research topics on gender gap

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• 06 September 2023

Gender equality: the route to a better world

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The Mosuo people of China include sub-communities in which inheritance passes down either the male or the female line. Credit: TPG/Getty

The fight for global gender equality is nowhere close to being won. Take education: in 87 countries, less than half of women and girls complete secondary schooling, according to 2023 data. Afghanistan’s Taliban continues to ban women and girls from secondary schools and universities . Or take reproductive health: abortion rights have been curtailed in 22 US states since the Supreme Court struck down federal protections, depriving women and girls of autonomy and restricting access to sexual and reproductive health care .

SDG 5, whose stated aim is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, is the fifth of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, all of which Nature is examining in a series of editorials. SDG 5 includes targets for ending discrimination and violence against women and girls in both public and private spheres, eradicating child marriage and female genital mutilation, ensuring sexual and reproductive rights, achieving equal representation of women in leadership positions and granting equal rights to economic resources. Globally, the goal is not on track to being achieved, and just a handful of countries have hit all the targets.

How the world should oppose the Taliban’s war on women and girls

In July, the UN introduced two new indices (see go.nature.com/3eus9ue ), the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) and the Global Gender Parity Index (GGPI). The WEI measures women’s ability and freedoms to make their own choices; the GGPI describes the gap between women and men in areas such as health, education, inclusion and decision making. The indices reveal, depressingly, that even achieving a small gender gap does not automatically translate to high levels of women’s empowerment: 114 countries feature in both indices, but countries that do well on both scores cover fewer than 1% of all girls and women.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made things worse, with women bearing the highest burden of extra unpaid childcare when schools needed to close, and subjected to intensified domestic violence. Although child marriages declined from 21% of all marriages in 2016 to 19% in 2022, the pandemic threatened even this incremental progress, pushing up to 10 million more girls into risk of child marriage over the next decade, in addition to the 100 million girls who were at risk before the pandemic.

Of the 14 indicators for SDG 5, only one or two are close to being met by the 2030 deadline. As of 1 January 2023, women occupied 35.4% of seats in local-government assemblies, an increase from 33.9% in 2020 (the target is gender parity by 2030). In 115 countries for which data were available, around three-quarters, on average, of the necessary laws guaranteeing full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights had been enacted. But the UN estimates that worldwide, only 57% of women who are married or in a union make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Systemic discrimination against girls and women by men, in many contexts, remains a colossal barrier to achieving gender equality. But patriarchy is not some “natural order of things” , argues Ruth Mace, an anthropologist at University College London. Hundreds of women-centred societies exist around the world. As the science writer Angela Saini describes in her latest book, The Patriarchs , these are often not the polar opposite of male-dominated systems, but societies in which men and women share decision making .

After Roe v. Wade: dwindling US abortion access is harming health a year later

One example comes from the Mosuo people in China, who have both ‘matrilineal’ and ‘patrilineal’ communities, with rights such as inheritance passing down either the male or female line. Researchers compared outcomes for inflammation and hypertension in men and women in these communities, and found that women in matrilineal societies, in which they have greater autonomy and control over resources, experienced better health outcomes. The researchers found no significant negative effect of matriliny on health outcomes for men ( A.  Z. Reynolds et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117 , 30324–30327; 2020 ).

When it comes to the SDGs, evidence is emerging that a more gender-equal approach to politics and power benefits many goals. In a study published in May, Nobue Amanuma, deputy director of the Integrated Sustainability Centre at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Hayama, Japan, and two of her colleagues tested whether countries with more women legislators, and more younger legislators, are performing better in the SDGs ( N. Amanuma et al. Environ. Res. Lett. 18 , 054018; 2023 ). They found it was so, with the effect more marked for socio-economic goals such as ending poverty and hunger, than for environmental ones such as climate action or preserving life on land. The researchers recommend further qualitative and quantitative studies to better understand the reasons.

The reality that gender equality leads to better outcomes across other SDGs is not factored, however, into most of the goals themselves. Of the 230 unique indicators of the SDGs, 51 explicitly reference women, girls, gender or sex, including the 14 indicators in SDG 5. But there is not enough collaboration between organizations responsible for the different SDGs to ensure that sex and gender are taken into account. The indicator for the sanitation target (SDG 6) does not include data disaggregated by sex or gender ( Nature 620 , 7; 2023 ). Unless we have this knowledge, it will be hard to track improvements in this and other SDGs.

The road to a gender-equal world is long, and women’s power and freedom to make choices is still very constrained. But the evidence from science is getting stronger: distributing power between genders creates the kind of world we all need and want to be living in.

Nature 621 , 8 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02745-9

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Global Gender Gap Report 2021

The Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks the evolution of gender-based gaps among four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment) and tracks progress towards closing these gaps over time.

This year, the Global Gender Gap index benchmarks 156 countries, providing a tool for cross-country comparison and to prioritize the most effective policies needed to close gender gaps. The methodology of the index has remained stable since its original conception in 2006, providing a basis for robust cross-country and time-series analysis. The Global Gender Gap Index measures scores on a 0 to 100 scale and scores can be interpreted as the distance to parity (i.e. the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed).

The 14th edition of the report, the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 , was launched in December 2019, using the latest available data at the time. The 15th edition, the Global Gender Gap Report 2021 , comes out a little over one year after COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. Preliminary evidence suggests that the health emergency and the related economic downturn have impacted women more severely than men, partially re-opening gaps that had already been closed.

The 2021 report’s findings are listed below.

Global Trends and Outcomes

• Globally, the average distance completed to parity is at 68%, a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
• The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 parliament seats and just 22.6% of over 3,400 ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of state, as of 15th January 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
• Widening gender gaps in Political Participation have been driven by negative trends in some large countries which have counterbalanced progress in another 98 smaller countries. Globally, since the previous edition of the report, there are more women in parliaments, and two countries have elected their first female prime minister (Togo in 2020 and Belgium in 2019).
• The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report and as a result we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
• The slow progress seen in closing the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap is the result of two opposing trends. On one hand, the proportion of women among skilled professionals continues to increase, as does progress towards wage equality, albeit at a slower pace. On the other hand, overall income disparities are still only part-way towards being bridged and there is a persistent lack of women in leadership positions, with women representing just 27% of all manager positions. Additionally, the data available for the 2021 edition of the report does not yet fully reflect the impact of the pandemic. Projections for a select number of countries show that gender gaps in labour force participation are wider since the outbreak of the pandemic. Globally, the economic gender gap may thus be between 1% and 4% wider than reported.
• Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already at parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that on its current trajectory, it will take another 14.2 years to completely close this gap. In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than for economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic, as well as continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.

Gender Gaps, COVID-19 and the Future of Work

• High-frequency data for selected economies from ILO, LinkedIn and Ipsos offer a timely analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender gaps in economic participation. Early projections from ILO suggest 5% of all employed women lost their jobs, compared with 3.9% of employed men. LinkedIn data further shows a marked decline of women’s hiring into leadership roles, creating a reversal of 1 to 2 years of progress across multiple industries. While industries such as Software and IT Services, Financial Services, Health and Healthcare, and Manufacturing are countering this trend, there is a more severe destruction of overall roles in industries with higher participation of women, such as the Consumer sector, Non-profits, and Media and Communication. Additionally, Ipsos data from January 2021 shows that a longer “double-shift” of paid and unpaid work in a context of school closures and limited availability of care services have contributed to an overall increase of stress, anxiety around job insecurity and difficulty in maintaining work-life balance among women with children.
• The COVID-19 crisis has also accelerated automation and digitalization, speeding up labour market disruption. Data points to significant challenges for gender parity in the future of jobs due to increasing occupational gender-segregation. Only two of the eight tracked “jobs of tomorrow” clusters (People & Culture and Content Production) have reached gender parity, while most show a severe underrepresentation of women.
• Gender gaps are more likely in sectors that require disruptive technical skills. For example, in Cloud Computing, women make up 14% of the workforce; in Engineering, 20%; and in Data and AI, 32%. While the eight job clusters typically experience a high influx of new talent, at current rates those inflows do not re-balance occupational segregation and transitioning to fields where women are currently underrepresented appears to remain difficult. For example, the current share of women in Cloud Computing is 14.2% and that figure has only improved by 0.2 percentage points, while the share of women in Data and AI roles is 32.4% and that figure has seen a mild decline of 0.1 percentage points since February 2018.
• This report also premiers a new measure created in collaboration with the LinkedIn Economic Graph team which captures the difference between men and women’s likelihood to make an ambitious job switch. The indicator shows that women experience a bigger gender gap in potential-based job transitions in fields where they are currently under-represented, such as Cloud Computing, where the job-switching gap is 58%; Engineering, where the gap is 42%; and Product Development, where the gap is 19%.
• Through the combined effect of accelerated automation, the growing “double shift”, and other labour market dynamics such as occupational segregation, the pandemic is likely to have a scarring effect on future economic opportunities for women, risking inferior reemployment prospects and a persistent drop in income. Gender-positive recovery policies and practices can tackle those potential challenges. First, the report recommends further investments into the care sector and into equitable access to care leave for men and women. Second, policies and practices need to proactively focus on overcoming occupational segregation by gender. Third, effective mid-career reskilling policies, combined with managerial practices, which embed sound, unbiased hiring and promotion practices, will pave the way for a more gender-equal future of work.

Gender Gaps by Economy and Region

• Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world for the 12th time. The top 10 includes:

• The five most-improved countries in the overall index this year are Lithuania, Serbia, Timor-Leste, Togo and United Arab Emirates, having narrowed their gender gaps by at least 4.4 percentage points or more. Timor-Leste and Togo are also among the four countries (including Cote d’Ivoire and Jordan) that have managed to close their Economic Participation and Opportunity gap by at least 10 full percentage points in one year. Three new countries have been assessed this year for the first time: Afghanistan (44.4% of the gender gap closed so far, 156th), Guyana (72.8%, 53rd) and Niger (62.9%, 138th).
• There are significant disparities across and within various geographies. Western Europe remains the region that has progressed the most towards gender parity (77.6%) and is further progressing this year. North America is the second-most advanced (76.4%), also improving this year, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (72.1%) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (71.2%). A few decimal points below is the East Asia and the Pacific region (68.9%), one of the most-improved regions, just ahead of Sub- Saharan Africa (67.2%) and surpassing South Asia (62.7%). The Middle East and North Africa region remains the area with the largest gap (60.9%).
• At the current relative pace, gender gaps can potentially be closed in 52.1 years in Western Europe, 61.5 years in North America, and 68.9 years in Latin America and the Caribbean. In all other regions it will take over 100 years to close the gender gap: 121.7 years in Sub-Saharan Africa, 134.7 years in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 165.1 years in East Asia and the Pacific, 142.4 years in Middle East and North Africa, and 195.4 years in South Asia.

Gender equality in research: papers and projects by Highly Cited Researchers

Strategic Alliances and Engagement Manager

Empowering women and girls is a critical target of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this installment of our blog series about Highly Cited Researchers contributing to the UN SDGs, we focus on SDG 5: Gender Equality. We discuss the research that Highly Cited Researchers have published and the trends we’re seeing emerge.

Gender equality is a fundamental human right and yet women have just three quarters of the legal rights of men today. While the speed of progress differs across regions, laws, policies, budgets and institutions must all be strengthened on an international scale to grant women equal rights as men.

The socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and high-profile policy changes like the overturning of Roe v. Wade have shown how much work needs to be done. The COVID-19 pandemic caused many women to leave the workforce and amplified challenges related to child and elder care, with women shouldering much of the burden. This can disproportionately affect girls’ educational prospects and, as is often the case in stressful environments and during times of crisis, puts women at increased risk of domestic violence .

While some high-profile issues related to women’s rights and safety make the news cycle, gender inequalities are firmly entrenched in every society, impacting the daily lives of women and girls in ways that are rarely reported on. As Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, once said , “from the economy to climate change to criminal justice reform to national security, all issues are women’s issues.”

Women’s issues are interconnected with all the SDGs, as we touched on in our recent post in this series, which explored the research centered around SDG 16: Peaceful, just and strong institutions . In that post we found that sexual, domestic and intimate partner abuse and violence against women are the most published topics related to SDG 16.

In this post, we look at Highly Cited Researchers who focus specifically on SDG 5 and issues of equality and gender .

What is SDG 5: Gender equality?

SDG 5: Gender Equality is intended to address the serious inequalities and threats faced by women around the globe. The targets related to this goal include:

• End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere.
• Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.
• Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life.

There has been an increase in articles and reviews related to this SDG since the establishment of the SDGs in 2015. This trend graph from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics ™, using Web of Science Core Collection ™ data, shows growth from 86,000 papers in 2015 to 152,000 in 2021. That’s a 77% increase in six years.

Growth in academic papers related to SDG 5: Gender Equality

Source: Incites Benchmarking & Analytics. Dataset: articles and reviews related to SDG 5: Gender Equality published between 2015-2021.

The top ten countries publishing on SDG 5: Gender Equality during this period are shown below, with the U.S. producing roughly one third of all papers.

Countries producing the most papers related to SDG 5: Gender Equality

We explore these angles from research published between 2010 and 2020 in more detail, below.

Inequalities in the treatment of women during childbirth

Özge Tunçalp , a Highly Cited Researcher from the World Health Organization (WHO), wrote a systematic review in 2015 about the mistreatment of women globally during childbirth. This paper, coauthored with Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, University of Sao Paulo and PSI (a global nonprofit working in healthcare), has been cited more than 590 times to date in the Web of Science Core Collection. Tunçalp’s paper provides further information about the type and degree of mistreatment in childbirth, which supports the development of measurement tools, programs and interventions in this area.

Tunçalp authored another open access paper on this topic in 2019 , which followed women in four low-income and middle-income countries to study their experiences during childbirth. Unfortunately, more than one third of the women in the study experienced mistreatment during childbirth, a critical time in their lives, with younger and less educated women found to be most at risk. Beyond showing that mistreatment during childbirth exists, this study demonstrates the inequalities in how some women are treated in comparison to others, which informs the interventions needed.

“Our research showed that mistreatment during childbirth occurs across low-, middle- and high-income countries and good quality of care needs to be respectful as well as safe, no matter where you are in the world.” Dr Özge Tunçalp, World Health Organization

According to Dr. Tunçalp, “Women and families have a right to positive pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal experiences, supported by empowered health workers, majority of whom are women. Improving the experience of care throughout pregnancy and childbirth is essential to help increase the trust in facility-based care – as well as ensuring access to quality postnatal care following birth. Our research showed that mistreatment during childbirth occurs across low-, middle- and high-income countries and good quality of care needs to be respectful as well as safe, no matter where you are in the world. It was critical to ensure that these findings were translated into WHO global recommendations to inform country policy and programmes .”

Autism spectrum disorder and the gender bias in diagnosis

William Mandy, a Highly Cited Researcher in Psychiatry and Psychology, looks at gender differences related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Mandy, from University College London, and his co-authors found that the male-to-female ratio of children with ASD is closer to 3:1, not the often assumed 4:1 . With an apparent gender bias in diagnosis, girls who meet the criteria for ASD are at risk of being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. This can cause confusion and challenges with social interactions growing up, and can put women and girls at greater risk of traumatic experiences. Mandy et al’s paper has been cited more than 830 times to date.

“The reason for this diagnostic bias is that sex and gender influence how autism presents, such that the presentations of autistic girls and women often do not fit well with current conceptualisations of the condition, which were largely based on mainly male samples.” Dr William Mandy, University College London

When asked about the relevance of his research to the clinical community, Dr. Mandy said: “Clinicians have long held the suspicion that there is a diagnostic bias against autistic girls and women – that they are more likely to fly under the diagnostic radar. Our work (Loomes et al., 2017) has helped to provide systematic, empirical evidence that this bias does indeed exist, and to quantify its impact, in terms of how many autistic girls go undiagnosed.

The reason for this diagnostic bias is that sex and gender influence how autism presents, such that the presentations of autistic girls and women often do not fit well with current conceptualisations of the condition, which were largely based on mainly male samples. Therefore, to address the gender bias in autism diagnosis, we need an evidence-based understanding of the characteristics of autistic girls and women. Our study (Bargiela et al, 2016), in which we interviewed late-diagnosed autistic women about their lives, helps do this, revealing distinctive features of autistic women and of their experiences. This knowledge is shaping research and clinical practice.”

Going forward

The above papers are just a few examples of Highly Cited Researchers contributing to SDG 5-Gender Equality. Others focus on depression, Alzheimer’s Disease, cardiovascular disease and ovarian cancer. The fact that biomedical research featured so prominently in these results should not be a surprise. Gender bias has been identified in many areas of healthcare, including patient diagnosis , discrimination against health care workers , and low rates of women in clinical studies to name a few.

The Highly Cited Researchers working on gender equality within their respective fields, which also include social sciences, economics and other areas in addition to medicine, are helping to address the complex issues related to SDG 5. And what’s worthy of note is that many of the researchers mentioned here were named as Highly Cited Researchers in the cross-field category, which identifies researchers who have contributed to Highly Cited Papers across several different fields. This shows that a multifaceted and integrated approach to gender equality research may be playing a significant role in addressing this global issue.

Stay up to date

We discussed the SDG Publishers Compact in the first post in our series and then celebrated the Highly Cited Researchers in SDG 1: No Poverty and SDG 2: Zero Hunger. We then covered SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 4: Quality Education , and then jumped ahead to cover SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions . Alongside this, we also looked at Ukrainian research contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, here , and published an Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™Insights paper called, Climate change collaboration: Why we need an international approach to research .

In our next post, we will identify Highly Cited Researchers who are working to address SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation.

At Clarivate, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, and this includes support of human rights, diversity and inclusion, and social justice. Read more about our commitment to driving sustainability worldwide, and see highlights from our 2021 Clarivate Sustainability Report .

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Closing the gender health gap: a £39bn boost to the economy, as well as lives

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The UK has the 12th largest gender health gap in the world. Closing it will require investment, but would also reap rewards for women and the country, reports Sarah Graham

Closing the gender health gap by 2040 could add almost £39bn to the UK economy and give each British woman around 9.5 more days of good health a year. That’s according to data shared with The BMJ by the McKinsey Health Institute, whose recent report with the World Economic Forum describes investing in women’s health as a $1tn global opportunity, with a $3 return on investment for every $1 spent. 1

The report quantifies the personal and economic cost of years lost to disability, ill health, and early death, and highlights that women globally spend on average 25% more of their lives in poor health than men. The economic case is compelling—by investing in research, innovation, and data collection and improving access to healthcare services, economies around the world could see a $400bn boost to productivity, as well as improving the health and lives of 3.9 billion women. 1 In March US president Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding the government’s research on women’s health, with $200m pledged for the following year.

A 2020 analysis of health data across 158 countries, carried out by men’s wellbeing platform Manual, 2 found the UK had the largest women’s health gap (where a country’s ranking for women’s health is lower than their rank for men’s health) in the world.

The UK government published its women’s health strategy for England 3 in summer 2022. This 10 year plan, informed by consultation with women’s health organisations and more than 100 000 individuals, includes commitments on research, training, and service provision (see box 1 ). Lesley Regan—former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG)—was appointed to support the strategy in the role of women’s health ambassador in June 2022, and reappointed in January 2024 for a further two years.

UK government spending pledges for women’s health in England

April 2022 - July 2023 £53m, through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), for research with a focus on conditions specific to women’s health—including endometriosis, menopause, and cervical cancer

April 2023 - March 2025 £25m over two years—or £595 000 for each integrated care board—to establish at least one women’s health hub in each area

August 2023 New policy research unit dedicated to reproductive health commissioned, with an initial investment of £3m over three years

January 2024 £50m for an NIHR challenge for research tackling maternal health disparities

March 2024 £35m to tackle maternity safety, including £9m for tools training to reduce brain injuries in childbirth

Total = £166m

Earlier this month, the NHS also appointed Sue Mann, a consultant and lead for women’s health in City and Hackney, NHS North East London, as its first national clinical director for women’s health—to “help implement the women’s health strategy.”

The strategy was welcomed by women’s health groups, but questions were asked about how the plans would be funded. Edward Morris, then-president of RCOG, expressed concern about “the lack of dedicated funding to make these ambitions a reality.”

More recently, women’s health campaigner and author Kate Muir told Femtech World , “Until the women’s health strategy is properly funded, it will just be a PR sticking plaster covering up ongoing chaos, misery, and year long waiting lists.” 4

Ringfencing research funding and upskilling researchers

Research investment will be vital to improvements in women’s healthcare. Women have historically been excluded from, or underrepresented in, medical research, while conditions that predominantly affect women have been neglected and underfunded, 5 leaving large gaps in medical knowledge and understanding about female bodies.

Data from the McKinsey Health Institute show the UK’s top 10 women’s health conditions contribute to half of the health impact on gross domestic product. These conditions include premenstrual syndrome, ovarian and uterine cancers, and other gynaecological diseases, 6 but also depressive and anxiety disorders, migraine, asthma, ischaemic heart disease, and osteoarthritis.

In 2022, just 2.4% of public and charitably funded research in the UK went to reproductive health and childbirth—a total of £68.4m. 7 Fewer than 6% of grants between 2009 and 2020 in the UK looked at female specific outcomes or women’s health. 1 (It is not possible to differentiate male specific funding, McKinsey says.) And—unlike Canada, the US, and the EU’s Horizon Europe funding scheme—the UK currently has no standardised policy to ensure researchers account for sex and gender in their work.

Filling these research gaps is one of the six key priorities laid out in the women’s health strategy, with just over £100m of research investment announced so far, and a new policy research unit dedicated to reproductive health (see box 1 ).

“This is a good start, but more money will be needed,” says Kate Womersley, an NHS psychiatry doctor and research fellow at the George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London. Researchers and policy makers also need to take a much wider view of what constitutes women’s health, she adds. 8

“The commitments on research are quite vague in the women’s health strategy. Women’s health is any condition that affects girls and women at any point in their life. You’re only going to get good care if you invest in high quality research—research that focuses on gynaecological and obstetric problems, but also research that looks at women’s health in all specialties and takes seriously the intersectional factors of race and age.”

Enter Medical Science Sex and Gender Equity (Message), a research project at the George Institute of which Womersley is co-principal investigator. 9 Message aims to improve sex and gender equality across the UK’s research sector by co-creating a policy framework for research funders. This is to be released in the spring, Womersley says, and 29 organisations across the UK medical research community—including funders such as NIHR and journal publishers including The BMJ —have already signed a statement indicating their support.

“Researchers who apply for funding will need to follow these policies to meet funders’ standards,” says Womersley. “This will require upskilling a whole generation or more of researchers who haven’t done this until now. There are time and training implications, and cost implications around increasing sample sizes to give meaningful findings for people of different sexes and genders.”

Sustainable funding for care?

Investment in research must sit alongside investment in care. Rolling out a nationwide network of women’s health hubs (WHHs) is a central part of the women’s health strategy, promising a one stop shop for reproductive health in every integrated care board (ICB), which should help to bridge some of the gaps between primary and secondary care. The government’s own economic modelling shows a £5 return on investment for every £1 spent on WHHs, but concerns have again been expressed about the sustainability of funding.

In March 2023, the government announced a one-off £25m investment in the scheme, with each of England’s 42 ICBs to receive £595 000 over the following two years. 10 ICBs were encouraged to use their full funding allocation to establish at least one hub in their area. But ministers noted they were only expected to do so if running the hub would still be affordable once this initial investment runs out.

For health economics policy adviser Bridget Gorham at the NHS Confederation, this raised some questions. “Given it’s intended to serve half the population £25m is not a lot of money. I started to look into arguments for more robust and sustained funding for an area that has historically been neglected,” she says.

The NHS Confederation is now running its own economic modelling project, led by Gorham, to make that case. With their findings to be published this summer, Gorham’s hope is that it will support further funding for the goals the strategy sets out. “It’s a 10 year strategy with only two years of funding,” she says. “We’re trying to demonstrate the return on investment of having a healthy and productive 51% of the population, but with the caveat that this won’t be an immediate return on investment because the inequalities in the system will take time to untangle.”

Another problem, Gorham adds, is that when NHS England wrote to all ICBs in November, advising on immediate action to “achieve financial balance,” women’s health was not a protected budget. As a result, she explains, “we heard from several integrated care systems that their WHH funding ended up being thrown into the black hole to break even for the financial year. Because the funding isn’t recurrent, the obvious question is how integrated care systems can continue the service after those initial two years of funding.”

Similar misgivings are shared by RCOG. “Historically, investment in women’s health services has been insufficient, short term, and siloed. We therefore welcomed the ambitious vision set out in the women’s health strategy for England. WHHs are a very positive first step,” says Ranee Thakar, president of RCOG.

She adds, however, “To deliver on the promise of the strategy and truly transform care to meet the holistic needs of women across their lives, a long term and sustainable approach to funding is needed. We urge the government to commit to this.”

Robbing Patricia to pay Paula?

Another concern is that WHHs could come at the expense of improving women’s health provision across the whole of primary care. A joint statement published by the Royal College of GPs, RCOG, the Faculty for Sexual and Reproductive Health, and the British Menopause Society 11 highlights existing workforce pressures across the health service and states that, “In order to make sustainable improvements to women’s health and harness the benefits of the WHH model, there must be a focus on equipping primary care with funding, staffing capacity, and skills and knowledge to consistently deliver high quality women’s healthcare.”

Challenges also remain in secondary care, such as gynaecology waiting lists 12 and a shortage of 2500 midwives across England. 13 14 In March, as part of the spring budget, the government announced an additional £35m in funding to tackle maternity safety, including investment in training, as well as funding for 160 new midwives over the next three years.

“Any money for maternity services is welcome, but this new funding is still woefully inadequate. The promise of 160 midwives over three years is a drop in the ocean of the staffing crisis, and is unlikely even to replace the midwives who leave the register or retire during that time,” says midwife Leah Hazard, author of Womb and Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Tale. “How can staff have protected time to complete the training that’s been announced when there aren’t enough midwives to cover clinical care? Once again, the Tories are tossing crumbs to a system on its knees.”

The Royal College of Midwives cautiously welcomed the announced investment and, at the time of writing, was seeking clarification from the government on the role the new midwives (which equates to roughly one for each NHS trust) will play in the recruitment and retention of the wider midwifery workforce.

Womersley notes that there are also large gaps across women’s wider health—in areas such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, and autoimmune disease—that aren’t currently prioritised by the women’s health strategy.

“We’re going in the right direction, but I have worries about the longer term investment plan,” says Hannah Wrathall, founder of women’s health communications firm Wrapp Consultancy. “It would be good to have some reassurance, particularly in an election year, that this is a sustained, ongoing effort that’s going to be ingrained in our health system regardless of political party.”

Perhaps the real question then is not how much investment is needed to close the gender health gap but if stakeholders can count on consistent funding—and continued political will—to see it through. With significant potential returns on even relatively small investments (see box 2 ), not all changes will require large funding pots, as Regan has noted. But what will be key is effective implementation, strong leadership, and sustainable, long term planning.

The economic case for action—a lesson from the US

In the US—where the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act established guidelines for sex and gender inclusion in clinical research—non-profit organisation Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) worked with research institution RAND to model the health and economic impacts of doubling funding for women specific research in four areas: autoimmune disease, brain health, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

“We were conservative in our modelling, so we assumed small health improvements of 0.1% or less,” explains Lori Frank, president of WHAM, who previously worked on the research as a RAND scientist. “Then we looked at how much is invested in women focused research, and across all the therapeutic areas we’d chosen it was 15% or less. We thought it was politically feasible to think about what might happen if we doubled that funding.”

Take rheumatoid arthritis: women make up 60% of patients in the US, yet when WHAM looked at NIH funding for the disease they found that just 7% of the budget went to women focused research. By doubling that funding, even assuming just a 0.1% health improvement, WHAM’s economic model showed a staggering 174 000% return on investment. 15

“When you apply funding correctly, even under a budget constraint, you improve outcomes and so reduce your costs in the long run. It becomes a virtuous circle,” says Valentina Sartori, a partner at McKinsey and one of the lead authors on the gender health gap report.

More women in decision making positions will help, she adds, but so too will stretch goals and incentives—for public and private funders—to help “force the system” and drive funding to areas of unmet need. As Sartori and her colleagues state in the report, “When tackling women’s health, the solution is not to divide more slices of one pie: it’s to make more pies.”

SG is author of Rebel Bodies: A guide to the gender health gap revolution .

I have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and have no relevant interests to declare.

Commissioned; not peer reviewed.

• ↵ World Economic Forum, McKinsey Health Institute. Closing the women’s health gap: a $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies. January 2024. www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20health%20institute/our%20insights/closing%20the%20womens%20health%20gap%20a%201%20trillion%20dollar%20opportunity%20to%20improve%20lives%20and%20economies/closing-the-womens-health-gap-report.pdf
• ↵ Manual. The men’s health gap. www.manual.co/mens-health-gap
• ↵ Department of Health and Social Care. Women’s health strategy for England. 30 August 2022. www.gov.uk/government/publications/womens-health-strategy-for-england/womens-health-strategy-for-england
• ↵ Mihalia S. Women’s health strategy risks becoming “PR sticking plaster,” warn campaigners. Femtech World . 2 February 2024. www.femtechworld.co.uk/news/womens-health-strategy-risks-becoming-pr-sticking-plaster-warn-campaigners
• ↵ Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Global health metrics: other gynecological diseases—level 4 cause. www.healthdata.org/results/gbd_summaries/2019/other-gynecological-diseases-level-4-cause
• ↵ UK Clinical Research Collaboration. UK health research analysis 2022. https://hrcsonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/UK_Health_Research_Analysis_Report_2022_web_v1-0.pdf
• Womersley K ,
• Strachan S ,
• Medical Science Sex and Gender Equity
• ↵ Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, Caulfield M, Barclay S. £25 million for women’s health hub expansion. 8 March 2023. www.gov.uk/government/news/25-million-for-womens-health-hub-expansion
• ↵ RCGP. Achieving success with the women’s health hub (WHH) model. www.rcgp.org.uk/representing-you/policy-areas/womens-health-hub-model
• ↵ RCOG. Left for too long. www.rcog.org.uk/about-us/campaigning-and-opinions/left-for-too-long-understanding-the-scale-and-impact-of-gynaecology-waiting-lists
• ↵ Royal College of Midwives. Midwives on the register doesn’t mean midwives in post, says RCM. 2023. www.rcm.org.uk/media-releases/2023/november/midwives-on-the-register-doesn-t-mean-midwives-in-post-says-rcm
• ↵ RCM. RCM tells politicians how to fix the midwifery staffing crisis with new pre-election guide. 2024. www.rcm.org.uk/media-releases/2024/february/rcm-tells-politicians-how-to-fix-the-midwifery-staffing-crisis-with-new-pre-election-guide
• ↵ Women’s Health Access Matters. The WHAM report. https://thewhamreport.org

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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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The intellectual structure of gender equality research in the business economics literature

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• Published: 12 May 2023

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• Francisco Díez-Martín   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9888-833X 1 ,
• Giorgia Miotto   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0973-6597 2 &
• Cristina Del-Castillo-Feito   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7903-1365 1  

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In both the public and private sectors, gender equality is a major issue faced by modern management. It is also a primary concern for the global sustainable development defined by the UN 2030 Agenda. Gender equality, as a research topic, has been explored from many different social, economic and political sides; nevertheless, gender equality in business economics is still a very promising research field since the everchanging global organisational environment requires frequent updates and polysemic approaches. The aim of this study is to identify and visualise the intellectual structure and dynamics of gender equality research on business economics literature through a bibliometric quantitative literature analysis. Our results found 12 main lines of research. They also identify the trending topics, sources of knowledge, and literature dissemination paths along these lines between 2001 and 2020. This work contributes to the field of gender issues by showing its intellectual structure and providing a research agenda and identifying future research lines and gaps in the area.

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1 Introduction

Gender equality is a major issue in modern management, both in the public and private sectors (Báez et al. 2018 ), and it is a primary concern for the global sustainable development defined by the UN 2030 Agenda (Miotto et al. 2019 ). Gender equality, as a research topic, has been explored from many different social, economic and political perspectives; nevertheless, gender equality in business economics is still a very promising research field since the everchanging global organisational environment requires frequent updates and polysemic approaches (Belingheri et al. 2021 ). The more recent research topics on gender equality in business economics focus on women on boards of directors (Nguyen et al. 2020 ), salary gaps (Wang et al. 2019 ), risk-taking and financial performance impacts (Baixauli-Soler et al. 2017 ; Papanastasiou and Bekiaris 2020 ), CSR and information disclosure (Pucheta-Martínez et al. 2021 ), and family businesses (Kubíček and Machek 2019 ; González et al. 2020 ).

The increasing number of publications on gender issues makes it difficult to monitor the evolution of this field of research. Knowledge accumulation reduces the assimilation capacity of researchers, making it difficult to keep up to date. This has led to the elaboration of several literature reviews on gender issues during the twenty-first century. Most of these literature reviews are focused on the following main topics: gender and entrepreneurship (Moreira et al. 2019 ), women on boards of directors (Terjesen et al. 2009 ; Cabrera-Fernández et al. 2016 ; Kent Baker et al. 2020 ; Nguyen et al. 2020 ), women in international business (Bullough et al. 2017 ), and gender and corporate social responsibility (Amorelli and García-Sánchez 2021 ). We would also like to highlight a literature review about gender equality in business from 2011 that analyses the research in this field from 1995 to 2010 (Broadbridge and Simpson 2011 ).

These literature reviews are focused on specific topics; nevertheless, there is a lack of a multidisciplinary and interconnected overview of the gender equality field that may deeply understand the cause and effect of the different issues involved (Kirsch 2018 ). Existing literature reviews fail to provide a comprehensive, clear picture of what has been studied thus far and, therefore, the most relevant and promising future research lines should occur in this area (Belingheri et al. 2021 ).

In addition, some key issues in understanding the state of the art in this field of research have not been solved, mainly due to the qualitative nature of previous research. Furthermore, several recent studies have not been included in any generic bibliographic analysis about gender issues in business. These previous investigations identify the main lines of research on gender issues; nevertheless, there is no study that classifies the intellectual structure of the research field, the trends that have caught the attention of researchers, or the investigations that have facilitated the dissemination of knowledge connecting different lines of research. The intellectual structure definition is a comprehensive analysis of the domain of a study field; it is a structured way to define the boundaries and the map of discipline (Hota et al. 2020 ).

Knowing the intellectual structure of the field is key to defining research objectives that contribute to current studies, helping to incorporate new research areas into the field, and defining a relevant and updated research agenda (Carayannis et al. 2021 ). Bibliometric techniques are designed to achieve this purpose: systematically design and visualise the intellectual structure and mapping of a research field (Donthu et al. 2021 ; Silva et al. 2021 ). Unlike qualitative literature reviews, such as systematic reviews, bibliometric methods apply quantitative criteria to analyses large amounts of information and to discover knowledge networks and their structure (Zupic and Cater 2015 ). In addition, this methodology reduces the subjectivity grade of qualitative research associated with researcher bias.

To date, a nonbibliometric literature review of gender equality in business economics has been performed. Previous researchers, such as Broadbridge and Simpson ( 2011 ), performed a qualitative literature review, whereas all other literature analyses focused on specific topics linked to gender issues. Taking into consideration the need to improve the theoretical framework of gender equality in business (Hong et al. 2020 ), the aim of this study is to identify and visualize the intellectual structure and dynamics of gender equality research in the business economics literature and academic field. The research questions we would like to answer are as follows:

RQ1. Which are the most relevant research topics in the gender equality field in the business economics discipline?

RQ2. What are the most influential documents in the field of gender equality in business economics?

RQ3. What are the sources of knowledge on gender equality in business economics?

RQ4. How has gender equality research in business economics evolved in the last twenty years?

RQ5. How are the different topics related to gender equality interconnected?

RQ6. Which are the most relevant topics that will define the future research agenda in this field?

The novelty of this study lies in these specific aspects. First, for the first time in this knowledge area, we use a bibliometric method suitable to review a large corpus of documents using a quantitative technique able to perform an objective and unbiased analysis that provides accountable and trustworthy data (Donthu et al. 2021 ; Kumar et al. 2022 ). Second, we provide a holistic perspective of gender equality in the business economics field, avoiding a focus on only one issue, broadening the spectrum of the research and allowing a wider, more inclusive and multidisciplinary assessment (organisational behaviour, people management, legitimacy, etc.). Third, we highlighted the connections of the entire research field of gender equality studies in the business economics literature. Fourth, we define an update and analytic state of the art in terms of gender equality in business economics, and we propose a future, relevant and useful research agenda.

This document is organised as follows: the next section explains the methodology, and we describe the bibliometric techniques and concepts used. Afterword, the results section explains the main lines of research on the field, trends and connections. Finally, the results are discussed, and a research agenda is suggested.

2 Methodology

The study of the intellectual structure of gender equality research in the business economics literature was carried out using bibliometric data. To do so, this study adopts methodological procedures similar to those of previous bibliometric research in the field (e.g. Kumar et al. 2022 ) and implements the Scientific Procedures and Rationales for Systematic Literature Reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) protocol, which consists of three major stages: article assembling, arranging and assessing (Paul et al. 2021 ).

2.1 Assembling

To assemble the corpus of articles on the defined research field, we identify the search keywords related to gender equality in the business economics literature. These keywords are included and organised into the following search string: “gender diversity" or "gender gap" or “gender equality” or “gender parity” or “gender equity”. These search keywords have been chosen taking into consideration previous research on gender equality that refer to all these topics as highly linked and related to an equal sharing of opportunities of progress, properties, paid work, money, decision-making power and time management between men and women (Furlotti et al. 2019 ; Miotto and Vilajoana-Alejandre 2019 ; Mehng et al. 2019 ). These concepts are also included in international reports, indices and institutional policies such as “The 2019 Report on Equality between Women and Men in the European Union” (European Commission 2019 ), the “Sustainable Development Goal 5” indicators (United Nations 2019 ), the “Gender Development Index” (United Nations Development Programme 2020 ), the “Gender Empowerment Measure” (United Nations Development Programme 2020 ) and the “Global Gender Gap Report” (GGI) (World Economic Forum 2019 ).

We use the abovementioned search string through the Web of Science (WoS) document titles, abstracts, and keywords. Even if the Web of Science (WoS) includes les articles tan the Scopus database, in the business economics fields, the percentage of unique and overlapping citations in Scopus and WoS are very similar (Martín-Martín et al. 2018 ). In addition, WoS is the most widely used database in the business economics literature (Zupic and Cater 2015 ), even if scientometric scholars have not yet decided which database is the best one (Pranckutė 2021 ). The search resulted in 22,263 documents.

2.2 Arranging

To arrange the corpus of articles returned from the assembling stage, we applied these filters in the WoS database: research area and publication year. We filtered the corpus of articles taking into consideration the business economic research area. This led to a reduced corpus of 3456 articles. We focused on articles published during the twenty-first century, and the timeframe of the study was 2001–2020. Although the first articles on this subject were published in 1984, from the twenty-first century, there was a high increase, and since then, more than 20 documents have been published annually. This timeframe definition led to a corpus consisting of 3316 documents. Finally, we identified 51 documents whose references were invalid or unreadable. This filter was important because the bibliometric analysis that we apply (co-citations) uses references as the source of analysis. Thus, the final research sample consisted of 3265 documents.

2.3 Assessing

This study applies a bibliometric analysis approach to assess a corpus of 2,816 articles on gender equality. Bibliometric methodology uses quantitative techniques with the aim of summarising large quantities of bibliometric data to show the intellectual structure of a research field (Donthu et al. 2021 ).

Inspired by previous bibliometric research on the business economics field (e.g., Díez-Martín et al. 2021 ), this study performs a bibliometric analysis using science mapping based on cocitation analysis in CiteSpace. Science mapping is a useful technique to explore the relationships between research constituents. It offers an organised visual representation of the characteristics and relationships among different studies in a scientific area (Mukherjee et al. 2022 ). As opposed to the manual analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, science mapping is a more efficient and objective methodology due to automated data analysis (Lim et al. 2022 ; Mukherjee et al. 2022 ).

Cocitation is a science mapping technique (Cobo et al. 2011 ; Mukherjee et al. 2022 ). It defines the frequency with which two papers ‘A’ and ‘B’ are cited together by a third paper ‘C’ (Small 1973 ). The idea behind this approach is that when two papers are cited together, they will probably share similar theories, assumptions, concepts or methods. Co-citation analysis is one of the most widely used methods for bibliometric research in social science disciplines (Zupic and Cater 2015 ) and is useful for uncovering relationships between cocited publications (foundational knowledge) (Mukherjee et al. 2022 ). Cocitation analysis highlights networks between different studies and can detect paradigm shifts, trends and schools of thought from a long-term perspective (e.g. Delgado-Alemany et al. 2022 ). To enrich the assessment of the bibliometric analysis, we used two network metrics (Donthu et al. 2021 ): burstness and betweenness centrality. These indicators provide additional valuable information about the network.

We used CiteSpace software for the cocitation analysis based on previous and well-known reviews of bibliometric software tools (Moral-Munoz et al. 2019 ). CiteSpace is a Java-based scientific detection and visualisation software that analyses the evolution of a research field through bibliometric co-citation (Chen 2006 ). Previous research in business economics used this software to understand the intellectual structure of a body of knowledge (Cruz-Suárez et al. 2020 ; Pascual-Nebreda et al. 2021 ).

Furthermore, this study provides a proposal of a future research agenda and research gaps based on the analysis of the most relevant topics and networks. The next section shows the findings of the study.

In the following two sections, we show the results that answer the research questions. In the first section, we show the main lines of research on gender equality in business economics (RQ1). This section also shows which are the most influential documents on gender equality, identifying the documents that have received more attention by the scholars of this area and that have become trending topics (RQ2). In addition, we describe the sources of knowledge of each main research line (RQ3). The second section describes the evolution of gender equality research in business economics in the last twenty years (RQ4). Furthermore, we highlight the research articles that are the node of connection between the different lines of research related to gender equality (RQ5). Finally, we propose a future research agenda, highlighting the most relevant topics that will define the future research lines in this field (RQ6).

3.1 Main lines of research

The main lines of research on gender issues in the business economics literature are shown in Table 1 (RQ1). We found 12 main research lines. Each research line is a cluster generated by CiteSpace and based on co-citations. To confirm that our clusters are homogeneous between themselves (cohesion) and differentiated from the others (separation), we use the silhouette value. This measure is used to identify the quality of a cluster configuration. Each cluster shows a Silhouette value greater than 0.845, above the recommended 0.7 (Chen et al. 2010 ). In addition, to measure the network quality, CiteSpace uses the modularity Q (from 0 to 1), which identifies the capability of a network to be decomposed into multiple components or clusters (Chen et al. 2010 ). In this study, the gender research network shows a reasonably well-coupled distribution of the clusters, reaching a Modularity Q of 0.7495.

Furthermore, Table 1 shows the number of trending topics of each line of research (RQ2). CiteSpace detects trends (burst documents) by applying the algorithm of Kleinberg ( 2003 ). The burstness identifies the most relevant documents that have been considered a source of a research trend, since they have received a high number of citations during a specific timeframe (Kim and Chen 2015 ; Hou et al. 2018 ). Supplementary material of Appendix 1 shows the results of the burst analysis, which illustrates the trending topics in the research field from 2001 to 2020.

The main lines of research on gender issues in the business economics literature are described below. The order of the description of the clusters is based on the size of the research line. Supplementary material of Appendix 2 identifies the documents included in each cluster. These documents represent the main sources of knowledge on gender equality in business economics (RQ3).

Cluster #1–Risk Management–is the greatest line of research in the field of gender in the business economics literature. It contains the largest number of referenced documents (93). This indicates that most research in this field has focused on the study of how gender risk profiles on boards of directors affect corporate financial performance. According to several authors, the lower risk-taking attitude and the higher risk aversion in firms run by female CEOs have lower leverage, less volatile earnings, and a higher chance of survival than otherwise similar firms run by male CEOs (Cumming et al. 2015 ; Faccio et al. 2016 ). In addition, the inclusion of women on boards of directors may improve fraud control and lower the impact of risky financial operations (Lucas-Pérez et al. 2015 ). Specifically, these papers analyse how gender board composition affects conservativism or risk tolerance in the decision-making process from the financial side (Berger et al. 2012 ; Palvia et al. 2015 ; Hutchinson et al. 2015 ; Bennouri et al. 2018 ). Gender differences and approaches in risk-taking tolerance affect corporate financial performance (Hoogendoorn et al. 2013 ), dividend pay-out policies (Ye et al. 2019 ), forecast accuracy and audit quality (Gul et al. 2013 ), increase ROA and ROE, and significantly decrease Tobin’s Q (Bennouri et al. 2018 ). This line of research has become the second main research trend in the field since 2017, based on seven burst documents (Supplementary material of Appendix 1 shows the results of the burst analysis, which illustrates trending topics in the research field during 2001–2020). Furthermore, the sources of knowledge in cluster #1 show an average year of publication in 2016. This cluster group shows recent and updated articles and research theories.

Cluster #2–Board Performance–represents the second largest areas of research, with more than 80 research papers. The mean year of the investigations on this cluster is 2015. Academics in this area have focused on analysing the relationship between gender diversity on boards of directors and firm performance (Lückerath-Rovers 2013 ; Chapple and Humphrey 2014 ). This line of research has become the main research trend in the field since 2017 (13 burst documents, see Supplementary material of Appendix 1). For example, they analyses the relevance of the morality or legitimacy of gender diverse boards from the point of view of stakeholders’ perceptions (Gregory-Smith et al. 2014 ; Perrault 2015 ). This cluster also analysed quota issues and their usefulness (Seierstad 2016 ) Characteristics such as firm size, type of business, industry, focus on innovation (Cabeza-García et al. 2021 ), size of the board (Strøm et al. 2014 ) or country gender parity have been studied to monitor the impact of gender board diversity and company outcomes (Post and Byron 2015 ).

Researchers on Cluster #3–Quotas and Tokenism–are focused on the presence of women in the companies’ boards of directors and, specifically, on the application of quotas to guarantee the presence of female directors. This practice has been internationally discussed and often adopted. Quota implementation has been considered formally, including quotas in the national legal framework, or informally, as a best practice in several private organizations (Adams and Funk 2012 ). In this context, researchers analyse whether and how organisations should ensure the presence of women in the boardroom and their real impact on governance and performance. (Adams and Ferreira 2009 ; Ahern and Dittmar 2012 ) . Research indicates that women on board performance improves when a critical mass of women is reached, since according to the tokenism literature, women may be reticent to advocate for other women in powerful positions (Torchia et al. 2011 ). For example, with the presence of at least three women and above, CSR indicators improve (Post et al. 2011 ). However, the appointment of women to a board driven by tokenism does not improve corporate performance and results (Abdullah 2014 ). This line of research has been the most trending topic of the field, particularly between 2010 and 2015 (39 burst papers). In fact, the average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in cluster #3 is 2010. Although it is one of the most prolific lines of research in this field and has been trending since 2005, the scientific advances published in this cluster are based on more consolidated and old papers. In other words, advances in this line of research are taking place at a slower rate than those from lines of research with a more recent average year of publication.

Cluster #4–CSR–refers to articles focused on how gender diversity on boards of directors influences CSR performance, strategies and policies. Specifically, the quality and quantity of nonfinancial information and data companies run by women are disclosed compared with organisations managed mainly by men. For example, several authors affirm that diverse and inclusive boards of directors tend to disclose more and better quality information about environmental impact (Frias-Aceituno et al. 2013 ; Amran et al. 2014 ; Liao et al. 2015 ) and that gender diversity has a positive influence on CSR. Researchers suggest that female talent can play a strategic role in enabling firms to manage their social responsibility and sustainable practices appropriately (Setó-Pamies 2015 ), and this CSR output may improve corporate legitimacy (Zhang et al. 2013 ; Díez-Martín et al. 2021 ) and firm value (Fernández-Gago et al. 2016 ). Nevertheless, gender diversity is a key factor for CSR performance if female members are not chosen due to quota allocation since the control of the board of directors’ assignment is negative for the CSR decision-making process (Hafsi and Turgut 2013 ). Others focus their research on finding insights into the link between board diversity and CSR, particularly the importance of linking gender diversity and CSR decision-making processes (Rao and Tilt 2016 ) and the minimum number of women (at least 3) that may make the difference in CSR strategy decisions (Fernandez-Feijoo et al. 2014 ). This is a relatively recent cluster, with an average year of publication of 2016. Seven research trends were created between 2001 and 2020.

Cluster #5–Team Diversity–represents a relatively wide area of research with 76 academic papers. The mean year of the papers in this cluster is 2006; therefore, it includes one of the oldest areas of research within the gender equality field and the most trending before 2010. It generated 15 burst papers between 2001 and 2010. This cluster addresses the topic of team diversity and team outcomes, the differences between group members and their effect on group performance (van Knippenberg and Schippers 2007 ). Researchers have analysed the characteristics or factors that lead firms to appoint more women to top management teams and their outcomes on a firm’s performance. Along this line, they identify the effects of team diversity on firm performance in diverse contexts (Horwitz and Horwitz 2007 ; Joshi and Roh 2009 ). For instance, female top managers’ qualifications are relevant for improving organisational performance (Smith et al. 2006 ). Academics study the elements that motivate the decisions of firms regarding including or not including women on their boards of directors, suggesting that fulfilling internal or external demands has a strong influence (Farrell and Hersch 2005 ; Francoeur et al. 2008 ) and that, in many cases, board diversity is influenced by a firm’s external business environment and requirements (Brammer et al. 2007 ). In other situations, gender diversity in top management positions transcends external factors (Krishnan and Park 2005 ).

Cluster #6–Pay Gap–focuses on the existence of the gender pay gap, the reasons for this issue, and the differences between industries, kind of organisation and countries (Blau and Kahn 2003 , 2006 ; Albrecht et al. 2003 ; Arulampalam et al. 2007 ). The mean year of publication of the sources of knowledge of this cluster is 2005, representing one of the oldest areas of research in the field. It was the second trending line of research before 2010 (10 burst papers). Researchers have shown that the gender gap typically widens towards the top of the wage distribution (the “glass ceiling” effect), and in a few cases, it also widens at the bottom (the “sticky floor” effect) (Albrecht et al. 2003 ; Arulampalam et al. 2007 ). According to these cluster’s papers, the cause of this gap has its rut in the rise of married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century, when several households must decide whether a married woman should work or not, and in most cases, a second salary was necessary to maintain the family (Blau and Kahn 2003 ; Greenwood et al. 2005 ; Attanasio et al. 2008 ). The segregation of women into lower‐paying occupations, industries, and establishments accounts for a sizable fraction of the sex gap in wages (Bayard et al. 2003 ). Nevertheless, women are promoted at roughly the same rate as men but may receive smaller wage increases upon promotion; women are just as likely as men to be promoted but find themselves stuck at the bottom of the wage scale for the new job class (Booth et al. 2003 ). The increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality (Machado and Mata 2005 ), since higher levels of wage compression (measured in absolute or relative terms) are positively related to training (Almeida-Santos and Mumford 2005 ).

Cluster #7–Competitiveness–research is about the study of the differences between women and men when acting in a competitive environment (Croson and Gneezy 2009 ; Buser et al. 2017 ). There is evidence that demonstrates that women are less inclined to enter competition. They feel less comfortable in a highly competitive environment, and this attitude increases with age (Datta Gupta et al. 2013 ; Andersen et al. 2013 ). Researchers have explained this gender gap by stating that men are more overconfident (Niederle and Vesterlund 2005 ). This attitude affects and limits women’s career progress (Balafoutas and Sutter 2012 ) or the participation of women in science (Fryer and Levitt 2010 ; Moss-Racusin et al. 2012 ). This cluster is very useful for researchers seeking to justify differentiation in gender-biased career orientation and professional progress. Along this line, some results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition in driving job-entry choices (Flory et al. 2015 ). This line of research has been the second most trending topic between 2010 and 2015 (24 burst papers). The average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in cluster #7 is 2011.

Researchers on cluster #8–Innovation–try to set a theoretical framework for the relationship between gender and innovation (Agnete Alsos et al. 2013 ) through the analysis of how gender diversity within R&D teams impacts firm innovation but also how gender policies aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions (Lawrence et al. 2011 ). The number of papers within this cluster is 23; therefore, it is one of the smallest areas of study within the field. The mean year of the publications is 2011. The results show that innovation is more advanced in higher gender diverse teams (Van Dijk et al. 2012 ; Díaz-García et al. 2013 ). Additionally, the relation between gender and other types of diversity, such as age, education or ethnicity, are also studied when considering the effect on innovation (Østergaard et al. 2011 ). The average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in this cluster is 2011. This line of research generated 7 trending topics between 2010 and 2015.

Cluster #9–Wage Gap Reasons–focuses on the reasons that explain the gender wage gap. The average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in this cluster is 2015, and it generated 3 trending topics between 2010 and 2020. This cluster stresses the idea that the origin of this breach resides in the different roles between women and men in family management and the time dedicated to family care. While convergence between men and women in traditional human capital factors (education and experience) played an important role in the narrowing of the gender wage gap, these factors explain relatively little of the wage gap since women exceed men in educational attainment and have greatly reduced the gender experience gap (Blau et al. 2013 ). Nonetheless, labour-market experience remains an important factor in analysing female wages (Blau and Kahn 2017 ). Women are less likely to work in results-driven companies, with highly variable salaries linked to employees’ objective achievement. Furthermore, women receive only 90% of the firm-specific pay premiums earned by men, and this practice will contribute to the gender wage gap since women are less likely to work at high-paying firms or if women negotiate worse wage bargains than men (Card et al. 2016 ). The salary gender gap would be considerably reduced if firms did not economically reward individuals who laboured long hours, something that is very common, for example, in industries such as the corporate, financial, and legal worlds and less common in technology, science, and health (Goldin 2014 ). To explain women’s shorter time dedicated to work, researchers focus their attention on the analysis of family structure and management: motherhood and children’s education are two factors that explain why women’s income, in middle age, has a gap of up to 32% compared with men’s salary (Angelov et al. 2016 ). Motherhood is one of the most important factors of the gender salary gap (Adda et al. 2017 ). Studies show that, for example, the Motherhood delay leads to a substantial increase in earnings of 9% per year of delay, an increase in wages of 3%, and an increase in work hours of 6 (Miller 2011 ). Likewise, when a woman becomes more likely to earn more than a man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce (Bertrand and Pan 2013 ).

Cluster # 10–Productivity–research is about gender and productivity. Progress in this line of research is slowing down. The average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in this cluster is 2011, and it generated 3 trending topics before 2010. According to these articles, women progress less and more slowly in their professional careers, and their salaries are lower than those of men for three main reasons: less advanced training, differences in career interruptions (specifically motherhood), and differences in weekly hours (specifically to take care of the kids) (Bertrand et al. 2010 ; Becker et al. 2010 ). The three of them are related to a lack of productivity. The cluster analyses the link between gender and productivity in several industries, environments and countries (Peterman et al. 2011 ; Kilic et al. 2015 ).

Cluster #11–TMT–is one of the smallest areas of research within the gender equality field, including only 9 papers. The mean year of the investigations is 2016; thus, it is one of the most recent topics among the updated research. Within this cluster, researchers explore the effect of female representation in top management teams (TMT) and firm performance (Schwab et al. 2016 ; Jeong and Harrison 2017 ). Several investigations focus on the effect of gender diversity in TMT and financial operations, such as initial public offerings or mergers and acquisitions (Parola et al. 2015 ; Quintana-García and Benavides-Velasco 2016 ). Additionally, the presence of female top managers is positively related to entrepreneurial outcomes in established firms, although these results are weakened in firms with many women among their employees since many times a female top manager is less likely to favour lower-level female employees, as her categorisation as a member of the TMT restricts gender-based favouritism (Lyngsie and Foss 2017 ). Moreover, aspects related to quotas on women on top management teams are also covered, identifying, for example, how the presence of a woman on a top management team (TMT) reduces the likelihood that another woman occupies a position on that team (Dezso et al. 2016 ).

Cluster # 12–Labour Force Access–is the oldest and smallest line of research in this field. The average year of publication of the sources of knowledge in this cluster is 2002. It analyses factors that have caused an increase in women's access to the labour market, and references the revolution that transformed women’s opportunities (Goldin 2006 ). Aspects such as fertility and motherhood are analysed: for example, birth control availability, such as the contraceptive pill, are considered key factors for increasing female employment (Goldin and Katz 2002 ). Moreover, women are currently more educated, attending college and graduate education (Jacob 2002 ; Charles and Luoh 2003 ), and marriage and motherhood ages are later, for example, as a result of the possibility of in vitro fecundation (Gershoni and Low 2021 )., These aspects reduce the gender gap in career achievement. For example, the growing presence of a new type of man–one brought up in a family in which the mother worked–has been a significant factor in the increase in female labour force participation over time (Fernandez et al. 2004 ). Social policies are also considered in the female labour force, and their results in different countries. Nevertheless, for all women around the world, attaining the combination of reproductive empowerment and decent work is a challenge. Career advancement is interrupted by childbearing (Petrongolo 2004 ) despite social protection policies (Finlay 2021 ).

3.2 Connection between lines of research: turning points

In the following section, we show the research network of gender issues in the business economics academic literature (Fig.  1 ). We describe the evolution of the field (RQ4), and we highlight the connections between the main lines of research from 2001 to 2020 (RQ5). To identify the nodes that connect the different research topics, we use betweenness centrality (Bc). This indicator quantifies the number of times that a node acts as the most direct bridge (along the shortest path) between two other nodes (Chen et al. 2009 ).

Research network on gender issues in the business economics literature (2001–2020)

To deeply comprehend the research network development, a diagonal observation perspective is recommended, from left to right. In this way, we can better understand how research on gender issues in the business economics literature has evolved. We can see that the research focus shifted from studies about the issues of women's access to the labour market (year 2002) to different topics such as risk management, firms’ performance and CSR.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, studies on gender focused on analysing the factors that favour women's access to the labour market (cluster #12), the gender pay gap and its causes (cluster #6), and gender diverse working team performances (cluster #5). During these decades, the papers that have contributed the most to the research field, being the main intellectual bridges that connect different approaches in this field, are Arulampalam et al. ( 2007 ) and Smith et al. ( 2006 ). The first paper connects research between clusters #12 and #6 by bridging the gender pay gap and the factors conditioning access to the labour force and career progress, such as the provision of childcare (Bc = 0.13). The second analyses the effects of management diversity and female quotas in the corporate context (Bc = 0.19). This research shows that the positive effects of women in top management strongly depend on the qualifications of female top managers and not on their numbers or quotas, signalling a research diffusion path between clusters #5 and #3.

The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen a growth in the number of lines of research on gender issues. Researchers ponder the consequences of gender quotas and tokenism (cluster #3), relative to women’s productivity in the corporate environment, especially in management positions (cluster #10), and the effects on innovation (cluster #8). They also explore the role that competitiveness plays as a determinant of the gender gap (cluster #7). The research line about productivity is strictly linked to the gender pay gap (cluster #6), since it relates women’s performance and productivity with the salary gap. Nevertheless, the other research lines (#3, #8, #7) all converge into cluster #2 about women on boards and firm performance. Moreover, the most recent and updated research topics (#1, #4 and #11) are linked through cluster #2.

If we consider the evolution of gender topic research related to business economics, gender quotas and tokenism (#3) and woman on board performance (#2) represent the nodes and main line of connection of the actual knowledge network. On the one hand, it is observed that the research lines of the beginning of the century connect with cluster #3. At this stage, Adams and Ferreira (Adams and Ferreira 2009 ) research is a keystone of this cluster and of the whole network (Bc = 0.21). The article affirms that when gender diversity in boards of directors is regulated by female quotas or driven by tokenism, it does not ensure a higher level of efficiency and effectivity of the boards and does not necessarily improve firm performance. On the other hand, it is also observed that the most current lines of research are connected with cluster #2. The keystone article of this cluster is Lückerath-Rovers ( 2013 ), and it investigates the financial performance of Dutch companies both with and without women on their boards (Bc = 0.21). The research shows that the presence of women in top management is a logical consequence of a more innovative, modern, and transparent enterprise, and it may improve stakeholders’ management and reputation; nevertheless, it cannot prove that there is a positive relationship between gender board diversity and a firm’s economic and financial performance.

An interesting node that connects cluster #2 and cluster #7 is represented by Charness and Gneezy’s ( 2012 ) article that demonstrates that women are more conservative about investment, and they appear to be more financially risk averse than men (Bc = 0.10). A different attitude in terms of risk taking and competitiveness may positively and negatively affect companies’ performance if their management teams are more gender inclusive. Cluster #7 represents the link with cluster #9, where researchers, in addition to competitiveness, take into consideration and propose wage gap causes.

4 Research agenda

During the twenty-first century, research on gender issues in the business economics literature has largely advanced. This progress has led to broad and useful knowledge creation and spread, but at the same time, it has also revealed new research gaps that should be addressed. In this paper, we propose a future research agenda (RQ6) based on the actual context. To design this research agenda, we follow the same process as Díez-Martín et al. ( 2021 ). We identified the most relevant and existing gaps based on our reading of the newest trending topic documents (i.e., newest burst documents) and reflection of extant gaps under each major theme.

In Table 2 , we describe the proposed research agenda, identifying the main topics, research questions and primary authors and sources of knowledge.

4.1 Beyond women on board and TMT: the middle management

Many studies analyse the influence of the presence of women on boards of directors on their effects on firm performance (Jane Lenard et al. 2014 ; Liu et al. 2014 ; Nguyen et al. 2020 ). The evolving role of women in society and the application of female quotas imposed by several countries have led researchers to dig into these aspects (Bøhren and Staubo 2014 ; Bertrand et al. 2018 ). Nevertheless, there are very few studies about women in middle management, since the literature on business economics has not yet addressed this topic, probably because it is much easier to obtain information about boards of directors, as the disclosure of this information is mandatory by law in most countries (Kent Baker et al. 2020 ). We learned much about gender diversity on boards and top management; nevertheless, research should better understand the presence and effect of gender diversity in middle management (Ferrary and Déo 2022 ), which is important for daily firm management. We should understand if and how gender diversity in middle management also affects firm performance if inclusive teams are more productive, committed, innovative, risk-taking biased, socially responsible, and accountable. We should examine whether diversity in middle management can make the difference, positively or negatively, or if there are no relevant differences, since strategic decisions depend only on top management teams. Thus, we encourage future research to pursue a better understanding of the role of women in middle management:

What is the gender composition of firms’ middle management?

What are the effects of gender diversity in middle management?

How does gender diversity in middle management affect firm performance?

Are inclusive teams more productive, committed, innovative, risk-taking biased, socially responsible, or accountable?

Can diversity in middle management make the difference, positively or negatively, or there are no relevant differences, since strategic decisions depend only on top management teams?

4.2 Human resources and people management

Few research studies on gender diversity are related to people management. For example, previous studies show that women in the recruiting process tend to increase board gender diversity (Hutchinson et al. 2015 ) or that flexible working schedules and compensation improve firms’ gender inclusion (Goldin 2014 ; Nguyen et al. 2020 ). Nevertheless, there are several aspects related to human resources management that have not yet been covered, such as recruiting process practices and gender diversity; salary gender gap from the people management perspective; working conditions and gender equal career opportunities; the effect of tokenisation at all firm management levels; and external and internal factors that improve or decrease gender equality in management positions. Therefore, we encourage future research to answer the following questions:

How is gender diversity managed and led in recruiting process practices?

How is the gender salary gap managed and dealt with from the people management perspective?

How are human resources departments dealing with the working conditions of women and gender-equal career opportunities?

How can we mitigate the effect of tokenization at all firm management levels?

What are the external and internal factors that improve or decrease gender equality in management positions?

4.3 Organisational behaviour

There are mechanisms that mediate the relationship between gender diversity and firm outcomes (Lucas-Pérez et al. 2015 ). Organisational behaviour variables may affect gender equality teams and firm outcomes (Cabrera-Fernández et al. 2016 ). Corporate leadership and internal communication have a moderating effect on gender issues (Adams 2016 ; Fernández-Temprano and Tejerina-Gaite 2020 ). Future research should focus on the main organisational internal dimensions that may improve gender inclusion and firm performance at the same time (Saitova and di Mauro 2021 ). What are the main soft skills and practices that increase internal gender equality and external competitiveness? At this point, we posit the following research questions:

How does internal organisational management improve gender inclusion and firm performance at the same time?

What are the main soft skills and practices that increase internal gender equality and external competitiveness?

4.4 What about customers?

According to stakeholder management and institutional theory, gender equality policies are very much appreciated and are considered a commitment to the common good (García-Sánchez et al. 2020 ). This alignment with stakeholders’ expectations increases corporate legitimacy (Díez-Martín et al. 2021 ) and access to economic and human resources (Blanco-González et al. 2020 ). Research studies have focused mainly on the impact on specific stakeholders such as shareholders and employees (Perrault 2015 ), ignoring customers. Future investigations should analyse whether gender policies may influence customer behaviours such as purchase intention, brand advocacy, and brand perceived ethicality. Applying behaviour theories (Hegner et al. 2017 ), researchers could understand the relationship between gender diversity and customer behaviour from a different and novel approach. Therefore, we propose the following research questions for future undertaking:

Do gender equality policies influence customer behaviours such as purchase intention, brand advocacy, and brand perceived ethicality?

Is there a relationship between gender diversity in organisations and customer behaviour?

4.5 Wage gap reasons

The gender salary gap is still a global issue (Wang et al. 2019 ). In most Western countries, for example, access to the labour market and to higher education are variables that may not affect the salary gap as in the past since women are as educated as men (Kleinjans et al. 2017 ). Many factors have recently been considered key to explaining the salary gap, such as family caring, motherhood, cultural prejudice, and self-esteem. Nevertheless, a deeper analysis of these aspects should be performed to overcome these obstacles and reduce the salary gap. Examples include children’s education about equal responsibility in family caring, use of technology to improve flexible working schedules for parents, performance evaluation based on results and not on working hours, cultural prejudice that avoids women’s career progress and gender-equal work-life balance opportunities. Therefore, we propose the following research questions:

Does access to the labour market affect the salary gap?

Does access to higher education affect the salary gap?

Which other variables may affect the salary gap: family caring, motherhood, cultural prejudice, self-esteem, etc.

Could children’s education about equal responsibility in family caring reduce the salary gap in the future?

Does the use of technology to improve flexible working schedules for parents, performance evaluation based on results and not on working hours, and a gender-equal work-life balance opportunity help reduce the salary gap?

4.6 Tangible and intangible assets

Most gender issues research focuses on corporate tangible assets such as financial performance and ROI (Reddy and Jadhav 2019 ). Nevertheless, there are very important intangible assets, such as reputation, that may be a very relevant source of competitive advantage (Miotto et al. 2020 ). There are several studies about women’s inclusion on boards of directors and their impact on the media and public opinion (de Anca and Gabaldon 2014 ) and on firm reputation (Bear et al. 2010 ; Navarro-García et al. 2020 ), but there is an unfulfilled research gap about other gender issues in business economics and their impact on external stakeholders’ opinions and expectations. Gender equality policies, if properly communicated, may be a source of positive reputation and corporate legitimacy (Blanco-González et al. 2020 ). In this regard, we call for new research on how organisational gender issue management improves tangible and intangible corporate assets:

Does women’s inclusion on boards of directors have a positive impact on the media, public opinion and firm reputation?

Does gender equality policies impact external stakeholders’ opinions and expectations?

May gender equality policies, if properly communicated, be a source of positive reputation and corporate legitimacy?

How may organisational gender issues management improve corporate reputation and legitimacy?

4.7 Gender in corporate governance and business ethics

Gender diversity and inclusion, specifically about boards of directors’ membership, is one of the most topical corporate governance issues (Nguyen et al. 2020 ). In terms of corporate governance, it has been demonstrated that there are ethical implications that force women to be included in top management positions (Kagzi and Guha 2018 ) and that female corporate leaders are more respectful of the legal framework and behave more ethically than men, decreasing the firm’s negative exposure (Ben-Amar et al. 2017 ). Nevertheless, there are few studies that analyse the relationship between gender issues management and business ethics from a broad and comprehensive perspective. Future research could focus on perceived organisational ethicality and business ethics from a firm gender equality strategy and policies perspective:

What is the relationship between gender issues management and business ethics?

Are perceived organisational ethicality and business ethics connected with the firm gender equality strategy and policies perspective and how?

4.8 Size and geography matter

Many studies have focused on multinational companies and large corporations. These studies have not considered small and medium-sized enterprises. In addition, few studies have compared different countries and the heterogeneous contexts that may affect gender issues, for example, in terms of legal framework, good governance recommendations and women rights development status. Some countries institutionalize gender quotas in private companies, while in others, girls’ right to education is still not ensured.

The priorities in gender issues of some nations are different from others due to institutional and socioeconomic differences (Post and Byron 2015 ). In this multicultural environment, future researchers should test previously raised hypotheses in new contexts. They should take into consideration different kinds of companies: public and private, large and small, in different industries, and from more and less developed countries. The creation of collaborative networks of researchers from different countries working on gender issues in business economics could be a useful and important project to carry out soon. In this regard, we call for new research on:

How are gender issues considered and managed in small- and medium-sized companies?

Is the kind of industry an important variable in terms of gender equality policies?

Are the priorities in gender issues of some nations different from others due to institutional and socioeconomic differences?

In the actual multicultural environment, future researchers should test previously raised hypotheses in new contexts.

How is gender equality perceived in different kinds of organisations, such as public and private, large and small, in different industries, and from more and less developed countries?

How are gender issues in business economics perceived and addressed in different countries?

5 Conclusions

This paper defines and visualises the intellectual structure of the research field of gender in the business economics literature from 2001 to 2020. The intellectual structure definition is a comprehensive analysis of the domain of a study field; it is a structured way to define the boundaries and the map of a discipline (Hota et al. 2020 ; Silva et al. 2021 ; Carayannis et al. 2021 ). The intellectual structure mapping answers the paper’s research question, providing information and details about which are the most relevant research topics in the gender equality field in the business economics discipline? (RQ1. What are the most influential documents in the field of gender equality in business economics? (RQ2.) What are the sources of knowledge on gender equality in business economics? (RQ3.) How has gender equality research in business economics evolved in the last twenty years? (RQ4.) How are the different topics related to gender equality interconnected? (RQ5.) Which are the most relevant topics that will define the future research agenda in this field? (RQ6.)

To date, there are no other studies of this nature for this research field. Our research complements previous qualitative literature reviews applying a quantitative analysis of large volumes of documents. In addition to the use of a systematic and objective bibliometric methodology, the novelty of this research stands on the broader scope and perspective of the analysis of the research field. Previous papers have focused mainly on specific topics, such as women on boards of executives (Kent Baker et al. 2020 ) or gender entrepreneurship (Moreira et al. 2019 ).

This research is based on the quantitative accuracy of a bibliometric review of more than 3000 documents, and its main contribution is the identification of the main research lines, trends and evolution, knowledge sources and extent of gender issues research on business economics. We visualise how the knowledge of this research field is organised, identify past and future challenges, and propose a future relevant research agenda.

The study identifies the most important sources of knowledge on gender issues in business economics from 2001 to 2020 (Supplementary material of Appendix 2). The quantitative applied methodology ensures a high level of objectivity and academic consistency, which provides unique value to the study, being the first one in this field. Previous literature reviews did not achieve such a broad intellectual scope since they were limited by the use of a qualitative and subjective approach (Broadbridge and Simpson 2011 ) or because they focused only on specific topics, such as gender board diversity (Kent Baker et al. 2020 ). The paper organization based on research lines is very useful for researchers that may use this structure as a starting point for their investigations. Moreover, practitioners may have an organised and clear idea of the trending topics about gender issues in business economics and a guideline to follow up on these matters.

Our results highlight the main topics and challenges in gender issues research from 2001 to 2020. We could summarise these topics in the following questions: which are the main factors that influence women's access to work? In what environments, industries, sectors and countries does the gender salary gap persist, and what are the main causes of this issue? Are quota policies helpful? How does gender diversity influence company performance and results? How does gender diversity in management positions affect CSR policies, information disclosure and corporate accountability? How does gender inclusion affect innovation and productivity? How do intrinsic variables (risk profile, competitiveness) influence firms’ results?

These topics have been combined and organized into 12 large research areas, shaping the intellectual structure of gender equality in the business economics academic field. Some of these lines of research confirm previous literature review results and conclusions. For example, researchers have always focused their attention on women on boards’ performance (Cabrera-Fernández et al. 2016 ; Kent Baker et al. 2020 ; Khatib et al. 2021 ), as shown in cluster #2, and this is one of the most relevant topics in the gender issues field. Top managers and CEOs could use this research to make relevant decisions about their boards of executive composition, taking into consideration the impact of gender diversity and inclusion.

Moreover, researchers have worked to analyse the relationship between gender diversity and CSR policies and information disclosure (Pucheta-Martínez et al. 2018 ; Amorelli and García-Sánchez 2021 ), as shown in #4. The gender bias in risk taking attitude and management (cluster #1) have been represented in prior literature reviews and are found to be key factors in entrepreneurship (Moreira et al. 2019 ). Managers should take into consideration the different gender leadership styles according to the type of industry and strategy. For example, some sectors or positions need a riskier style of decision-making progress, while other environments may need a different kind of emotional and social intelligence in their management teams.

Nevertheless, as a novelty of this bibliometric analysis, we identify new relevant research areas such as the wage gap #9, the effect of the gender differences in competitiveness #7, the consequence of a different risk management on firms’ performance #1 (actually the broadest area of research), or the results of gender diversity, not only in the boards of directors but also in the middle management teams #12. To date, middle management has not been considered as important in terms of gender inclusion; nevertheless, in the current competitive and uncertain environment, middle positions need to be cared for as much as top management.

The originality of this bibliometric review also stands on the identification of the main nodes of the knowledge network and connections within gender issues in business economics research. The turning points (Bc papers) highlight the intellectual transition between different research areas. They are useful for enhancing new multidisciplinary and multidimension academic findings and managerial implications.

The burst paper identification (Supplementary material of Appendix 1) highlights the most relevant papers, i.e., the ones that truly focused most of the researchers’ attention and interest during a specific timeframe. We could feature the evolution and challenges that researchers have experienced in this field. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, research trending topics focused on understanding the reason for the gender pay gap (Blau and Kahn 2003 ; Arulampalam et al. 2007 ). Since 2010, there has been a proliferation of new topics: gender quotas (Nielsen and Huse 2010 ; Torchia et al. 2011 ), performance analysis based on gender (Dezsö and Ross 2012 ), women and innovation (Díaz-García et al. 2013 ), and women and competitiveness (Niederle et al. 2013 ). During the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, researchers focused their effort to better understand gender firms’ performance based on the gender perspective, specifically to comprehend the existence of very different and, sometimes, contradictory academic results and findings on this topic (Seierstad 2016 ). A very interesting paper about gender and competitiveness is considered a tipping point, identifying the different risk-taking attitudes and management styles between men and women as key factors that may affect organizational competitiveness and performance (Hutchinson et al. 2015 ). Scholars have recently pointed out that during an uncertainty situation, men and women use different mindsets when assessing organisations (Díez-Martín et al. 2022 ). Managers should be aware of the importance of gender inclusivity in their teams since the teams’ composition and dynamics affect companies’ performance and competitiveness.

The analysis of the burst papers also highlights that researchers have overcome some of the main challenges in gender issues since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Currently, research on the gender pay gap and women's access to the labour market is not very relevant. Researchers focus on the gender effects on firms’ performance and their causes.

This research provides important implications for business managers, policymakers, and academics. For business managers, improving their knowledge about the effect of integrating gender policies in businesses can encourage them to develop and implement projects to foster corporate operations and improve efficiency. The broader scope and perspective of our analysis enables the improvement of business decisions related to several aspects. Regarding human resources management, the research has demonstrated gender-biased behaviour that can have an impact on organisations´ performance. Examples include risk-taking attitude, risk tolerance, risky financial operations, fraud control, chance of survival, and behaviour under competitive or uncertainty environments. This knowledge could be considered in employee selection processes or talent management. In addition, considering the effect that diversity in teams has on firm performance (more gender-diverse teams enhance innovation, tend to disclose more and better-quality information about environmental issues, and have a positive influence on CSR), managers could build and manage teams in a more efficient manner. Moreover, business managers that aim to attract diverse talent should consider that women are less motivated to work in results-driven companies based on objective achievement. Regarding stakeholder management, managers should assume that gender equality management in their company could generate implications related to external perceptions about corporate identity and image. Both variables are evaluated by stakeholders who issue legitimacy assessments.

Policymakers have an important role in ensuring gender equality in every area. In the business field, research papers show that inequality in terms of gender is decreasing. However, a salary gap still exists. This situation involves the need to implement policies to support and incentivise gender equality in companies. Nevertheless, many initiatives implemented by policymakers have not achieved the expected results; in fact, many policies related to the establishment of quotas have been questioned and have proven less efficient in reducing the gender gap. Coercive measures are not reaching the required results. In contrast, the most successful policies have resulted from transformative events based on technological innovations that have improved the lives of families. Policymakers could focus their initiatives and resources on enhancing technological innovations with this purpose. Family (management and care) appears to be a key reason for some gender inequalities, such as the wage gap. Thus, policymakers could favour the development of an institutional context that cares for family issues and that could influence organisational behaviour.

For scholars, this research enables us to improve the existing knowledge of gender equality in the business field. The research agenda may be used for the constitution of new theoretical frameworks, as a guide for researchers in future projects, a guideline for relevant topics, a source of innovative methodology, and as a list of potential future collaborators.

Finally, this study presents some limitations, as with any bibliometric review based on co-citations. The analysis is comprehensive, but the chosen filters may limit the scope and dimension of the database. Co-citation analysis is biased on older research, which is more likely to be co-cited. Although the results are obtained through quantitative indicators, researchers’ interpretations may affect the study’s results and conclusions.

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This research was supported by “Ayuda Puente 2019, URJC”. Project V948 “Las políticas de igualdad de género como estrategia de legitimación empresarial”.

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Díez-Martín, F., Miotto, G. & Del-Castillo-Feito, C. The intellectual structure of gender equality research in the business economics literature. Rev Manag Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-023-00671-8

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Gender and Politics

Gender and Politics Research Paper Topics

• The gender gap in political representation: causes and consequences
• Gender quotas in politics: pros and cons
• Women’s rights and political participation in the Middle East
• Women’s representation in local government: a case study of a specific country or region
• Masculinity and political leadership: how gender affects perceptions of leadership qualities
• Women’s access to political power in post-conflict societies
• Gender and political violence: how violence affects men and women differently
• The impact of gender on voting behavior
• The role of women in peacebuilding and conflict resolution
• Gender mainstreaming in international development policy: successes and challenges
• Intersectionality in politics: how race, class, and gender intersect to shape political outcomes
• The gendered impact of globalization on the labor market and political participation
• Gender and environmental politics: exploring the links between gender, environmentalism, and politics
• The impact of gender on political ideology and party affiliation
• Gender and political rhetoric: how gendered language affects political discourse
• The role of men in promoting gender equality in politics
• Feminism and political theory: historical and contemporary debates
• The impact of gender on political socialization and political attitudes
• The gendered nature of political scandals: how men and women are affected differently
• Women’s role in authoritarian regimes: case studies of specific countries
• The gendered impact of austerity policies on welfare states and social programs
• Gender and political participation in online spaces: how digital platforms are changing the landscape of political participation
• Women’s representation in the judiciary: a comparative analysis
• The impact of gender on media coverage of political campaigns
• Gender and international security: exploring the links between gender, security, and conflict
• The gendered impact of immigration policies and migration flows
• Gender and political corruption: how gender affects perceptions of corruption and ethics in politics
• Women’s role in political parties: a comparative analysis
• The impact of gender on political trust and legitimacy
• The gendered impact of economic liberalization and privatization policies
• Women’s representation in international organizations: a case study of the United Nations
• The role of gender in the formation of public policy and political decision-making
• Gender and political communication: how gender affects political messaging and public opinion
• The impact of gender on the formation and implementation of foreign policy
• Gender and the politics of social movements: exploring the role of women in movements for social change
• Gender and the politics of reproductive rights: a comparative analysis of policy and activism
• Women’s access to education and its impact on political participation
• The gendered nature of political institutions and processes: a comparative analysis
• Gender and the politics of identity: exploring the links between gender, race, and ethnicity in political discourse
• The impact of gender on the politics of healthcare and healthcare policy
• Women’s participation in local community governance: a case study of a specific region or country
• The impact of gender on political accountability and transparency
• Gender and political decision-making in the private sector: a comparative analysis
• The gendered impact of natural disasters on political outcomes and policy responses
• Women’s role in the politics of climate change: exploring the links between gender, the environment, and politics
• The impact of gender on political violence and terrorism
• Gender and the politics of nationalism: exploring the links between gender, nationalism, and identity
• Women’s role in the politics
• The Role of Intersectionality in Women’s Political Participation: An Analysis of Racial, Ethnic, and Class Differences in Political Mobilization.
• Women’s Representation in Political Leadership: Examining the Glass Ceiling in Parliaments and Executive Offices.

Women have historically been excluded from political decision-making, with men dominating positions of power in most political systems. This has led to a lack of representation of women’s perspectives and experiences in political decision-making, resulting in policies that do not adequately address the needs of all members of society. While progress has been made in increasing the number of women in political leadership roles in many countries, women continue to face unique challenges in accessing and exercising political power. These challenges include gender bias, discrimination, and social norms that prioritize men in political leadership.

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One way to address these challenges is through the use of quotas and affirmative action policies to increase the representation of women in political decision-making. Quotas have been implemented in many countries around the world, with varying degrees of success. Some argue that quotas are necessary to overcome the structural barriers that prevent women from accessing political power, while others argue that quotas are unfair and can lead to the selection of less qualified candidates. Regardless of the effectiveness of quotas, it is clear that increasing the representation of women in political decision-making is essential to creating more equitable and inclusive policies.

Feminist movements have also played a critical role in shaping political discourse and pushing for gender equality in political systems. Feminist movements have highlighted the ways in which gender shapes political systems and policies, and have worked to mobilize women to become more active in political decision-making. These movements have also pushed for policy changes to address gender-based violence, discrimination, and other issues that disproportionately affect women. By bringing attention to these issues, feminist movements have helped to shape political discourse and create more space for women to participate in political decision-making.

Despite these efforts, women continue to face significant challenges in accessing and exercising political power. Women remain underrepresented in political decision-making in many countries, and face unique challenges in accessing the resources and support needed to succeed in these roles. Addressing these challenges will require a sustained effort to increase the representation of women in political decision-making and to create more supportive and inclusive political environments.

In conclusion, gender and politics is a critical area of inquiry in political science, exploring the ways in which gender shapes political systems, policies, and outcomes. Women have historically been excluded from political decision-making, resulting in policies that do not adequately address the needs of all members of society. Quotas and affirmative action policies, as well as feminist movements, have been instrumental in addressing these challenges and increasing the representation of women in political decision-making. However, significant challenges remain, and continued efforts will be needed to create more equitable and inclusive political systems.

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Why the Gender Pay Gap Persists in American Businesses

By Molly Mitchell

Women have progressed a lot in terms of workplace gender equity since the days of Rosie the Riveter, but elements of inequity remain stubbornly in place. In 2024, for example, women still earn around 84 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same job on average in the US – almost the same as it was twenty years ago.

The Darden Report recently caught up with Professor Allison Elias , author of “ The Rise of Corporate Feminism ,” to explore the history of this continuing gender pay gap, where things stand today and new research on this dynamic.

Allison Elias’s 2022 book, “The Rise of Corporate Feminism,” was named a Best Summer Book of 2023: Business by the Financial Times .

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap refers to the difference in earnings between women and men. Specifically, it is the ratio of women’s to men’s median earnings, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for full-time workers. And importantly, the often-cited 80 percent statistic provides an incomplete picture of women’s experiences in the labor market since the gap is exacerbated for many women of color. Hispanic and Black women experience the largest gaps relative to white, non-Hispanic men.

Why does the gender pay gap happen?

There are many reasons that the gender pay gap exists. Economists label these reasons as supply side (women’s choices) and demand side (employers’ choices), although it can be difficult to untangle the two or categorize them neatly as one or the other.

Traditionally, women have had lower educational attainment, been segregated into jobs that paid lower wages and had less continuous experience in the labor force. But we cannot attribute these trends to women’s choices alone. Legal constraints, economic structures and gender norms have also played a role in shaping women’s preferences and choices. Sociologists may even argue that career preferences emerge in childhood from gender-specific socialization processes.

On the demand side, gender discrimination (at the point of hire and beyond) has contributed to lower pay and fewer promotional opportunities for women. However, it is difficult to measure the extent to which implicit and explicit attitudes of employers account for the wage gap.

Do certain professions/fields experience the gap more than others?

The gender pay gap tends to increase as pay increases, in part because the minimum wage creates a floor for lower earners. People in managerial and professional work, where jobs are more gender integrated, see higher wage gaps than those in jobs requiring a high school degree.

Regarding MBA graduates, the gender wage gap tends to increase over time. Researchers at one top program examined multiple cohorts of MBA graduates 13 years following graduation and found that parenthood impacted women’s earnings more so than men’s. At 13 years out from graduation, women were earning 56 percent of what their male classmates earned. Factors like taking time away from work and working even a few hours fewer per week were found to have tremendous impact on women’s earnings later in their careers. Caregiving responsibilities have a negative influence on women’s earnings (e.g., the motherhood penalty), whereas men have been shown to actually earn more upon becoming fathers! For those in the highest-paid jobs, the returns for what sociologists call overwork are huge, and contribute significantly to sustaining the wage gap.

At a more micro level, we also know from experimental research in social psychology that women receive less credit—and also claim less credit—for their work when engaged in joint tasks with men. I have a recent paper coauthored with Jirs Meuris at Wisconsin where we examine almost two decades of data to demonstrate the effect on the gender wage gap of a job’s interdependence, meaning the extent to which a job requires working on a team or coordinating with others. Over time and across industries and occupations, jobs that are rated as more interdependent, meaning they require two or more people to sequentially complete tasks, have higher gender wage gaps.

This makes sense given what we know from social psychology about credit for joint work: In mixed gender groups, women receive and claim less credit, which could influence reward allocation. But also, we find that the gender of the task matters. The gender wage gap is exacerbated in male-dominated occupations and is lessened in female-dominated occupations.  Rewarding individual contributions in interdependent work settings is more complex and can sustain and worsen gender inequality, particularly in traditionally male settings.

Managers who wish to address this trend should revisit their performance evaluation systems, which were likely designed with independent work in mind. With increasing numbers of employees engaged in interdependent jobs, managers need to find new ways to evaluate individual contributions and rely on multiple sources when determining rewards.

How much progress towards equity have we made? 

Since 1960 the gap has narrowed, although it has hovered around 80 percent for several decades. Despite continuing inequities, women are more likely to graduate from high school, graduate from college and earn master’s degrees. They earn half of all doctorates. In MBA programs, women represent 47 percent of those receiving graduate business degrees from U.S. business schools (in 2020)—a significant increase from less than 5 percent in 1970.

Furthermore, women have gained control over reproduction with the dissemination of a birth control pill, and age at first marriage has continued to rise along with the percentage of women who prioritize career success. These factors are interrelated: investment in education—and interest in career advancement—becomes more attractive for women who have more control over family planning.

While there is much progress in educational attainment, the pay gap is largest in the highest-paid jobs that demand overwork, which economist Claudia Goldin calls “greedy jobs.” Jobs that are highly compensated, such as finance or corporate law, pay disproportionately more on a per-hour basis when they require more time (more than 40 hours a week) and offer less flexibility. A gender pay gap is sustained in these jobs because women are more likely to choose a more flexible path that does not have such high rewards for overwork. Goldin, who recently won the Nobel Prize, calls this issue the “last chapter” in the converging economic roles of men and women.

I have a forthcoming case with economist Peter Debaere about Goldin’s work, which uses protagonists from both of our books, “To America and Back Again” (English for: “Naar jouw Amerika en terug”), and “The Rise of Corporate Feminism,” to illustrate certain historical trends in women’s labor force participation.

Important to note is that even though women in the highest-paid work face the highest wage gap penalties, in general women remain overrepresented in the lowest-paying occupations. And occupations with greater proportions of women tend to pay less even when controlling for educational and skill requirements. Occupational gender segregation intersects with race and ethnicity. As of 2019, white men were overrepresented in jobs with the highest pay (e.g., physician, chief executive, financial investment, pilot, architect) and women (white, Black and Latina), as well as Black and Latino men, were overrepresented in jobs with the lowest pay (e.g., food service, childcare, cashier). So while the gender wage gap is lower among those with less education, occupational segregation remains high in those jobs.

What practical policies or actions are most effective in closing the gender wage gap?

It is difficult to declare one specific remedy for the gender wage gap. Recommendations usually target change at the individual or organizational level while governments are also forwarding interventions. For individuals, there has been much emphasis on women’s propensity (or lack thereof) to negotiate their starting salaries, particularly with the publication and dissemination of “Women Don’t Ask,” a groundbreaking book from 2003.

Recent research using MBA data from management professors Laura Kray, Jessica Kennedy and Margaret Lee suggests that actually women do ask, and the wage gap for this population is no longer an individual-level phenomenon. Instead, organizations and governments should advance solutions, and there is promise in at least two remedies: banning salary history and promoting pay transparency.

Given the historic lack of pay transparency in the private sector, companies are increasingly opting to perform audits to try to ensure pay equity regardless of gender or race. And states are adopting laws to ban an employer’s questions about a candidate’s previous salary, which has been shown to improve salary outcomes for women and underrepresented minorities. Under consideration at the federal level is the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand coverage for equal pay and also ban salary history considerations and promote pay transparency.

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden’s graduate degree programs (MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden’s top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 18,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Felipe Carozzi

Andrés gago, april 11th, 2024, what explains the gender ideology gap.

0 comments | 11 shares

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Research suggests there is a growing ideological gap between young men and women across the world. Felipe Carozzi and Andrés Gago present evidence from Spain that can provide a partial explanation for this phenomenon.

Over the past few months, there has been extensive coverage in the press and social media of the widening ideological gaps emerging between young men and women in many countries. Much of this attention came after a recent Financial Times article elaborating on research carried out by Alice Evans, a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University. This research indicates that the women of Generation Z are becoming more progressive than their male counterparts.

This is an intriguing development both due to its implications for the future and its unknown origins. There has been no shortage of potential explanations put forward to account for this change. Some of the more popular include that it is a symptom of the use of social media, a new expression of the “culture wars”, a result of different policy preferences or some combination of all of the above.

Evidence from Spain

In a recent study , we present research that could provide a partial explanation for this phenomenon. We assess differences in the willingness of political parties to engage in gender-sensitive policies. We seek to understand how the characteristics of political leaders affect their propensity to implement policies such as pre-schooling or long-term care services that, in practice, benefit women disproportionately. For this purpose, we focus on the case of Spanish local governments, which have the capacity to implement these policies at will.

It is worth noting that Spain is one of the (many) countries that feature an increasing ideological gender gap among young voters , and that the policies that we explore are highlighted by many international organisations, including the European Parliament, as key policies for fostering gender equality.

In terms of the characteristics of politicians that we focus on, we test whether female mayors are more likely to implement gender-sensitive policies than their male counterparts. This is motivated by a literature championed by Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo , studying differences by gender in the propensity to implement different policies (see this paper for a review).

We also test whether centre-right Partido Popular (PP) mayors differ from other mayors in their propensity to implement these policies. Studies documenting a difference (or the absence of a difference) in policy across partisan divides abound. What we do is study this question in relation to policies that arguably benefit women disproportionately.

Our study relies on a close election regression discontinuity design for estimation. In a nutshell, we use tight races (also known as close elections) as a way of “randomising” the identity of the mayor in Spanish municipalities. We then exploit this local randomisation to estimate the effect of gender or partisan identity on our outcomes of interest.

We complement this with panel estimates relying on variation over time across municipalities to estimate our parameters of interest. We use data on more than 5,000 Spanish municipalities covering the period between 2010 and 2014, where municipal budget laws required detail records of spending figures in the policies of interest. Details of the analysis can be checked in the open-access version of our paper .

What do we find?

Arguably our most important finding is that we do not detect significant differences by mayoral gender in the propensity that a municipal government engages in gender-sensitive policies. The second key finding is that there are differences in gender-sensitive policies by party: centre-right PP mayors are less likely to preside over local governments that engage in these policies. The leader’s gender does not affect their propensity to promote gender-sensitive policies, but their party does. We rationalise this by noting that Spain is a country with strong parties, in which individual characteristics of local leaders matter less than their party when it comes to policy.

This brings us back to the gender ideology gap. Our findings point to significant differences by party in the propensity to engage with gender-sensitive policies. Specifically, mayors from the centre-right PP were less likely than mayors to their left to introduce preschool or long-term care services. This is observed in a context in which these policies were becoming increasingly common.

If these policies are indeed valued by women – survey evidence indicates this is the case – then it is perhaps natural that Spanish women are becoming increasingly more prone to support left-leaning parties. If politics determines who obtains “ what, when and how ”, it is reasonable to suppose that electoral loyalties will, to some degree, reflect the benefits associated with the menu of policies offered by each political camp.

Naturally, as highlighted by Alice Evans , other factors of a more cultural nature can all contribute to widening ideological gaps by gender. Yet, it is in a sense comforting to find that policy differences can also influence this divergence through more direct, predictable channels.

For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: G-Stock Studio / Shutterstock.com

About the author

Felipe Carozzi is an Assistant Professor of Urban Economics and Economic Geography at the London School of Economics.

Andrés Gago is an Assistant Professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Business School.

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• Evaluate work-home conflict as a result of gender inequality.
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• Manifestation of gender inequality in society.
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• Best modes to tackle gender inequality at home.
• How is gender inequality portrayed in sports?
• Should women and men perform specific roles?

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• Women’s views on long-existing gender stereotypes.
• How are gender roles portrayed in movies, news, and TV shows?
• Gender stereotypes in children
• Evaluate gender as portrayed in literature
• Gender mainstreaming in institutions.
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• How are gender stereotypes developed in families?
• Parents’ gender roles and children’s aspirations.
• Emotional perception of gender inequality.
• The disparity between gender stereotypes in the Eastern and Western culture

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• Gender stereotypes in athletic management.
• Effect of globalization on gender norms and experiences.
• Feminization and gender issues in education
• Relation between gender equality and women’s rights.
• The global perception of female leadership and gender equity.
• The effects of gender discrimination in social media and how it affects individuals.
• Transgender and gender non-conforming in children.
• Race and Gender public relations.
• Gender socialization and ageism.
• Gender differences in financial knowledge acquisition.

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The gender gap in higher STEM studies: A systematic literature review

Sonia verdugo-castro.

a GRIAL Research Group, Department of Didactics, Organization and Research Methods, Research Institute for Educational Sciences, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

Alicia García-Holgado

b GRIAL Research Group, Computer Science Department, Research Institute for Educational Sciences, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

Mª Cruz Sánchez-Gómez

c GRIAL Research Group, Department of Didactics, Organization and Research Methods, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

Associated Data

Data associated with this study has been deposited at Verdugo-Castro, S., García-Holgado, A., & Sánchez-Gómez, M. C (2021). Code repository that supports the research presented in the paper ‘The gender gap in higher.

STEM studies: A Systematic Literature Review’ (v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/record/5775211 .

The development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) requires more qualified professionals in these fields. However, gender segregation in higher education in this sector is creating a gender gap that means that for some disciplines female representation does not even reach 30% of the total. In order to propose measures to address the phenomenon, it is necessary to understand the possible causes of this issue.

A systematic literature review and mapping were carried out for the study, following the PRISMA guidelines and flowchart. The research questions to be answered were (RQ1) What studies exist on the gender gap in relation to the choice of higher education in the STEM field; and (RQ2) How do gender roles and stereotypes influence decision-making related to higher education? The review of peer-reviewed scientific articles, conferences texts, books and book chapters on the European education area was applied. A total of 4571 initial results were obtained and, after the process marked by the PRISMA flowchart, the final results were reduced to 26. The results revealed that gender stereotypes are strong drivers of the gender gap in general, and the Leaky Pipeline and Stereotype Threat in particular. To narrow the gender gap, it is necessary to focus on influences from the family, the educational environment, and the peer group, as well as from the culture itself. Positive self-concept, self-efficacy, self-confidence, and self-perception need to be fostered, so that the individual chooses their studies according to their goals.

Gender gap; STEM; Gender; Stereotypes; Diversity; Higher education.

1. Introduction

The science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field is experiencing a shortage of skilled workers ( Codiroli Mcmaster, 2017 ), yet it is experiencing a great deal of technological development ( Winterbotham, 2014 ). In addition, the STEM education sector suffers from under-representation of gender diversity, namely of women ( García-Holgado et al., 2019a , García-Holgado et al., 2019b , García-Holgado et al., 2019c ; Jacobs et al., 2017 ). This situation invites reflection on the cause of gender segregation in scientific and technical higher education.

With regard to motivation as a vector for deciding which higher education studies to pursue, studies have been published, such as that of Guo et al. (2018) , in which it is pointed out that women prefer to opt for professions related to people, their care and education, while men prefer to opt for the fields of things. However, beyond the simple explanation of what they prefer, it is necessary to detect what modifies and conditions the motivation, and therefore the final decision.

Gender stereotypes in the STEM education sector are related to Stereotype Threat ( Corbett and Hill, 2015 ) and the Leaky Pipeline, which lead to the loss of equal representation in the sector.

Stereotype Threat is a social phenomenon that occurs when the person concerned fears confirmation of the negative stereotyping of the group to which they belong ( Cheryan et al., 2017 ). Given that the STEM sector has been socially ascribed to men ( Blackburn, 2017 ; Nosek et al., 2009 ), women may fear rejection in the field of study and careers. One of the consequences of Stereotype Threat is when erratic stereotypical thoughts lead the affected persons to doubt their abilities, deteriorating their self-confidence, despite having optimal performance results ( Correll, 2001 ).

This situation of loss of a sense of belonging can erode women's self-efficacy ( Hall et al., 2015 ), and eventually lead to the phenomenon of the Leaky Pipeline ( Berryman, 1983 ).

Understanding the factors involved in the process of deciding which higher education studies to pursue will shed light on how to enable the retention of women ( Reiss et al., 2016 ). Such retention is essential to avoid further loss of human capital, given that female participation rates in STEM studies are worryingly low.

In addition, to combat the gender gap, the different social and cultural factors involved, as well as gender stereotypes, which, as pointed out by authors such as Bian et al. (2017) , can be observed from the age of six, must also be taken into account in the frame of reference. However, taking as a reference authors such as Ceci et al. (2014) , the need to pay attention to solid environmental influences is reaffirmed. The latter authors ( Ceci et al., 2014 ), in their study, concluded that early sex differences in spatial and mathematical reasoning do not necessarily stem from biological bases, that the gap between the average mathematical ability of females and males is narrowing, and that sex differences show variations over time and across nationalities and ethnicities. Thus, all this points to the need to pay attention to environmental and contextual factors that modulate the impact on the gender gap.

On a biological basis, there is controversy in the literature. While some authors argue that the gender gap is not biologically based ( Bian et al., 2017 ; Blackburn, 2017 ; Borsotti, 2018 ; Cantley et al., 2017 ; Codiroli Mcmaster, 2017 ), other authors do suggest that differences between men and women in career and lifestyle preferences are to some extent due to biological influences ( Stewart-Williams and Halsey, 2021 ).

Therefore, as Ceci et al. (2014) point out, gender discrimination has historically been a potential reason for the under-representation of women in scientific academic careers. Today, however, attention must also be paid to the barriers girls and women face to full participation in scientific and technical fields ( Ceci et al., 2014 ).

Although segregation does not occur in 100% of the countries in the world, there is a widespread trend of gender segregation in tertiary studies. As an example, about STEM higher education, during 2018, in France, 28,857 men (74.55%) studied tertiary Physics studies, compared to 9,850 women (25.45%). The same was true in Spain with 73.23% male representation, in Greece with 70.51% and in Austria 78.32%. In the disciplines of Mathematics and Statistics, for example, in the UK, 63.05% of the representation was male, as in France with 70.41%. And in Sweden, in Exact Mathematical Sciences 66.06% of the students were male. Also, in 2018, 81.67% of students in ICT studies in the European Union were male. For example, in Spain, 86.92% of students in Software disciplines were male. Moreover, during 2018, 73.53% of students in Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction disciplines in the European Union were male. For example, in Germany, 82.02% of Engineering students were male. And finally, 81.93% of Electronics and Automation students in Turkey were male, as was the case in Architecture with 69.07% of men ( European Institute of Gender Equality, 2018 ).

To explore the factors involved in horizontal gender segregation in the STEM education sector, a review of the existing literature is proposed through a Systematic Literature Review on the gender gap in STEM education in the European Union.

After searching and reading other reviews, it was decided to develop the Systematic Literature Review.

First, Canedo et al. (2019) address the barriers that women face in software development projects. The authors aim to find mechanisms to encourage women's interest in the field of software development projects. In turn, Gottfried et al. (2017) present a literature review on how friends and familiar social groups play a role in the likelihood that high school students do or do not pursue advanced studies in mathematics and science. Also, Wang & Degol (2013) address motivational pathways towards STEM career choices, in relation to gender; they do so using Expectancy Value Theory as a framework. Finally, Yazilitas et al. (2013) focus on micro-level and macro-level patterns linked to the unequal representation of students of both genders in STEM.

After reading the reviews, it was decided to continue with the review process of the present study, given that they did not respond to the research questions posed for the research. Canedo et al. (2019) focus their attention on software development projects; however, they do not address other STEM fields and do not propose to analyse the social, academic, and personal factors involved in segregation. On the other hand, Gottfried et al. (2017) base their study on the influence of friends and family on the decision to study mathematics and science, however, the spheres of technology and engineering are not included, and the perspective is not open to another classification of elements, such as personal and academic. Similarly, Wang & Degol (2013) propose to discover the motivations towards the choice of careers, although they do so from a psychological perspective, and the study is outdated as it was published in 2013. Finally, Yazilitas et al. (2013) also start from a psychological perspective. Nonetheless, in order to answer the research questions of the review presented here, it is necessary to take an educational perspective and not only a psychological one, because socio-educational elements are addressed.

In deciding to continue the process, the PRISMA model was used. The aim of the work was to identify what work has been or is being developed on the subject, and to understand the influence of gender stereotypes on the segregation process. The aim was to answer what are the objectives pursued in the existing studies, what are the methodologies and scientific methods used, whether specific instruments and/or data collection techniques have been used for the study of the gender gap in STEM studies, as well as what are the results obtained in the studies. Also, it aimed to know the relationship between the gender gap in STEM studies and the cultural and social patterns surrounding gender.

This paper is organised in six blocks. The first is the introduction, followed by the planning of the research in the second block (materials and methods), then the results of the mapping in the third block, and the results of the Systematic Literature Review and the discussion in the fourth block. The fifth section contains the conclusions. Finally, the sixth section describes the threats to the validity of the study.

2. Materials and methods

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) allows for the identification, evaluation and interpretation of all available research relevant to a particular research question, thematic area, or phenomenon of interest ( Kitchenham, 2004 ). The systematic literature review process is divided into three phases: planning the review, conducting the review and writing the report ( Kitchenham and Charters, 2007 ). Along with the Systematic Literature Review, a systematic mapping can be carried out, which entails the same phases as outlined above ( Petersen et al., 2015 ).

In the work presented, an SLR and a systematic mapping of the gender gap in higher education in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sector have been carried out. In this work, the systematic mapping is presented as a complementary element to the Systematic Literature Review. The procedure followed is the PRISMA flowchart and guidelines ( Moher et al., 2009 ).

The review and mapping process was divided into a set of phases or steps. These phases range from the systematic review of other SLRs related to the gender gap in STEM higher studies–to determine the need to carry out the present study–, to the results obtained after carrying out the review. The phases followed were: (1) systematic review of other SLRs, (2) definition of the research questions for the SLR and mapping, (3) definition of the inclusion and exclusion criteria, (4) definition of the search strategy, (5) definition of the quality criteria, (6) data extraction, (7) results, and (8) data analysis and report writing.

The complete detailed explanation of each step of the systematic literature review presented in this article is contained in supplementary material 1. Each element has been detailed in supplementary material 1, simplifying the information in this document to facilitate the wording of the explanatory steps of the review.

2.1. Identifying the need for a review

Before conducting a systematic review or mapping of the literature it is necessary to examine whether there is a real need for the review. It should be determined whether a systematic review already exists that answers the research questions posed and can support the research. There is no scientific reason to conduct a systematic review or mapping that has been done before, unless there is a clear bias in the review or it is outdated and new studies have been published since the existing review was completed ( Petticrew and Roberts, 2005 ). To find out whether there are previous reviews or mappings that answer the research questions posed in the study, a search for existing systematic reviews and mappings should be conducted. For this part of the analysis, the following research question is posed: Do SLRs or mappings exist that answer the research questions of this study?

Finally, 107 documents were identified in Scopus with this equation of terms, 36 of them related to reviews and mappings. After reviewing the 36 documents, only 2 met the indicated criteria. On the other hand, in Web of Science, 49 documents were identified with the search string stated. Of the 49 documents, 9 were associated with a literature review or mapping, and, after examining the documents, only 2 met the criteria. Of the four final articles, one of them followed the SLR methodology, one of them partially followed the SLR methodology and the other two did not follow the SLR methodology.

From the review of the four final papers, it was concluded that none of them answered the research questions that were posed for this study. This is because they focus on other elements related to the gender gap ( Canedo et al., 2019 ; Gottfried et al., 2017 ), in addition to the fact that two of them are outdated, as they are publications from 2013 ( Wang and Degol, 2013 ; Yazilitas et al., 2013 ). Nine years have passed since 2013, which means almost a decade left unaddressed in these reviews.

Detailed information on this section of the systematic literature review and on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, search strategy, search strings, and criteria for quality assessment can be found in supplementary material 1.

2.2. Research questions

Once the actual need to carry out the SLR of the present study was determined, the process began. The first phase was to review the research questions and the mapping questions. First, two research questions (RQ) were defined:

• • RQ1: What studies exist on the gender gap in relation to the choice of higher education in the STEM field?
• • RQ2: How do gender roles and stereotypes influence decision-making related to higher education?

Secondly, eight mapping questions (MQ) have been defined:

• • MQ1: Which databases publish studies in relation to the gender gap in the STEM education sector?
• • MQ2: Which keywords are applied in the studies?
• • MQ3: How are the studies distributed per year?
• • MQ4: What kind of methodologies and methods do the studies apply?
• • MQ5: In which countries do the studies take place?
• • MQ6: With which population are the studies conducted?
• • MQ7: What instruments or data collection techniques have been validated?
• • MQ8: What kind of data collection instruments or techniques are used?

Based on the research questions defined, the PICOC method proposed by Petticrew and Roberts (2005) was used to define the scope of the review:

• • Population: Gender gap in the STEM sector.
• • Intervention: Studies conducted, and proposals related to the gender gap in the STEM education sector
• • Comparison: No comparison.
• • Outcomes: Results of studies conducted in relation to the gender gap in the STEM education sector.
• • Context: Students integrated in the European educational field, especially in the STEM sector, with a special focus on EQF levels 5, 6, 7, and 8 (European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning).

Universal human factors condition the gender gap in STEM higher education. Since as known from the scientifically accepted SCCT model of Lent et al. (1994) , motivations and outcome expectations condition the decision on which higher education studies to pursue. However, the gender gap is not only influenced by intrinsic factors but also by extrinsic elements. Cultural patterns marked by stereotypes and gender roles present themselves differently, depending on the local culture ( Bourdieu, 1980a , 1980b , 1984 ). Since the gender gap is a sociological phenomenon that responds to socio-cultural rules, the gender gap index does not occur equally in all world geographical regions ( García-Holgado et al., 2019c ; World Economic Forum, 2021 ).

In this sense, it is of scientific interest to analyse the gender gap in developed geographical areas which implement measures to alleviate segregation where the gap is manifest. For this purpose, global gender gap reports have been consulted to determine the gender gap index situation in the different world regions.

According to the World Economic Forum (2021) , each country is in a particular situation concerning closing the gender gap. According to the World Economic Forum (2021) , the geographical areas of Eastern Europe and Western Europe are in a worse situation in terms of closing the gender gap than areas of North America such as Canada and the United States. In the global ranking of gender gap indices, updated to 2021, Canada ranks 24th out of 156, and the United States ranks 30th out of 156. In 2021 Canada closed 77% of the gender gap and the United States 76%. Meanwhile, other Eastern and Western European countries are in less favourable positions. In 2021 Hungary was ranked 99 out of 156, with 69% of the gender gap closed; Greece was ranked 98 out of 156, with 69% of the gender gap closed; Romania was ranked 88 out of 156, with 70% of the gender gap closed; Malta was ranked 84 (70%); the Czech Republic ranked 78th (71%); the Slovak Republic ranked 77th (71%); Poland ranked 75th (71%); Italy ranked 63rd (72%); Luxembourg ranked 55th (73%); Estonia ranked 46th (73%); Croatia ranked 45th (73%); Slovenia ranked 41st (74%), and Bulgaria ranked 38th (75%).

Also addressing gender segregation in the vertical sense, according to the World Economic Forum (2021) , the low presence of women in top positions demonstrates the persistence of a “Glass Ceiling” even in some of the most advanced economies. While in the United States women occupy the 42% of senior and management positions, in other countries such as Sweden they occupy the 40%, in the United Kingdom the 36.8%, in France the 34.6%, in Germany the 29%, in Italy and the Netherlands the 27%.

On the other hand, as far as the gender pay gap is concerned, developed countries still have a gap to close, e.g., France has 39% of the gap to close, Denmark has 38% of the gap to close, while the United States has 35% of the gap to close.

Therefore, given the results of the reports, it has been decided to analyse the scientific production on the gender gap in higher STEM studies in the European Union. Although it is a geographical area that is on the way to reducing the gender gap, there are still high rates to be closed.

2.3. Data mining

Regarding the data extraction, the metadata of the publications obtained from the search was downloaded from the databases in CSV format. The raw datasets are available in Zenodo ( Verdugo-Castro et al., 2021 ). The phases of defining the protocol, searching and extracting the initial data from the databases were carried out by all the authors of this publication. The search results are current as of 10 November 2021. Subsequent filtering of the successive phases was done by peer review among the authors. The data mining process is an iterative and incremental process. The process was done through different phases ( Figure 1 ). The process is described through the PRISMA flowchart ( Moher et al., 2009 ).

PRISMA flowchart of the Systematic Literature Review. Source: Created by the authors.

First, the results were identified, following the application of search strings in the two selected databases. The results of the databases were downloaded in CSV format. Then, all results were organised in a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. The spreadsheet was configured to automatically detect duplicate titles to facilitate their search and removal. After removing the duplicate items, the data extraction stages began with the application of different filters ( http://bit.ly/3a4gRM5 ).

• • First stage: On a second sheet of Google Sheets, three items were analysed to see if the publication was related to the study objective and the research questions. This phase allowed us to define the candidates for reading. These three elements were the title, the abstract and the keywords ( http://bit.ly/39lO0DX ).
• • Second stage: The documents resulting from the previous phase were then dumped onto a third sheet. On this third sheet of Google Sheets, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. To proceed to the next stage, each publication had to meet all the inclusion criteria ( http://bit.ly/39lO0DX ).

During the first phase, 2794 items were removed, and during the second phase, 698 items were removed. A total of 3492 items were eliminated between the first and second phases. The reasons for discarding these publications were:

• o The publication's subject matter did not have a clear relationship to the gender gap in the STEM education sector.
• o The study addressed the gender gap in STEM fields at the employment or business level but, not in the educational field.
• o The study addressed gender segregation in education, but from the perspective of female teachers, not female students.
• o The study addressed educational elements not related to the gender gap. For example, academic performance and grades.
• o The research was not carried out in European Union countries or regions.
• o The publication was not open access or available through University of Salamanca databases subscriptions.
• • Third stage: The third stage of the process focused on the eligibility of publications. The publications selected in the previous stage were read again. This time they were read with the aim of answering the quality questions ( http://bit.ly/36fnBpi ). In total, there were 10 questions, each of which was answered with one of the following options: yes (1), no (0), partial (0.5). Each answer corresponded to a score, so that the sum of the answers gave each paper a score between 0 and 10. Those papers with a score equal to or higher than 6 were selected for the final stage.

At the quality stage, 196 items were discarded if they did not reach the minimum cut-off score of 6. While all publications were related to the gender gap in the STEM education sector in an EU country or region, the reasons for exclusion were as follows:

• o The objectives of the publication were not clearly aligned with the gender gap in STEM. In some cases, the approach to segregation was collateral and superficial.
• o Some research did not propose methodological approaches of interest at qualitative, quantitative or mixed levels.
• o Other research did not propose intervention proposals (four of the ten quality questions are linked to socio-educational proposals).
• o Some studies do not take into account the limitations encountered throughout the research.
• o The publication does not answer at least one of the two SLR research questions.

Finally, 26 items made it to the final phase. Each selected paper was analysed in detail to obtain the answers to the research and mapping questions.

3. Results of the systematic mapping

The results to the systematic mapping questions are presented below.

3.1. MQ1: which databases publish studies in relation to the gender gap in the STEM education sector?

About three quarters of the publications are indexed in Scopus, compared to 23% of those indexed in Web of Science.

3.2. MQ2: which keywords are applied in the studies?

As presented in Table 1 , the most frequently used keywords are gender, STEM, and stereotypes.

Table 1

Results to the MQ2.

3.3. MQ3: how are the studies distributed by year?

As shown in Figure 2 , the years with the highest number of publications are 2018 and 2017.

Results to the MQ3.

3.4. MQ4: what kind of methodologies and methods do the studies use?

It can be seen from Figure 3 that there is a preponderance of studies based on quantitative paradigms, although qualitative designs and mixed approaches are emerging. Complete information on this question can be found in Table 1 of Supplementary Material 2 linked to this article.

Results to the MQ4.

3.5. MQ5: in which countries are the studies carried out?

As presented in Figure 4 and 9 studies were carried out in Germany; 5 in Spain, 3 in the UK and Ireland, 2 in areas such as Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium and Finland, and only one study in other regions, such as Slovenia, Norway, Scotland, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Results to the MQ5.

3.6. MQ6: with which population are the studies conducted?

As shown in Figure 5 , the samples with which the studies have been carried out are primarily university students and secondary school students. Studies have also been carried out with primary school students and secondary school and university students. Finally, in one study, there have been samples of primary, secondary, and university education; and in another study, the sample has been female graduates.

Results to the MQ6.

Complete information on this question can be found in Table 2 of Supplementary Material 2 linked to this article.

Table 2

Results for the MQ7 and MQ8.

3.7. MQ7: what data collection instruments or techniques have been validated? And MQ8: what kind of data collection instruments or techniques are proposed?

Table 2 provides information on what kind of techniques or instruments have been used to collect the data and which of them have been validated.

4. Results of the systematic literature review and discussion

The qualitative analysis of the resulting papers in the systematic literature review has been organised into two main blocks (4.1. and 4.2.). Since there are two research questions to be answered for SLR, the first research question is answered in the first block (4.1. IQ1: What studies exist on the gender gap in relation to the choice of higher education in the STEM field?), and the second block answers the second research question (4.2. IQ2: How do gender roles and stereotypes influence decision-making related to higher education?).

In turn, a grouping strategy has been followed to classify the results thematically and facilitate their understanding. After reading all of them, the main themes studied in the papers were identified as categories, and the results of the papers were organised based on these categories. Finally, eight main themes have been identified, four to answer the first research question and four to answer the second SLR research question.

In the first block, in which the first SLR research question is answered, the main themes are Socio-educational projects and proposals (4.1.1.), study of gender differences (4.1.2.), initiatives in secondary and university education (4.1.3.) and Active methodologies and intervention initiatives (4.1.4.). On the other hand, in the second block, in which the second research question of the SLR is answered, the main topics are Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) and early intervention (4.2.1.), educational institutions and the learning process (4.2.2.), perceptions of male-dominated domains (4.2.3.) and social structures and contextual influences (4.2.4.).

The first research question addresses what studies exist on the gender gap in relation to the choice of higher education in the STEM field. In this sense, it is possible to identify studies on gender differences, socio-educational proposals, and initiatives that can be organised by educational levels, in this case, secondary and university, and also by typology, active methodologies, and intervention initiatives.

On the other hand, the second question addresses how gender roles and stereotypes influence decision-making related to higher education. In this line, the SCCT model ( Lent et al., 1994 ) explains the relationship between social stereotypes and the decision taken. However, the question can also be answered regarding the influence of education as an institution, social and contextual influences, and the perception of socially androcentric spaces.

Figure 6 visually presents the main ideas of the results for the two research questions.

Main ideas of the results for the two research questions.

4.1. IQ1: what studies exist on the gender gap in relation to the choice of higher education in the STEM field?

4.1.1. socio-educational projects and proposals.

The IRIS project, Interests and Recruitment in Science, arises to study the factors that determine young people's choices ( Henriksen et al., 2015 ). The aim is to gain a better understanding of how young people evaluate STEM as an option for their educational choices, as achievement in science and technology is only one of many factors that influence their choices.

In terms of specific intervention groups, Heybach and Pickup (2017) allude to a socio-educational approach in the UK. A group called STEMettes ( STEMettes, 2021 ) is working to combat what they consider to be a culture in which girls do not imagine women doing "science stuff" while they are mothers.

In the framework of project design for the improvement of diversity and gender inclusion, there are different technology companies that follow a gender perspective trend, such as LinkedIn, Salesforce, Intel, Google, Microsoft and IBM. In this line, Peixoto et al. (2018) propose an initiative based on robotics, as an inclusive tool, to combat the gender gap.

Also, the Girls4STEM project led by the School of Engineering of the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV) in Spain aims to increase and retain the number of female students, applying its intervention with students aged 6 to 18, their families and teachers ( López-Iñesta et al., 2020 ).

Another project worth mentioning is 'Increasing Gender Diversity in STEM' ( Ballatore et al., 2020 ). The aim is to investigate the gender difference in the self-perception of female students about their career choice. In order to find out the self-perception, a web application for students called ANNA tool was designed and used.

Finally, the project Science and Technology as Feminine, promoted by the Spanish Association of Science and Technology Parks (APTE), aims to raise awareness of the under-representation of women in STEM fields and promote girls' inclusion in scientific and technical careers ( Davila Dos Santos et al., 2021 ).

4.1.2. Study of gender differences

From the study by Kang et al. (2019) it was found that during the transition period from primary to secondary school there were gender differences in relation to interest in and preferences for science subjects, and in relation to future career prospects. Preferences were mostly in biology for girls and physics and chemistry for boys. Furthermore, it was concluded that teachers are agents of change involved in the educational process, so it is necessary for them to take care of the material they use and the way they communicate with students. Perhaps by conveying to girls the fact that science careers can respect people's personal time, they might retain their interest in science.

Also, an element to pay attention to is self-efficacy and, for this, Brauner et al. (2018) work from mental models. The study was carried out in Germany and a socio-educational approach was proposed, in which the subjects were participants in robotics courses to increase vocational interests and interest in computer science. From the results it can be concluded that the participants drew predominantly male STEM people in rather isolated situations. The people drawn are perceived to look nerdy , although they are also perceived as quite attractive and intelligent. Even so, the mood of the people in the pictures was perceived as slightly negative. It was concluded that girls reported significantly lower levels of technical self-efficacy and lower interest in computer science than boys. However, it is of deep concern that this effect emerges so early and can be measured empirically at the age of 11 or 12 years. The study by Brauner et al. (2018) shows that gender differences with respect to mental models, self-efficacy and interest have already developed by the age of 12.

Furthermore, in the line of socio-educational applications, the research by Wulff et al. (2018) is based on the performance of the Physics Olympiad in Germany in 2015. The aim was to generate motivation in young men and women in the field of physics. To this end, the aim was to develop physical identity for both men and women. After the Olympiad, the return rate for the following year for female participants was 60% (62% for males), while the return rate for non-participating females was 28% (39% for males).

Finally, the study by Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel (2017) tested the effect of gender-typicality of academic learning tasks on HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) and showed that the gender of the robot had no influence on the participants' objective learning performance. That is, participants' learning was neither positively nor negatively affected by learning with a "male" or "female" robot. This fact could be exploited to reduce gender-related performance disparities and contribute to equal opportunities for male and female students in higher education.

4.1.3. Initiatives in secondary and university education

One innovation introduced by the education system is presented in the study by Görlitz and Gravert (2018) . It analyses the potential of redesigning the secondary school curriculum in Germany to achieve increased enrolments in higher STEM degrees. The results suggest a positive and robust increase in the likelihood of choosing STEM as a university major for males, although there is no effect for females. One cause could be the acquired roles of men and women.

Another proposal in Germany is that of Finzel et al. (2018) , who aim to motivate secondary school female students to consider Computer Science as a possible option. The latest measure has been the introduction of the make IT mentoring programme in 2014. The programme was designed to provide female students with information about Computer Science and to include measures that consider self-concept and gender stereotypes correlated with a negative image of women in Computer Science. Within make IT , participants should be supported to achieve a more realistic self-assessment and positive feedback of their own abilities.

In addition, Ertl et al. (2017) work on self-concept. From their research they conclude that students who reported a higher number of favourite STEM subjects at school have a higher self-concept, while higher levels of school support and teacher stereotyping indicate a lower and less positive self-concept in STEM. Regarding the impact of stereotypes, STEM female students mentioned that they were pursuing an atypical career path and that their social environment was surprised by this type of career choice.

4.1.4. Active methodologies and intervention initiatives

Continuing with the proposals, mentoring is proposed as a measure to reduce the gender gap in STEM. Stoeger, Hopp, et al. (2017) conducted their study in Germany and aimed to compare the effectiveness of individual versus group online mentoring in STEM. This was done within the framework of CyberMentor , an online mentoring programme in STEM for gifted girls designed to increase participation rates of talented girls in STEM. In terms of results, the proportion of communication about STEM topics was higher in group mentoring than in individual mentoring. Girls in group mentoring showed a higher amount of STEM-related networking compared to girls in individual mentoring. Finally, group mentoring mentees reported an increase in elective intentions in STEM, while individual mentoring mentees reported no significant differences.

In addition, to work on interest and attitudes towards mathematics, Cantley et al. (2017) work from Collaborative Cognitive Activation Strategies, and from the Izak9 resource. Following the study there was a small increase in girls' enjoyment of mathematics in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. However, boys' enjoyment increased marginally in the Republic of Ireland and decreased marginally in Northern Ireland.

In terms of attitudes, Borsotti (2018) empirically investigates the main socio-cultural barriers to female participation in the software development degree programme at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark (ITU). The results reveal that almost all respondents attributed the gender gap to a greater extent to the existence of stereotypes.

On outreach interventions, Sullivan et al. (2015) aim to help secondary school girls develop an optimal view of the role of computers in society and to learn some of the key computer skills, including computer programming. It examines CodePlus, a programming club based on the Bridge 21 model, which was established in three all-girls schools. Students worked together on activities including computational thinking, computers in society and programming using Scratch. The results obtained in the Sullivan et al. (2015) study are: (1) there was no gender difference in expected and actual mathematics grades, (2) boys played computer games for much longer than girls, (3) girls spent more time using computers for homework, while boys spent more time using computers to look up general non-school related information, (4) boys demonstrated significantly higher levels of self-efficacy than girls, (5) boys were also more likely to study computer science at university than girls and were more confident about being accepted into a computer science degree. The comparisons demonstrate clear differences in how girls view themselves in terms of computer science ability.

On the other hand, Salmi et al. (2016) found that after visiting science, technology and engineering exhibitions with students, girls were in a better position to decide about their future because they experienced more autonomy than boys. This study also revealed that girls had higher attitudes towards science than boys. However, for the engineering factor, boys' attitudes were significantly more positive than girls'. Motivations are also explored in the study by Olmedo-Torre et al. (2018) . In this case, they study the differences between the motivations of female STEM students, forming two groups: (1) Computing, Communications, and Electrical and Electronic Engineering studies (CCEEE women), and (2) other STEM studies (non-CCEEE women). The female respondents considered social stereotypes (31.47%) and immediate environment (14.5%) as the main reasons for the low enrolment of women in STEM studies. Surprisingly, the third reason (11.03%) is that women do not like engineering. In addition, CCEEE women were less likely than non-CCEEE women to consider themselves more able than men in physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and graphic expression.

Also, Botella et al. (2019) aim to increase the number of female students by providing them with support, in order to prevent them from giving up in the early stages. The work programme of the School of Engineering of the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV) is organised around four main actions: (1) providing institutional encouragement and support, (2) increasing the professional support network, (3) promoting and supporting leadership and (4) increasing the visibility of female role models. Two other elements to study are identity as a scientist and scientific capital. The study by Padwick et al. (2016) is developed for this purpose within Think Physics (Northumbria University, Newcastle) ( Think Physics, 2016 ). Through collaboration with industry, agencies and schools, Think Physics ( Think Physics, 2016 ) addresses the gender imbalance and under-representation of lower socio-economic groups in the physics, engineering, and computing sectors.

Furthermore, continuing with the analysis of capital, Stoeger et al. (2017) study whether the level of educational capital and the learning capital of students are related to STEM Magnet schools. The findings show that more and more girls are choosing STEM magnet school options as part of their studies. Interestingly, however, this general trend is not followed when choosing higher STEM studies. Cincera et al. (2017) also address scientific understanding, applying a programme to enhance the acquisition of scientific skills. However, there was no significant change in either the girls' or the boys' group.

Meanwhile, the study conducted in Portugal by Martinho et al. (2015) seeks to identify gender differences with respect to cooperation and competitiveness. The results reveal that women are more cooperative than men and men are more competitive than women. Thus, one of the socially assigned gender roles is manifested.

However, the gender gap also concerns communities and industries. González-González et al. (2018) present good practices from communities and industries. Laboratorial, which has a "Talent Fest", stands out. There is also Microsoft, which offers mentoring to young women, for the development of their digital skills. Finally, there is also the Women at Google initiative, which aims to increase the presence of women in the company and encourage them to feel more empowered.

Also, Herman et al. (2019) aim to promote the re-entry into the STEM labour market of women who abandoned their careers, through a blended learning programme. The Badged Open Course (BOC) was developed in 2016 to support women returning to STEM careers after a long period of time.

Finally, as is known from the updated indices published in the latest report of the World Economic Forum (2021) , the different countries included in the rankings still have a percentage of the gender gap to close. However, given the results obtained in the systematic review of the literature, it is striking that in those countries where initiatives have been implemented to alleviate the gender gap, the gender gap continues to persist. This finding is consistent with the conclusions obtained in the study by Stoet and Geary (2018) . The authors concluded in their research that, paradoxically, countries with lower gender equality indexes had relatively more female graduates in STEM disciplines than those with higher gender equality indexes. As noted by the same authors ( Stoet and Geary, 2018 ), this finding is noteworthy since, following other authors such as Williams and Ceci (2015) , countries with higher gender equality indexes are those that offer girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities and generally promote women's participation in STEM fields. In line with Stoet and Geary's (2018) argument, it is not only social and cultural factors that play a role, but also the individual choices and attitudes that students make, which may be influenced by other factors such as socioeconomic status. In this sense, and in agreement with other authors ( Stoet and Geary, 2018 ; M.-T. Wang and Degol, 2013 ), students should base their educational decisions on their potential, regardless of the educational field to which the decision is directed.

4.2. IQ2: how do gender roles and stereotypes influence decision-making related to higher education?

4.2.1. social cognitive career theory (scct) and early intervention.

According to Heybach and Pickup (2017) in order to suppress gender roles and stereotypes that foster the gender gap it is necessary to move away from androcentrism, and the stereotypical belief that the rational mind is male and the passive nature is female. This would move away from the binary logic, in which occupations have either a female or male profile. The STEM workforce should be empowered, preventing gender roles and stereotypes from increasing the Leaky Pipeline ( Heybach and Pickup, 2017 ). To retain girls and women, the Stereotype Threat must be lessened. Girls and women grow up thinking that they should be dedicated to caring for the family, and scientific thinking is also thought to be masculine in nature. To eradicate these erratic beliefs Heybach and Pickup (2017) propose female role models as a possible solution, in order to increase interest.

For their part, Peixoto et al. (2018) indicate that efforts to retain women and girls in STEM focus on secondary education and/or university. However, it is more relevant to work from an early age. From an early age, it is already evident that boys identify more with the concept of science than girls. Stereotypical perceptions of what STEM is lead boys to feel that scientists can be similar to them at higher rates than girls.

Kang et al. (2019) also point to boys' and girls' interests as a key element, as career aspirations may begin around the age of 11 or 12. Academic and extracurricular experiences and science education are conditioning elements. In addition, the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) points out that attention should be paid to the expectations of results, since they are a major source of interest.

Other authors who also argue the importance of addressing the gender gap from an early age are ( Brauner et al., 2018 ). They point out that self-efficacy plays an important role in decision-making. This in turn relates to the locus of control of Causal Attribution Theory. Considering that gender, ethnicity, and other distinguishing characteristics may also interfere with decision-making, one must again turn to SCCT. This theory points out that different elements need to be addressed in order to reduce segregation: self-efficacy, outcome expectations, personal goals, career interests, career path choices, performance, and perceived achievements.

However, it is not only a question of interests, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations. According to Cantley et al. (2017) attention should also be paid to attitudes. When the transition from primary to secondary school takes place, students' attitudes towards mathematics become more negative. Attitudes are influenced by interest and enjoyment. For this reason, Cantley et al. (2017) propose to work from Cognitive Activation Teaching Strategies, since they are related to the intrinsic motivation of the person.

4.2.2. Educational institutions and the learning process

Padwick et al. (2016) point out that an important and involved element is science capital. Children with higher science capital are more likely to choose higher STEM studies than those with lower science capital.

Also, Stoeger, Greindl, et al. (2017) , who report on STEM magnet schools and non-STEM magnet schools, assume that gender stereotypes can be observed at the age of six. This fact implies that STEM magnet schools could play an important role in increasing participation in STEM studies.

In this line, Salmi et al. (2016) emphasise the difficulty of changing attitudes after primary education, since they are formed at an early age. Salmi et al. (2016) focus on cognitive, motivational, and learning aspects, because motivation and attitudes precede intention. Therefore, if positive attitudes towards the STEM sector can be generated at an early age and motivational elements are introduced, a behavioural approach to science and engineering can be generated.

In terms of motivation, according to Görlitz and Gravert (2018) those who choose to take mathematics and science classes in secondary education are more likely to specialise in these areas at university.

In addition, scientific identity and agency play a role in decision-making. In accordance with Wulff et al. (2018) agency and scientific identity, tinged with social roles, are a possible source of underrepresentation. Elements such as stereotypes, lack of interest, motivation or sense of belonging may explain the underrepresentation of young women in domains such as Physics.

4.2.3. Perceptions of male-dominated domains

In the sense of identity, as Borsotti (2018) points out computer science has been socially constructed as a masculinised domain, resulting in stereotypical perceptions and beliefs, low self-efficacy on the part of women and girls, and biased assessment in STEM subjects.

To address this, according to Sullivan et al. (2015) exposure to computer science, at home or at school, and encouragement from family and peers are the main factors influencing girls' decisions to pursue higher education in computer science. Other factors include self-perception, self-confidence, self-efficacy, scientific understanding, parenting strategy, stereotypes, and biases that girls and women must combat, and the barriers girls face when working in male-dominated environments.

In this regard, Ertl et al. (2017) also consider that negative perceptions, stereotypical beliefs and Stereotype Threat reinforce dysfunctional attribution patterns, which ultimately lead to a lower proportion of women, especially in the areas of technology and engineering. The authors also focus on self-concept as a key element to avoid the gender gap, based on Expectancy-Value Theory.

4.2.4. Social structures and contextual influences

Olmedo-Torre et al. (2018) insist on the relevance of the perception of the immediate environment. It is important to involve families and teachers in the search for a solution. According to Botella et al. (2019) gender roles and patterns and stereotypes installed in the family and in society about relevant careers for both men and women have an impact on the future education of boys and girls, and on their career choices. There are proposals to address these obstacles, such as the promotion of female role models in STEM fields, academic counselling, teacher mentoring, internship opportunities and career and skills development.

Furthermore, picking up on the idea of mentoring, according to Finzel et al. (2018) the probability of choosing higher studies in computer science is lower for women than for men. However, the low proportion is not due to a lack of competence of female students, as they are not less qualified. Instead, the presence of gender stereotypes and the absence of female role models are possible reasons for the low representation of women in computer science. Therefore, mentoring programmes are proposed to encourage the development of higher education in STEM.

In terms of real-world initiatives, Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel (2017) propose an intervention with robots. They aim to investigate whether "female" gendered robots could effectively support learning in STEM disciplines, and whether "male" gendered robots could support learning in linguistic and literary studies. After conducting the study, it can be concluded that the female agent tends to be more effective regardless of the gender of the participants.

Moreover, Henriksen et al. (2015) indicate that the challenge for future research is to further explore the social structures, discourses, curricular components, etc., that impede women's participation in the fields of science, where they have so far had only a small representation.

In addition to all of the above, the educational factor leads to the employment factor. According to González-González et al. (2018) , the problem of educational segregation extends to professional life. Finally, Cincera et al. (2017) point out that an optimal response to segregation is to encourage interactive learning through multimedia applications, in order to attract students' attention to science.

5. Conclusions

5.1. methodologies and methods and population groups.

According to the literature, the methodologies and methods that can be applied in gender gap studies in the STEM education sector may differ. Mixed models ( Herman et al., 2019 ; Padwick et al., 2016 ) and multi-method approaches ( Borsotti, 2018 ; Brauner et al., 2018 ; Ertl et al., 2017b ; Finzel et al., 2018 ; Henriksen et al., 2015 ; Olmedo-Torre et al., 2018 ) can be used. Quantitative studies ( Cantley et al., 2017 ; Cincera et al., 2017 ; Görlitz and Gravert, 2018 ; Kang et al., 2019 ; Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel, 2017 ; Salmi et al., 2016 ; Stoeger et al., 2017 ; Stoeger et al., 2017 ; Sullivan et al., 2015 ; Wulff et al., 2018 ), or qualitative studies ( Botella et al., 2019 ; Martinho et al., 2015 ) can also be applied. On the other hand, another type of study is based on the review of initiatives ( González-González et al., 2018 ; Heybach and Pickup, 2017 ; Peixoto et al., 2018 ).

However, what is most interesting is to know which population groups are of scientific interest in investigating this topic of study. The literature reveals that it is of interest to investigate from early ages to the working stages ( González-González et al., 2018 ; Herman et al., 2019 ) through primary education ( Padwick et al., 2016 ; Salmi et al., 2016 ; Sullivan et al., 2015 ), secondary ( Brauner et al., 2018 ; Cincera et al., 2017 ; Kang et al., 2019 ; Wulff et al., 2018 ) and university ( Ertl et al., 2017b ; Henriksen et al., 2015 ; Martinho et al., 2015 ; Olmedo-Torre et al., 2018 ; Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel, 2017 ; Stoeger et al., 2017 ). Moreover, as revealed in the literature, it is not only interesting to focus on one age group. Research can be conducted with students and women who are at different stages of their educational trajectory ( Botella et al., 2019 ; Cantley et al., 2017 ; Finzel et al., 2018 ; Görlitz and Gravert, 2018 ; Stoeger et al., 2017 ), such as students in primary, secondary and university education simultaneously.

5.2. Measurement and assessment resources

It is helpful to know what resources can be used to carry out studies in which the gender gap in the STEM education sector is studied and measured. Among the resources are gender gap measurement and assessment tools. After consulting the literature, it is noted that some instruments are aimed at detecting scientific identity, such as the Aspires Questionnaire ( Padwick et al., 2016 ). There are also instruments for measuring attitudes towards science, such as: Deci-Ryan motivation, Situation motivation test, Science attitudes, Future educational plans, Raven test, Knowledge test and School achievement ( Salmi et al., 2016 ).

On the other hand, Sullivan et al. (2015) have used an adaptation of the Papastergiou questionnaire to measure perceptions and self-efficacy concerning Computer Science. Along the lines of motivation, the Aiken Scale ( Cantley et al., 2017 ) is helpful and validated for measuring interest in mathematics. In addition, Wulff et al. (2018) , who conducted a Physics Olympiad, used: Content interest physics and Situational interest, for the measurement of interest. In the context of the IRIS project, Henriksen et al. (2015) used the validated IRIS Q questionnaire.

However, not all possible resources are quantitative instruments. Focus groups ( Henriksen et al., 2015 ) and qualitative interviews ( Borsotti, 2018 ; Martinho et al., 2015 ) can also be applied to approach knowledge through discourses. Another qualitative strategy is analysing through drawings ( Brauner et al., 2018 ).

Cincera et al. (2017) used the SEI Questionnaire to close the reflection on data collection resources adapted from the NoS instrument. Kang et al. (2019) validated an instrument based on PRiSE and PISA within the MultiCO project. Olmedo-Torre et al. (2018) applied the validated survey "Survey for engineering students and graduates", collecting quantitative and qualitative data. Finally, Stoeger et al. (2017) applied the Questionnaire of Educational and Learning Capital (QELC) to analyse educational and learning capital.

5.3. Possible initiatives

On the other hand, another of the original contributions of this work is the systematisation of possible initiatives to implement aimed at closing the gender gap in the STEM education sector. In this sense, Peixoto et al. (2018) propose an initiative based on robotics as an inclusive and motivational measure to encourage interest from the school stage. Along the same lines, Sullivan et al. (2015) carried out outreach interventions through programming in secondary education.

In terms of proposals that worked positively in the studies, to boost interest and motivation in physics from secondary education, Wulff et al. (2018) applied a Physics Olympiad with boys and girls. Continuing also in the context of secondary education, a proposal that has generated positive effects is the redesign of the curriculum to promote STEM disciplines ( Görlitz and Gravert, 2018 ). Also, to motivate female secondary school students to consider Computer Science as a possible field of study, Finzel et al. (2018) conducted a mentoring programme called make IT. In the same line, Stoeger et al. (2017) conducted a mentoring-based study within the context of the CyberMentor programme.

Using different methodologies, Cantley et al. (2017) promoted the enjoyment of mathematics through Collaborative Cognitive Activation Strategies.

In the university environment, the School of Engineering of the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV) promotes actions to increase the number of female students ( Botella et al., 2019 ). The actions are institutional support, increasing the support network, promoting leadership, and promoting female role models.

Finally, initiatives should not only be promoted in schools and universities. As advocated by González-González et al. (2018) , communities and businesses should also promote good practices. Finally, along the same lines, Herman et al. (2019) promote the re-entry of STEM women into the labour market through a Blended Learning programme.

In this way, it is concluded that it is worth investing resources and efforts in proposals based on scope interventions. According to the professional or training stage, applying one type of initiative or another will be more appropriate, as has been seen among those discussed above.

5.4. Impact of stereotypes

Measures and interventions could combat the effects of segregation, including the "Leaky Pipeline" phenomenon and the Stereotype Threat. These stereotypes are perpetuated over time. One of the socially acquired roles is that of family care for women, as demonstrated by Weisgram and Diekman (2015) .

However, it is inappropriate to think that intervention measures should focus exclusively on women and girls. The gender gap is a system-wide problem. Education, business and society, and family and social actors are indispensable elements to be mentioned ( Craig et al., 2019 ; Fisher and Margolis, 2003 ; Lehman et al., 2017 ; Sax et al., 2017 ). However, it remains striking that initiatives heavily target women and girls.

The scientific vocation is considerably affected by stereotypes. These stereotypes must be fought to deconstruct them. Investing efforts to close the gender gap should not be a matter of quotas or public image. As presented in a study by the Harvard Business Review ( Hewlett et al., 2013 ), organisations that have a more diverse and inclusive workforce tend to be more innovative and experience greater market growth than companies that do not adopt such a philosophy.

However, action should not be delayed until secondary or university education. Authors such as Kang et al. (2019) –and accordance with Nurmi (2005) – confirm that career aspirations begin at the age of 11–12 years. Therefore, it is necessary to act from an early age, as supported by Brauner et al. (2010) , Miller et al. (2018) and Wang (2013) .

In this sense, girls generally prefer more family and contact-oriented occupations than boys, as Konrad et al. (2000) point out. Thus, women have continuously shown less interest in science and STEM occupations, especially in engineering ( Ceci and Williams, 2010 ; Diekman et al., 2010 ).

In addition to personal goals, outcome expectations and interests, other constructs such as self-concept, motivation, attitudes, performance, and self-efficacy should be addressed. By enhancing scientific and confident identity and self-confidence in the discipline, positive self-knowledge can be enhanced. Moreover, if people have gains in agency ( Bandura, 1977 ), they will feel more prepared to engage in what they really want to do.

5.5. Other segregation types

Finally, while the work presented in this paper focuses on horizontal segregation in women's entry and persistence in STEM fields, horizontal segregation is not the only form of segregation that exists. It is also essential to recognise the existence and impact of vertical segregation ( Corbett and Hill, 2015 ). The latter type prevents or hinders promotion within the field, resulting in the Glass Ceiling phenomenon. Vertical segregation manifests mainly in the labour sector once women are immersed in the labour market. This phenomenon occurs because of the obstacles and barriers women face that make it difficult to progress at the same rate as their male counterparts ( Cotter et al., 2001 ; de Welde and Laursen, 2011 ; Zeng, 2011 ). When the Glass Ceiling occurs in the academic and scientific space, it is accompanied by the Scissors Effect ( Wood, 2009 ).

Perceived barriers include the lack of female role models and references, gender bias, hostile work environment, lack of natural work-family balance, unequal growth opportunities based on gender, and the gender pay gap ( Botella et al., 2019 ; ISACA, 2017 ).

As can be seen, the two types of segregation, vertical and horizontal, share a common trigger: perceived barriers in the environment and context. For this reason, it is essential to work on these barriers to reduce them until they are eradicated.

6. Threats to the validity of the study

The systematic review and mapping presented in this paper, just like any other research method, may suffer from threats to its validity, as well as some limitations. Two categories of threats are identified: construct validity and validity of conclusions.

To preserve the validity of the construct, a series of measures were applied to maintain the objectivity of the results. These measures were: to review previous SLRs to confirm the need to carry out the presented study, and to follow systematised and documented phases marked by inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria, with the ultimate aim of mitigating possible biases. On the other hand, although a search protocol has been defined, this does not guarantee that all publications related to the subject are included. In order to weigh up this threat, searches have been carried out in the two main research databases, namely Web of Science and Scopus.

In addition, for the validity of the conclusions, the data extraction process has been described step by step and documented by means of different spreadsheets which are available from the links: http://bit.ly/3a4gRM5 , http://bit.ly/39lO0DX and http://bit.ly/36fnBpi .

The main limitation encountered in the research was the initial management of the large volume of results obtained from the equation of terms. The initial starting point was 4571 results, which meant that the start of the process took longer than desired.

Finally, as a future prospect, it is proposed to make systematic updates of the literature presented, with the aim of identifying new proposals for intervention, as well as methodological approaches to the factors influencing the gender gap.

Declarations

Author contribution statement.

All authors listed have significantly contributed to the development and the writing of this article.

Funding statement

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades under a FPU fellowship (FPU017/01252). This work has been possible with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union in its Key Action 2 "Capacity-building in Higher Education". Project W-STEM "Building the future of Latin America: engaging women into STEM" (Reference number 598923-EPP-1-2018-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). The content of this publication does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed in the publication lies entirely with the authors.

Data availability statement

Declaration of interest's statement.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research work has been carried out within the PhD Programme of the University of Salamanca in the field of Education in the Knowledge Society ( http://knowledgesociety.usal.es ), and this research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with a grant for the training of University Teachers (FPU017/01252). Also, the authors would like to thank Elena P. Hernández Rivero (Language Centre-USAL) for translation support.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

The following is the supplementary data related to this article:

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Despite High Potential, 75 Vulnerable Economies Face ‘Historic Reversal’

In Half of IDA Countries, Income Gap with Wealthiest Economies is Widening

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2024 — Despite their high potential to advance global prosperity, one-half of the world’s 75 most vulnerable countries are facing a widening income gap with the wealthiest economies for the first time in this century, a new World Bank report has found . Taking full advantage of their younger populations, their rich natural resources, and their abundant solar-energy potential can help them overcome the setback.

The report, The Great Reversal: Prospects, Risks, and Policies in International Development Association Countries , offers the first comprehensive look at the opportunities and risks confronting the 75 countries eligible for grants and zero to low-interest loans from the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA). These countries are home to a quarter of humanity—1.9 billion people. At a time when populations are aging nearly everywhere else, IDA countries will enjoy a growing share of young workers through 2070—a huge potential “demographic dividend.” These countries are also rich in natural resources, enjoy high potential for solar-energy generation, and boast a large reservoir of mineral deposits that could be crucial for the world’s transition to clean energy.

Yet a historic reversal is underway for them. Over 2020-24, average per capita incomes in half of IDA countries—the largest share since the start of this century—have been growing more slowly than those of wealthy economies. This is widening the income gap between these two groups of countries. One out of three IDA countries is poorer, on average, than it was on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic . The extreme-poverty rate is more than eight times the average in the rest of the world: one in four people in IDA countries struggles on less than $2.15 a day. These countries now account for 90% of all people facing hunger or malnutrition. Half of these countries are either in debt distress or at high risk of it. Still, except for the World Bank Group and other multilateral development donors, foreign lenders—private as well as government creditors—have been backing away from them.

“The world cannot afford to turn its back on IDA countries,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President . “The welfare of these countries has always been crucial to the long-term outlook for global prosperity. Three of the world’s economic powerhouses today—China, India, and South Korea—were all once IDA borrowers. All three prospered in ways that whittled down extreme poverty and raised living standards. With help from abroad, today’s batch of IDA countries has the potential to do the same.”

More than half of all IDA countries—39 in all—are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fourteen of them—mainly small island states—are in East Asia, and eight are in Latin America and the Caribbean. In South Asia, all countries except for India are IDA countries. Thirty-one IDA countries have per capita incomes of less than $1,315 a year. Thirty-three are fragile and conflict-affected states.

IDA countries share similar opportunities. The “demographic dividend”—a deep and growing reserve of young workers—is one of them. Abundant natural resources is another. These countries account for about 20% of global production of tin, copper, and gold. In addition, some IDA countries possess critical mineral deposits essential for the global energy transition. Because of their abundant sunshine, most IDA countries are well situated to take advantage of solar energy. On average, their long-term daily solar-electricity generation potential is among the highest in the world.

This potential, however, comes with risks that must be managed. To reap the demographic dividend, IDA governments will need to undertake policies to improve education and health outcomes and make sure that jobs are available for the rising number of young people who will enter the workforce in the coming decades. To seize the full potential of their natural-resource wealth, IDA countries will need to improve policy frameworks and build stronger institutions capable of better economic management. All of this will require ambitious domestic policy reforms—and significant financial support from the international community.

“IDA countries have incredible potential to deliver strong, sustainable, and inclusive growth. Realizing this potential will require them to implement an ambitious set of policies centered on boosting investment,” said Ayhan Kose, the World Bank’s Deputy Chief Economist and Director of the Prospects Group . “ This means improving fiscal, monetary, and financial policy frameworks and advancing an array of structural reforms to strengthen institutions and enhance human capital."

IDA countries today have large investment needs. In the poorest of them, closing existing development and infrastructure gaps and building resilience to climate change will require investment that amounts to nearly 10% of GDP. The costs of climate disasters have doubled in IDA countries over the past decade: Economic losses from natural disasters average 1.3% of GDP a year—four times the average of other emerging market and developing economies. Such needs will require IDA countries to generate sustained investment booms—the type that boosts productivity and incomes and reduces poverty. Historically, such investment booms have often been sparked by a comprehensive package of policy measures—to bolster fiscal and monetary frameworks, ramp up cross-border trade and financial flows, and improve the quality of institutions. Such reforms are never easy, the report notes. They need careful sequencing and implementation. But previous IDA countries have shown they are possible.

IDA countries will need significant international financial support to make progress and lower the risk of “protracted stagnation,” the report notes . Stronger cooperation on global policy issues—including fighting climate change, facilitating more timely and effective debt restructurings, and supporting cross-border trade and investment—will also be crucial to help IDA countries avert a lost decade in development .

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The joy of sports: How watching sports can boost well-being

Researchers explore in depth the positive psychological and neurophysiological benefits of watching sports.

For many individuals, sports have long served as a source of enjoyment and relaxation. Watching sports, particularly at large gatherings, goes beyond entertainment. It fosters a sense of community and belonging among audiences. This sense of connection not only makes individuals feel good but also benefits society by improving health, enhancing productivity, and reducing crime. Although it is popularly recognized for its positive effects, existing studies on the relationship between watching sports and well-being offer only limited evidence.

Recognizing this gap, a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Shintaro Sato from the Faculty of Sport Sciences, Waseda University, Japan, embarked on a groundbreaking study. Prof. Sato, alongside Assistant Professor Keita Kinoshita from Nanyang Technological University and Dr. Kento Nakagawa from the Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, used a multi-method approach, combining secondary data analysis, self-reports, and neuroimaging measures to understand the connection between sports viewing and well-being in the general population. "A significant challenge in well-being research is the subjective nature of measurement procedures, potentially leading to biased findings. Therefore, our studies focused on both subjective and objective measures of well-being," explains Prof. Sato. Their research was published online on 22 March 2024 in Sports Management Review .

In the first study, the researchers analyzed large-scale publicly available data on the influence of watching sports on 20,000 Japanese residents. The results of this study confirmed the ongoing pattern of elevated reported well-being associated with regular sports viewing. However, this study was limited by its inability to provide deeper insight into the relationship between sports consumption and well-being.

The second study, an online survey aimed at investigating whether the connection between sports viewing and well-being varied depending on the type of sport observed, involved 208 participants. The experiment exposed them to various sports videos, assessing their well-being both before and after viewing. The findings underscored that widely embraced sports, like baseball, exerted a more significant impact on enhancing well-being compared to less popular sports, such as golf.

However, the most groundbreaking aspect of this research emerged in the third study. Here, the team employed neuroimaging techniques to scrutinize alterations in brain activity following sports viewing. Utilizing multimodal MRI neuroimaging measurement procedures, the brain activity of fourteen able-bodied Japanese participants was analyzed while they watched sports clips. The results of this investigation illuminated that, sports viewing triggered activation in the brain's reward circuits, indicative of feelings of happiness or pleasure. Additionally, a noteworthy finding surfaced in the structural image analysis. It revealed that individuals who reported watching sports more frequently exhibited greater gray matter volume in regions associated with reward circuits, suggesting that regular sports viewing may gradually induce changes in brain structures. "Both subjective and objective measures of well-being were found to be positively influenced by engaging in sports viewing. By inducing structural changes in the brain's reward system over time, it fosters long-term benefits for individuals. For those seeking to enhance their overall well-being, regularly watching sports, particularly popular ones such as baseball or soccer, can serve as an effective remedy," comments Prof. Sato.

The study has profound implications and theoretical contributions to sports management literature. Existing literature has primarily focused on sports fans; however, this study has taken into consideration a larger general population irrespective of their relationship to sports consumption. This research can contribute significantly to sports management practices and policymaking for public health.

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• Keita Kinoshita, Kento Nakagawa, Shintaro Sato. Watching sport enhances well-being: evidence from a multi-method approach . Sport Management Review , 2024; 1 DOI: 10.1080/14413523.2024.2329831

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