queer and queering in the context of this discussion serves as an umbrella term to recognize a variety of expressions, identities, and actions that disrupt cis-heteronormative frames based on strict and binary conceptions of gender and sexualities.

It would, however, be misleading to claim that there has been no movement within the field of TJ to queer it, thanks to critical interventions from scholars and activists alike ( Fobear, 2023 ). Many of these developments can be observed in relation to truth commissions ( Bueno-Hansen, 2023 ; Fobear, 2014 ) as well as processes of dealing with the past in Latin American contexts, “some of which have expanded their purview to include human rights investigations of violence against sexual and gender minorities” ( Schulz, 2019 , p. 701; see also Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ). Colombia in particular serves as a contemporary example of the precedent-setting work for the inclusion of persons with diverse SOGIESC and their experiences into TJ processes ( Oettler, 2019 ), for instance with the 2011 Victim’s and Land Restitution Law and its Victim’s Unit, which include “a differential approach that recognizes sexual orientation and gender identity” ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 , p. 5). In Ecuador, too, a feminist-informed and gender inclusive approach contributed toward “a holistic understanding of sexual and gender-based violence,” including attention to violence against persons with diverse SOGIESC in the Truth Commission’s final report ( Bueno-Hansen, 2023 , p. 2).

However, to queer transitional justice processes, it is not enough to only address antiqueer violence directed against LGBTQI communities and people with diverse SOGIESC, but also to address and critically interrogate larger systems of homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and heteronormativity ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Fobear, 2023 ). To this end, critical scholars have argued for the need of queer, intersectional, and decolonial approaches ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Ní Aoláin & Rooney, 2007 ) that expose “how institutionalized categories and identities are used to regulate and socialize” ( Fobear, 2023 , p. 6), and that would contribute toward circumventing the neoliberal and heteronormative foundations of TJ. In combination, this triangulation of queer, intersectional, and decolonial analytical lenses to examine queer lived realities can challenge the hetero- and cis-normativity of the field ( Bueno-Hansen, 2018 ; Hagen, 2016 ), and can thus contribute toward a more inclusive understanding of gender in the context of TJ. Nevertheless, across time and space, states’ accountability to address systematic forms of violence against persons with SOGIESC and to push for greater inclusion remains severely limited—consequentially requiring further engagement and advocacy to push the conversation forward by focusing on greater engagement across different spheres and for a variety of populations in transitional settings ( Fobear, 2023 ).

Ways Forward: Toward More Comprehensive and Inclusive Conceptions of “Gender” and “Justice”

This article has offered an overview of transitional (gender) justice mechanisms and their limitations and has put forward questions as to whether transitional justice and its “formulaic approach” ( Rees & Chinkin, 2015 , p. 1211) can ever succeed in changing women’s and other marginalized population’s lives. Without a doubt, much progress has been made in gendering transitional justice processes, and gendered harms have received increasing attention in the international policy arena. However, several shortcomings persist in effectively addressing gendered conflict-related experiences and in advancing transformations for women. When it comes to the implementation of transitional justice, all too often gender remains an afterthought, and is often implemented through a typical “add women and stir” approach—which in turn falls short in fully understanding the ways in which gender permeates all aspects of social and political life, including of armed conflicts and political transitions.

In light of these limitations and shortcomings, then, more needs to be done to address gender in postconflict and transitional spaces. This includes a move beyond transitional justice toward transformative justice, for instance in the form of transformative reparations to ultimately address gendered and patriarchal structures and root causes of violence and conflict and contribute toward more gender-just societal structures. Gendering transitional justice also requires going beyond a conflation of “gender” with “women,” to instead fully consider the full spectrum and elasticity of gender in the form of paying more sustained attention to masculinities and queer experiences and perspectives. To gain a more complete picture of gender in transitional justice and to ultimately advance this progress in practical turn, relational, intersectional, de-colonial and queer approaches are required that take into account the ways in which gender intersects with other identities and forms or exclusions and discrimination. Such approaches, then, also hold the potential to move beyond neoliberalized notions of justice (and gender) that dominate the study and practice of transitional justice, and to instead think of justice in more relational and creative terms.

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Related Articles

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Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice

• Published: November 1995
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Turning to concrete questions of justice for women, Sen introduces the issue of ‘co‐operative conflicts’ and argues that these conflicts are often rooted in traditional conceptions of women's role, which are internalized as ‘natural’ by the women themselves. Sen's contention is that the capabilities approach can handle these conflicts better than Rawlsian liberalism and economic utilitarianism. To Sen, the central problem is to confront the underlying prejudice directly and to outline the need for and scope of reducing inequalities in capabilities without accepting that this project necessarily causes great inefficiency.

1 Practice and Theory

Empirical research in recent years has brought out clearly the extent to which women occupy disadvantaged positions in traditional economic and social arrangements. While gender inequalities can be observed in Europe and North America (and in Japan), nevertheless in some fields women's relative deprivation is much more acute in many parts of the ‘Third World’.

Indeed, there are extensive inequalities even in morbidity and mortality in substantial parts of Asia and North Africa. Despite the biological advantages that women have in survival compared with men (the ratio of women to men averages around 1.05 or so in Europe and North America, partly due to biological differences in mortality rates), the number of women falls far short of men in Asia and North Africa, though not in sub‐Saharan Africa. If we took the European and North American ratios as the standard, the total number of ‘missing women’ in Asia and North Africa would be astonishingly large (more than 50 million in China alone). Even if the sub‐Saharan African ratio of females to males is taken as the standard, the number of ‘missing women’ would be more than 44 million in China, 37 million in India, and a total exceeding 100 million world‐wide. 2 While looking at female: male ratios in the population is only one way of examining the relative position of women, this approach does give some insight into the acuteness of the problem of gender inequality in matters of life and death. It also throws some indirect light on the history of inequalities in morbidity and of unequal medical care. Direct observation of these other data confirm the intensity of gender inequality in vitally important fields. 3

I have begun with a rather stark account of some features of gender inequality. What bearing does a theory of justice have on our understanding and analysis of these dreadfully practical matters? One bearing is obvious enough. In describing some arrangements as ‘unjust’ we invoke—explicitly or by implication—some conception of justice, and it is necessary at some stage to come to grips with the appropriateness of the respective theories of justice to pronounce judgement on these matters. An observation of inequality can yield a diagnosis of injustice only through some theory (or theories) of justice.

A second context is a bit more complex but no less important. The tolerance of gender inequality is closely related to notions of legitimacy and correctness. In family behaviour, inequalities between women and men (and between girls and boys), are often accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘appropriate’ (even though they are typically not explicitly discussed). Sometimes the operational decisions relating to these inequalities (e.g. providing more health care or nutritional attention to boys vis‐à‐vis girls) are undertaken and executed through the agency of women themselves. The perceived justness of such inequalities and the absence of any contrary sense of deep injustice play a major part in the operation and survival of these arrangements. 4 This is not the only field in which the survival of extraordinary inequality is based on making ‘allies’ out of those who have most to lose from such arrangements. It is, therefore, important to scrutinize the underlying concepts of justice and injustice, and to seek a confrontation between theory and practice.

2 Co‐operative Conflicts

There are many areas of social organization in which all the parties have something to gain from having a workable arrangement, but the gains that are made respectively by different parties differ greatly from one working arrangement to another. There are co‐operative elements in these arrangements, but also elements of conflict in the choice of one arrangement rather than another.

This class of problem can be called ‘co‐operative conflicts’. 5 Such problems have been investigated in the literature of economics and game theory in different ways. For example, what J. F. Nash ( 1950 ) calls ‘the bargaining problem’ is a case of co‐operative conflict in which each party has well‐defined and well‐understood interests which coincide with their objectives.

Sometimes, simplifying assumptions are made that eliminate crucial aspects of co‐operative conflicts. One example is the assumption (used powerfully by Gary Becker, 1981 ) that the ‘altruistic’ head of the family acts in the joint interest of all, and everybody else in the family has exactly the same rational perception of the family's joint interest, which they all want to maximize in a rational and systematic way. This avoids the problem of   conflict in co‐operative conflicts by making everyone pursue the same objectives, as a result of which they have no disharmony of interests, or of objectives. If women (or girls) die in much larger numbers than men (or boys), because of differential medical attention and health care, then this model requires that such differentials are what every member of the family (including the relatively more‐stricken women) rationally promote and their consequences are what they jointly seek.

The existence of conflicts is, however, fully acknowledged in game‐theoretic discussions of ‘the bargaining problem’ inside the family (see, for example, Manser and Brown ( 1980 ); Lundberg and Pollak ( 1994 )). Different family members are seen to have partly divergent interests. It is taken for granted that every member of the family acts on the basis of promoting his or her rationally perceived individual interests, and there is no ambiguity about this. This has the effect of abstracting from the role of implicit theories of justice and of appropriateness, and instead of Beckerian ‘collectivism’, we have here thoroughly individualistic perception of interests and choices based on them.

There is an interesting contrast here that is worth a comment. The situation of real conflict between different members of the family is well caught by the game‐theoretic perspective in a way that the Beckerian formulation does not. On the other hand, the socially influenced perception of the absence of conflict between family members may well be closer to Becker's formulation than to the standard game‐theoretic one. What is needed is a combination, which acknowledges the possibility of real conflicts of interests (unlike in Becker's framework) coexisting with a socially conditioned perception of harmony (unlike in the standard game‐theoretic model). Implicit theories of justice and traditional understandings of what is ‘natural’ and ‘proper’ can play a major part in making people with divergent interests feel united around shared perceptions of common objectives. Thus, despite the illumination about conflicts provided by game‐theoretic models, they do tend to ignore some of the more important causal influences—related to perceptions of legitimacy—that give stability to extreme inequalities in traditional societies. 6

Theories of justice are important in bringing out the tension between perceptions of justice and what may be required by the demands of fairness or less partial rational assessment. Practical uses of theories of justice can be particularly important in the long run, since social change is facilitated by a clearer understanding of tensions between what happens and what is acceptable. While such an impact may be indirect, and while the connections between ethical analysis (on the one hand) and social perceptions and practical politics (on the other) may not be instantaneous, it would be a mistake to ignore the long‐run practical importance of a clearer understanding of issues of justice and injustice.

3 The Claims of Utilitarian Justice

No ethical theory has had as much influence in the modern world as utilitarianism. It has been the dominant mode of moral reasoning over the last two centuries. We can do worse than begin with the question: Why not go for the utilitarian theory of justice as the basis of analysis of gender inequality? The fact that utilitarianism had a radical role in providing effective critiques of many traditional inequities (Bentham's own 1789 practical concerns were much inspired by his outrage at what he saw around him) makes it particularly appropriate to look for a positive lead from that quarter.

Unfortunately, utilitarianism provides a rather limited theory of justice for several distinct reasons. First, utilitarianism is ultimately an efficiency‐oriented approach, concentrating on promoting the maximum sum total of utilities, no matter how unequally that sum total may be distributed. If equity is central to justice, utilitarianism starts off somewhere at the periphery of it.

It is, of course, possible to use utilitarianism to reject many inequalities, since inequalities are often also thoroughly inefficient. But given the lack of a basic concern with equality in the distribution of advantages, the utilitarian concentration on the promotion of utilities is not particularly oriented towards justice.

Secondly, the efficiency that utilitarianism promotes is, of course, specifically concerned only with the generation of utilities . Under different interpretations of utilities variously championed by different utilitarian authors, this amounts to promoting either maximal pleasures, or maximal fulfilment of felt desires, or maximal satisfaction of perceived preferences, or some other achievement in a corresponding mental metric. 7 As was discussed in the last section, one of the features of traditional inequalities is the adaptation of desires and preferences to existing inequalities viewed in terms of perceived legitimacy. This plays havoc with the informational basis of utilitarian reasoning since inequalities in achievements and freedoms (e.g., in morbidities, mortalities, extents of undernourishment, freedom to pursue well‐being) get concealed and muffled in the space of conditioned perceptions.

There is, in fact, some empirical evidence that the deprived groups such as oppressed women in deeply unequal societies even fail to acknowledge the facts of higher morbidity or mortality (even though these phenomena have an objective standing that goes beyond the psychological perception of these matters). 8 Basing the assessment of justice on a measuring rod that bends and twists and adapts as much as utilities do, can be formidably problematic. The difficulties are certainly big enough to discourage us from looking for a utilitarian theory of justice as an ethical arbitrator or as a conceptual frame of reference for analysing the problem of gender inequalities.

4 The Rawlsian Theory of Justice

Compared to the utilitarian approach the Rawlsian theory of ‘justice as fairness’ has many decisive advantages. The Rawlsian theory also has merits in terms of scope and reach over more relativist and less universalist approaches that have sometimes been proposed. 9

The Rawlsian approach avoids the peculiar reliance on selected mental characteristics that utilitarianism recommends. It also provides a foundation based on the idea of fairness that links the demands of justice to a more general mode of reasoning. 10 The use of ideas of fairness, rationality, reasonableness, objectivity, and reflective equilibrium provides Rawls's theory of justice with a depth of political argumentation that is remarkably effective. More substantively, the concern with equity in addition to efficiency as reflected in Rawls's principles of justice puts equity at the centre of disputes about justice in a way that utilitarianism (peripherally concerned, as it is, with equity) fails to do. 11

The Difference Principle of Rawls focuses on primary goods as the basis of assessing individual advantages. Primary goods are things that every rational person is presumed to want, such as income and wealth, basic liberties, freedom of movement and choice of occupation, powers and prerogatives of office and positions of responsibility, and the social bases of self‐respect. In this list there is a clear recognition of the importance of a variety of concerns that affect individual well‐being and freedom and which are sometimes neglected in narrower analyses (e.g., in the concentration only on incomes in many welfare‐economic analyses of inequality).

Despite these advantages there are some real problems in using the Rawlsian theory of justice as fairness for the purpose of analysing gender inequality. In fact, these problems are quite serious in many other contexts as well, and constitute, in my judgement, a general deficiency of the perspective of the Rawlsian theory of justice. Perhaps the most immediate problem relates to Rawls's use of the respective holdings of primary goods as the basis of judging individual advantage. The difficulty arises from the fact that primary goods are the means to the freedom to achieve, and cannot be taken as indicators of freedoms themselves.

The gap between freedoms and means to freedoms would not have been of great practical significance if the transformation possibilities of means into actual freedoms were identical for all human beings. Since these transformation possibilities vary greatly from person to person, the judgements of advantage in the space of means to freedom turn out to be quite different from assessments of the extents of freedoms themselves. The source of the problem is the pervasive diversity of human beings which make equality in one space conflict with equality in other spaces. 12 The particular issue of inter‐individual variations in converting primary goods into freedoms to achieve fits into a more general problem of divergence between different spaces in which the demands of equity, efficiency, and other principles may be assessed.

One of the features of gender inequality is its association with a biological difference which has to be taken into account in understanding the demands of equity between women and men. To assume that difference away would immediately induce some systematic errors in understanding the correspondence between the space of primary goods and that of freedoms to achieve. For example, with the same income and means to buy food and medicine, a pregnant woman may be at a disadvantage vis‐à‐vis a man of the same age in having the freedom to achieve adequate nutritional well‐being. The differential demands imposed by neo‐natal care of children also have considerable bearing on what a woman at a particular stage of life can or cannot achieve with the same command over primary goods as a man might have at the corresponding stage in his life. These and other differences, in which biological factors are important (though not exclusively so), make the programme of judging equity and justice in the space of primary goods deeply defective, since equal holdings of primary goods can go with very unequal substantive freedoms.

In addition to these differences which relate specifically to biological factors, there are other systematic variations in the freedoms that women can enjoy vis‐à‐vis men with the same supply of primary goods. Social conventions and implicit acceptance of ‘natural’ roles have a major influence on what people can or cannot do with their lives. Since the sources of these differences may appear to be ‘external’ to the human beings, it is possible to expect that they can be somehow accounted in when constructing a suitable basket (and index) of primary goods. If this could be adequately done, problems arising from these ‘external sources’ would be accountable within Rawlsian calculus.

However, in many circumstances this may not prove to be possible. Some of the social influences appear in most complex forms and may be hard to formalize into some component of primary goods. The sources of pervasive social discouragement are often hard to trace and harder to separate out.

Perhaps more importantly, as was discussed earlier, some of the constraints that are imposed on what women are free or not free to do may closely relate to women's own perceptions of legitimacy and appropriateness. The presence of this influence plays havoc, as was discussed earlier, with the utility‐based evaluation of justice. That problem has some bearing on the Rawlsian perspective as well. The behavioural constraints related to perceptions of legitimacy and correctness can strongly affect the relationship between primary goods and the freedoms that can be generated with their use. If women are restrained from using the primary goods within their command for generating appropriate capabilities, this disadvantage would not be observed in the space of primary goods. It is not clear how these constraints, many of which are implicit and socially attitudinal, can be incorporated within the framework of the ‘external’ category of primary goods.

I would, therefore, argue that despite major advantages in adopting the Rawlsian theory of justice in analysing gender inequality, there are also serious problems, arising particularly from variations in the correspondence between primary goods and freedoms to achieve. These problems are not specific to gender justice, but they apply with particular force in this case.

There is another problem that may be briefly mentioned here. This relates to the domain of applicability of the Rawlsian theory of justice. In the original presentation (Rawls, 1958 ; 1971 ), ‘justice as fairness’ did appear to be a theory with a very wide domain, applicable in many diverse social circumstances, with a universalist outlook. Without formally contradicting anything presented in that earlier version, Rawls's more recent presentations (Rawls, 1985 ; 1987 ; 1988 a ; 1988 b ; 1993 ) have increasingly stressed some special features of Western liberal democracies as preconditions for applying the principles of justice.

Rawls has emphasized that his ‘political conception’ of justice requires tolerance and acceptance of pluralism. These are certainly attractive features of social organization. If these were parts of the requirement imposed by Rawls's theory, without making it illegitimate to apply other parts of his principles of justice even when these conditions were not entirely met, the domain of his theory would not have been substantially reduced, even though its demands would have been significantly expanded. However, Rawls has sometimes asserted precisely that conditionality—making the requirements take a fairly ‘all or nothing’ form. This has the immediate effect of making it an illegitimate use of his theory to apply his principles of justice in circumstances where the conditions of tolerance are not met.

In the context of many ‘Third World’ countries in which the problems of gender inequality are particularly acute, Rawls's requirements of toleration are not at all well met. If, as a result, it becomes right to conclude (as seems to be suggested by Rawls) that his theory cannot be applied in such societies, then there is not a great deal to be said about gender inequality in those circumstances with the aid of ‘justice as fairness’.

I personally would argue that Rawls over‐restricts the domain of his theory, since it has usefulness beyond these limits. 13 The theory comes into its own in the fuller context of toleration that make Rawls's ‘political conception’ more extensively realizable, but the important questions of liberty, equity, and efficiency outlined by Rawls have substantial bearings even in those circumstances in which the demands of toleration are not universally accepted.

5 Freedoms, Capabilities, and Justice

I have argued elsewhere in favour of judging individual advantage directly in terms of the freedom to achieve, rather than in terms of primary goods (as in Rawls, 1971 ), incomes (as in standard welfare‐economic discussions), resources (as in Dworkin, 1981 ), and other proposed spaces. The ‘capability perspective’ involves concentration on freedoms to achieve in general and the capabilities to function in particular (especially when assessing freedoms to pursue well‐being). 14 Individual achievements in living could be seen in terms of human functionings, consisting of various beings and doings, varying from such elementary matters as being adequately nourished, avoiding escapable morbidity, etc., to such complex functionings as taking part in the life of the community, achieving self‐respect, and so on.

An important part of our freedom to achieve consists of our capability to function. In the functioning space an achievement is an n ‐tuple of functionings that are realized, whereas a capability set is a collection of such n ‐tuples of functioning combinations. The capability set of a person represents the alternative combinations of functioning achievements from which the person can choose one combination. It is, thus, a representation of the freedom that a person enjoys in choosing one mode of living or another. 15

When we want to examine a person's freedom to achieve in a more general context (including the achievement of social objectives), we shall have to go beyond the functioning space into the corresponding representations of broader achievements, e.g., promoting her social objectives such as reforming some feature or another of the society in which she lives. By pointing our attention towards freedoms in general, the capability approach is meant to accept the relevance of freedom over this broader space, even though the formal definition of capabilities may not take us beyond human functionings as such. 16

A number of questions have been raised about the cogency, scope, and applicability of the capability approach to justice. I have dealt with some of the issues elsewhere (Sen, 1992 a ; 1992) and will not go into them here. 17 There are also interesting issues in the relationship between this approach and the perspective emerging from Aristotelian analysis of capability, virtues, and justice, and these have been illuminatingly discussed by Martha Nussbaum ( 1988 a ; 1988 b ). These issues too I shall not pursue here. Instead I shall try to comment on some particular features of this approach that may be particularly relevant in developing a capability‐based theory of justice in general, and can be usefully applied specifically to analyse gender inequality.

I would argue that any theory of justice (1) identifies a space in which inter‐personal comparisons are made for judging individual advantages, and (2) specifies a ‘combining’ procedure that translates the demands of justice to operations on the chosen space. For example, the utilitarian approach identifies the relevant space as that of individual utilities (defined as pleasures, fulfilment of desires, or some other interpretation), and picks the combining formula of simply adding up the individual utilities to arrive at a sum total that is to be maximised. To take another example, Nozick's ( 1974 ) ‘entitlement theory’ specifies the space as a set of libertarian rights that individuals can have, and uses as a combining formula an equal holding of these rights. Similarly, the Rawlsian approach demands maximal equal liberty for all in the space of some specified liberties (through the ‘First Principle’) and supplements it by demanding a lexicographic maximin rule in the space of holdings of primary goods (included in the ‘Second Principle’ in the form of the ‘Difference Principle’).

It should be obvious that the specification of the space of functionings and capabilities in particular, and of achievements and freedoms in general, does not amount to a theory of justice. It merely identifies the field in which the ‘combining’ operations have to be defined. The assertiveness of the claim rests on the acceptance of the peculiar relevance of this space in judging individual advantage in formulating a theory of justice.

I have argued elsewhere that a theory of justice must include aggregative considerations as well as distributive ones. 18 It will be a mistake to see the space of functionings and capabilities as being exclusively related to specifications of the demands of equality. In assessing the justice of different distributions of individual capabilities and freedoms, it would be appropriate to be concerned both about aggregative considerations and about the extent of inequality in the distribution pattern.

It is not my purpose here to argue for a particular formula for combining the diverse considerations of equality and efficiency, and I am not about to propose a rival specification to the lexicographic maximin rule used by Rawls, or to the simple summation rule used by the utilitarians. There are good grounds for attaching importance both to overall generation of capabilities (this includes aggregative considerations in general and efficiency considerations in particular) as well as to reducing inequalities in the distribution of capabilities. Within that general agreement various formulae can be found that do not coincide with each other but which can be—and have been—defended in a reasonable way in many presentations. I have not gone beyond outlining a space and some general features of a combining formula, and this obviously falls far short of being a complete theory of justice. Such a complete theory is not what I am seeking, and more importantly for the present purpose, it is not especially needed to analyse gender inequality. The class of theories of justice that are consistent with these requirements is adequate for the present purpose.

6 Gender and Justice

Earlier in this paper I have tried to outline the connection between common perceptions of legitimacy and appropriateness (shared even by women themselves) in traditional societies and the gender inequalities that are generally accepted in those societies (even by the women themselves). In that context I illustrated the inequalities with some standard indicators of minimal success in living, such as survival rates. This was just one illustration of the kind of variable in terms of which inequalities can be assessed. Being able to survive without premature mortality is, of course, a very basic capability. When a fuller accounting is done, many other capabilities would have obvious relevance, varying from the ability to avoid preventable morbidity, to be well‐nourished, to be comfortable and happy, etc., on the one hand, as well as more complex freedoms to achieve, including social goals and objectives, on the other.

This way of judging individual advantage provides an immediate connection between (1) the basis of the class of theories of justice outlined in the previous section, and (2) the empirical realities in terms of which gender inequality can be effectively discussed. The main advantage in being concerned with this space rather than the space of resources, primary goods, incomes, etc., is that the perspective of freedom to achieve tells us a great deal more about the advantages that the persons actually enjoy to pursue their objectives (as opposed to the means they possess that may differentially privilege different people to promote their aims).

It has been suggested by Rawls ( 1988 b ), in a critique of my line of reasoning, that comparing people's capabilities would require the use of one universal set of ‘comprehensive’ objectives shared by all, and that demanding such uniformity would be a mistake. I agree that it would be a mistake to demand such uniformity, but is it really needed?

People do, of course, have different particular aims. Whether at a deep and sophisticated level a shared set of general objectives can be fruitfully assumed is an important question that has been addressed in the Aristotelian perspective by Martha Nussbaum ( 1988 b ). 19 But no matter what position we take on that particular question, it is important to recognize that inter‐personal comparison of capabilities are not rendered impossible by the absence of an agreed ‘comprehensive doctrine’. By looking at ‘intersections’ between different individual orderings, agreed judgements on capabilities can be made without invoking a single ‘comprehensive’ doctrine shared by all. 20 There can be incompletenesses in such orderings but that is a problem that applies to the indexing of primary goods as well. 21 The really serious cases of inequities that tend to move us towards agitating for social change would typically be captured by a variety of orderings, even when they would disagree with each other in many subtler issues.

The specification of the relevant space opens the way not only for the assessment of inequalities in those terms but also for understanding the demands of efficiency in that context. This is particularly important in understanding gender inequality for two distinct reasons.

First, as was argued earlier, gender relations do involve ‘co‐operative conflicts’. There are benefits for all through co‐operation, but the availability of many different arrangements (yielding different levels of inequality in the generated capabilities) superimpose conflicts on a general background of co‐operative gains. To deny the existence of the efficiency problem would be a great mistake, and cannot serve the cause of gender equality in a practical world. Efficiency issues have to be tackled along with problems of inequality and injustice.

Secondly, gender inequality is made acceptable to women themselves (along with the more powerful male members of the society at large) by playing up the demands of efficiency in particular social arrangements. The relatively inferior role of women and the shockingly neglected treatment of young girls are implicitly ‘justified’ by alleged efficiency considerations. The alternative of chaos and gross inefficiency is frequently presented, explicitly or by implication, in discussions on this subject. That line of argument has to be critically scrutinized and challenged.

To meet that general presumption and prejudice, what is needed is a serious analysis of the feasibility of alternative arrangements that can be less iniquitous but no less efficient. To some extent such an analysis can draw on what has already been achieved in other countries. In the light of specific circumstances, more particular analysis of feasibilities may also be needed. 22 The identification of deprivation has to be linked directly to the demands of fair division.

The central issue is to confront the underlying prejudice directly and to outline the need for and scope of reducing inequalities in capabilities without accepting that this must cause great inefficiency. The implicit prejudices call for explicit scrutiny. We have to be clear on the nature of the ‘theory’ underlying the practice of extreme inequality, and be prepared to outline what justice may minimally demand. The advantage of a theory of justice defined in terms of the capability space is to place the debate where it securely belongs.

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A revised version of a paper presented at the WIDER conference on Human Capabilities: Women, Men and Equality, in Helsinki, August 1991. In revising the paper. I have benefited from the comments of David Crocker, Jonathan Glover, Martha Nussbaum, and Ruth‐Anna Putnam.

See Sen ( 1989 ; 1992 b ). See also Coale ( 1991 ); Klasen ( 1994 ) for other bases of estimates, and Harriss and Watson ( 1987 ) for a general discussion of the underlying issues.

I have tried to discuss the available evidence in Sen ( 1990 c ); and also in my joint work with Jean Drèze; Drèze and Sen ( 1989 ), ch. 4. See also Boserup ( 1970 ); Lincoln Chen et al. ( 1981 ); Kynch and Sen ( 1983 ); Sen ( 1985 b ).

Indeed, sometimes even social analysts tend to treat the absence of any perceived sense of unjust inequality as ‘proof’ that any suggestion of real conflict is mistaken—‘an import of foreign ideas into the harmony of traditional rural living’. For a critique of this tradition of interpretation, see Kynch and Sen ( 1983 ) and Sen ( 1990 c ).

For a characterization and analysis of ‘co‐operative conflicts’, see Sen ( 1990 c ). This is an extension of what Nash ( 1950 ) called ‘the bargaining problem’.

In this paper I am concerned specifically with the situation in the ‘Third World’, but I believe that the problem of gender inequality even in the economically advanced countries of Europe and North America can be better understood by bringing in conceptions of justice and legitimacy as determinants of individual behaviour.

It is sometimes thought that the ‘desire‐fulfilment’ theory of utility is radically different from a ‘mental metric’ approach, since it examines the extent of fulfilment of what is desired, and the objects of desire are not themselves mental magnitudes: for this and related arguments see Griffin ( 1982 ; 1986 ). But the utilitarian formula requires interpersonally comparable cardinal utilities, and this demands comparisons of intensities of desires for different objects, by different people. Thus, in effect, the dependence on mental metrics is extensive also in the desire‐fulfilment formulation of utilitarian calculus.

On this see Kynch and Sen ( 1983 ). It is, of course, a different issue as to how these ‘objective’ matters relate to human perceptions generally (including those of professional doctors), and I am not addressing here the foundational question of objective–subjective divisions. On that issue, see Hilary Putnam ( 1987 ; 1991 ).

Relativism raises many different types of issues. There are questions of cultural relativism, which are sometimes invoked to dispute criticisms of traditional societies. There is also the question of a separate ‘feminist’ approach to justice. These is, in that context, the methodological problem as to whether the advantages of men and women in a theory of justice can be judged in the ‘same’ standards. On these matters and also on their bearing on theories of justice, see Okin ( 1987 ; 1989 ), Nussbaum ( 1988 a ; 1988 b ) and Ruth Anna Putnam ( 1992 ).

I am referring particularly to the use of ‘the original position’ in Rawls ( 1958 ; 1971 ). See also Rawls ( 1985 ; 1993 ). In his later presentations Rawls has integrated the reasoning based on ‘the original position’ with a constructivist programme inspired by Kant ( 1785 ).

Equality is valued in Rawls's first principle (demanding ‘equal liberty’) as well as the second (of which the Difference Principle particularly brings out the concern with the worse off members of the society). The special concern with liberty, which is a part of the first principle, is also an attractive feature of justice, even though the lexicographic priority that liberty gets over other human concerns can be disputed. On this see Hart ( 1973 ).

I have discussed this issue in Sen ( 1980 ; 1990 b ; 1992 a ).

On related matters see Putnam ( 1992 ).

On this see Sen ( 1980 ; 1985 a ; 1985 b ; 1993 ). For an excellent review of discussions relating to this perspective, see Crocker ( 1991 b ). See also Griffin and Knight ( 1989 ), Crocker ( 1991 a ), and Anand and Ravallion ( 1993 ).

On some technical issues in evaluating freedom, see Sen ( 1990 a ; 1991 a ; 1992 a ). It is important to emphasize that the freedom to choose from alternative actions has to be seen not just in terms of permissible possibilities, but with adequate note of the psychological constraints that may make a person (e.g., a housewife in a traditional family) desist from taking steps that she could, in principle, freely take. On this and related issues, see Laden ( 1991 ).

A distinction made between ‘agency objectives’ in general and ‘well‐being objectives’ in particular is relevant here. The capability to function is closely related to well‐being objectives but the approach (of which this outlook is a part) encourages us to look beyond this space when we are concerned with a person's ‘agency freedoms’ (see Sen, 1985 a ).

See also Crocker ( 1991 b ).

This is discussed particularly in Sen ( 1992 a ).

On this see Sen ( 1970 ; 1990 b ; 1992 a ).

On that problem see Plott ( 1978 ); Gibbard ( 1979 ); Blair ( 1988 ) and Sen ( 1991 b ).

One of the most important fields of investigation in this context is the role of the freedom to accept remunerative employment on the part of women. On this see Sen ( 1990 c ) and Martha Chen ( 1992 ).

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• Social justice: what’s...

Social justice: what’s in it for gender equality and health?

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• Sarah Hawkes , director 1 ,
• Jennie Gamlin , deputy director 1 ,
• Kent Buse , director 2
• 1 Centre for Gender, Health and Social Justice, University College London, UK
• 2 Healthier Societies Program, George Institute for Global Health, Imperial College London, UK

Social justice framing and approaches can help accelerate progress towards gender equality and reducing health and wellbeing inequities. Yet in addition to promoting action on the inequitable distribution of power and privilege, campaigners need to make a case for a state that proactively promotes and upholds collective wellbeing, say Sarah Hawkes, Jennie Gamlin, and Kent Buse

Every 20 February marks World Social Justice Day in the calendar of the United Nations. For many, the idea of social justice is deeply rooted in political philosophy 1 and questions of what constitutes a just and equal society and how we arrive at it. Even among proponents of social justice, belief in these core concepts of equality and fairness may be met with varying levels of acceptance depending on the type of equality demanded. In 2022, we can generally see opposition to the ideas of social justice, equality, and fairness declining, but some of the voices of resistance have radicalised, both from pushback within and against democratic states, and from the heart of nationalist and populist regimes. 2 However, calls for justice that extend into demands for a universal basic income, 3 a more progressive approach to land ownership, 4 or a reform of immigration policies so that the right to health and life are not determined by citizenship 5 are often likely to meet with resistance even among those who are generally considered progressive in their politics.

At the other end of the political spectrum, social justice is framed as a challenge to individual freedoms and has become a handy smear to imply that anything that falls under its banner is nothing more than a byword for “identity politics” and “wokeness” that constitutes a “dangerous form of decadence,” 6 as one British politician recently claimed.

Given these two starkly different positions, it is worth exploring how a social justice approach, as much in theory as in practice, can help move us towards gender equality and health and wellbeing for all. Our starting point is that gender equality and health equity are firmly intertwined, and that a social justice approach provides a much needed framework for equality of opportunity, as well as equality and equity in outcomes.

The relationship between social justice and health has been debated over many years, and for outstanding explorations of the philosophical underpinnings of social justice and health, the work of scholars such as Sridhar Venkatapuram 7 and Jennifer Prah Ruger 8 is well worth revisiting. Both have shone convincing conceptual lights on its centrality in promoting fair and equitable outcomes in health and wellbeing for all.

If we look at how this rich literature on health and social justice can be brought to bear on the intersection of health and gender, we think there are three areas that can spur us to greater action.

The first is the impact that gender inequality has on health outcomes. A growing evidence base 9 shows the impact of gendered inequalities (or, frequently, the pervasive ignoring and overlooking of gender) on risk and vulnerability to ill health, access to health services, and the quality of care received once inside health services. Tackling these drivers of health inequities is an obvious starting point for health actors who are concerned with social justice and gender equality (for all genders).

Taking a social justice approach encourages us to think beyond the gendered inequalities apparent among people who use health services and act on the unequal and gendered distribution of power and privilege that drives health inequities more broadly. As Venkatapuram puts it, “People’s health or clinical ‘health outcomes’ are significantly socially produced by a range of political, economic, legal, cultural and religious institutions.” 7 Thus, girls’ secondary education has been estimated to be one of the two strongest predictors of maternal and health outcomes among women and girls in low and middle income countries, 10 while laws against child rape “lack legal protections for boys” in 33 out of 60 surveyed countries. 11 Gendered inequalities in the education and legal systems in these examples have direct consequences on the gendered distribution of health and wellbeing across all populations. Taking a social justice lens to our action on gender and health enables us to seek positive change both within the health system and across the wider determinants of health.

This message has been taken up within the global health ecosystem, with a wide variety of organisations promoting action from a social justice perspective. These range from the specifics, such as “Closing the gender pay gap is just one of the many aspects of our gender justice work around the world” (Islamic Relief Worldwide), through to more general commitments “to support the leaders, businesses and communities working for a more just and equitable society” (McKinsey and Company). Our Global Health 50/50 report 12 in 2021 found that among 200 organisations across the global health ecosystem, 28 use the language of social justice in describing their work and philosophy. What we need now is for this minority view to become normalised and the dominant way of framing our work in health.

The second area where social justice is necessary relates to participation and engagement. The “revolutionary” 13 Alma Ata declaration of 1978 called for the “maximum community and individual self-reliance and participation in the planning, organization, operation and control of primary health care.” 14 In the decades since, countless policies and programmes in both health and gender have incorporated community and public engagement. Such an approach fits within the philosophy of social justice—not only because it promotes individual agency, but also because it underpins exercises in reaching agreement on collective values, shared priorities, and the prevailing rules and norms in the health system. 7

Last, but by no means least, it is important to recognise that social justice relies upon laws and policies that promote distributive justice, and hence on the presence of properly funded and fully functioning public institutions to ensure implementation of and accountability for those policies. 15 In other words, for social justice to be achieved we need state institutions that function for the welfare and wellbeing of all, and which can be held to account for these commitments.

While action at the levels of individuals and organisations is necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient in achieving social justice across gender and health. We also require states, state institutions, and multistate instruments (such as the United Nations) to uphold principles of social justice and speak the language of social justice. In recent years, we have seen a constant eroding of the state (and the multilateral system) and its functions in many settings. The marketisation and financialisation of what were previously state-led services (health, education, welfare), together with a diminishing of the concept of collective wellbeing, has undermined the collective power of citizens to hold systems to account for the social good that lies at the heart of social justice.

Many of us proudly claim the moniker of “social justice warrior” when promoting gender equality and health and wellbeing for all. We propose that World Social Justice Day is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that while social justice may start with a claim to identity and representation, its full realisation means also holding democratic states to account for their duty to serve their communities by guaranteeing social wellbeing and the fair distribution of resources.

Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and have none to declare.

Provenance and peer review: not commissioned; not peer reviewed.

• ↵ Open Democracy. Amartya Sen and the Idea of Justice https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/amartya-sen-and-idea-of-justice/
• ↵ Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Is universal basic income a good idea? 27 May 2021. https://www.jrf.org.uk/universal-basic-income-good-idea
• ↵ Monbiot G, Grey R, Kenny T, et al. Land for the Many; changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed. A report to the Labour Party. June 2019. https://landforthemany.uk/
• ↵ Mason R. Tory party chairman says ‘painful woke psychodrama’ weakening the west. The Guardian. 14 February 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/14/oliver-dowden-says-painful-woke-psychodrama-weakening-the-west
• Venkatapuram S
• Prah Ruger J
• ↵ Lancet Series on Gender Equality, Norms, and Health . Lancet. 30 May 2019 . https://www.thelancet.com/series/gender-equality-norms-health .
• ↵ Economist Intelligence Unit. Shining Light on the Response to Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation. 2019. https://outoftheshadows.eiu.com/
• ↵ Global Health 50/50. Annual Report. Gender Equality: Flying Blind in a Time of Crisis. 2021. https://globalhealth5050.org/2021-report/
• ↵ World Health Organization. Declaration of Alma-Ata. International conference on primary health care. Kazakhstan, USSR. 1978. https://www.who.int/publications/almaata_declaration_en.pdf
• ↵ United Nations Dept of Economic and Social Affairs. Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations. 2006; New York. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/ifsd/SocialJustice.pdf

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A Critical Analysis of Gender Justice under the Indian Constitution

Trishala chettri.

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In India, the notion of gender justice is not a new phenomenon. Women have been subjected to gender inequality and differences in every aspect of their lives. In the era of modernization, women still face discrimination in various fields. They are often subjected to inequality in multiple areas and still face issues such as sexual harassment, forced prostitution, dowry, and many more. Transgender people are also subjected to utter discrimination and are deprived of their fundamental human rights as a third gender. However, The Constitution of India laid down specific provisions and laws to eradicate the concept of gender inequality between men, women, and the third gender in socio-economic, political, legal, and another aspect of life. The paper seeks to critically evaluate the constitutional provision relating to gender equality and analyse the general issues and problems faced by women and the third gender in society.

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International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 3, Page 1610 - 1620

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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.

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A global health response to gender justice requires continued engagement

Posted on May 12, 2024 May 12, 2024

» A global health response to gender justice requires continued engagement

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Authors: Pascale Allotey, Elhadj As Sy, Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Peter Friberg, Sofia Gruskin, Geeta Rao Gupta, Sarah Hawkes 

Published By: BMJ

Date: October, 2021

Publication Link: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/10/22/a-global-health-response-to-gender-justice-requires-continued-engagement/

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