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Promoting gender equality across the sustainable development goals

• Open access
• Published: 15 September 2022
• Volume 25 , pages 14177–14198, ( 2023 )

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• Walter Leal Filho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1241-5225 1 , 2 ,
• Marina Kovaleva 1 ,
• Stella Tsani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7302-4930 3 ,
• Diana-Mihaela Țîrcă   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9155-9616 4 ,
• Chris Shiel 5 ,
• Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2198-6740 6 ,
• Melanie Nicolau   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6532-9657 7 ,
• Mihaela Sima   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2069-3639 8 ,
• Barbara Fritzen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0346-1270 9 ,
• Amanda Lange Salvia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4549-7685 10 ,
• Aprajita Minhas 1 ,
• Valerija Kozlova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5639-6396 11 ,
• Federica Doni   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6581-9530 12 ,
• Jane Spiteri   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6625-2372 13 ,
• Tanushka Gupta 14 ,
• Kutoma Wakunuma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8236-3221 15 ,
• Mohit Sharma 16 ,
• Jelena Barbir   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9226-0680 1 ,
• Kalterina Shulla 1 ,
• Medani P. Bhandari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2213-2349 17 , 18 &
• Shiv Tripathi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3806-1960 19  

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Gender issues, and gender equality in particular, can be regarded as cross-cutting issues in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), even though it is unclear how they are taken into account. This study addresses this information gap by performing an assessment of the emphasis on gender issues across all the other 16 SDGs, in addition to SDG5, through a literature review and case study analysis, the basis for the newly developed framework, highlighting specific actions associated to each SDG. The 13 countries addressed in the 16 case studies include China, India, or Australia and illustrate the inclusion of SDG5 into the SDGs. Using an SDG matrix, the SDG targets are analysed. Those where an emphasis on gender equality is important in allowing them to be achieved are listed. The novelty of our approach resides in offering an in-depth analysis of how gender issues interact with the other SDGs, proposing a new analysis framework clearly identifying SDGs 1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16 demanding further attention for successful SD gender implementation and illustrating specific areas where further actions may be necessary, which may be used by policy-makers, raising further awareness on gender equality contribution to achieve the SDGs. A set of recommendations aimed at placing gender matters more centrally in the SDGs delivery are presented as a final contribution. These focus on the need for greater awareness and attention to good practices, to achieve successful implementation initiatives.

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1 Introducing SDG5–gender equality

In an unprecedented global effort, the heads of state and government and high representatives in the United Nations (UN) meeting of September 2015 put forward the ‘2030 Agenda’, a global plan for human and environmental prosperity, structured in 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, indicative of the scale and of the ambition of the global action to be pursued. The 2030 Agenda recognises that the achievements of the 17 SDGs are linked to human and planetary prosperity, strengthening universal peace, greater freedom and promoting the eradication of poverty, discrimination and inequalities in all forms (UN, 2015 ). In the collective journey of meeting the SDGs and the UN 2030 Agenda targets, countries and stakeholders will act in partnership (Leal Filho et al., 2022a ) to take a transformative and inclusive path towards a resilient and sustainable future in economic, social and environmental terms. The 2030 Agenda plans for the SDGs and the related targets trigger action in critical areas for human and planetary welfare. These include (UN, 2015 ): (i) human existence in prosperity, equality and a healthy environment, (ii) planet conservation through timely climate action, sustainable production, consumption and management of natural resources, (iii) economic, social and technological prosperity in a harmonious symbiosis with nature, (iv) peaceful, just and inclusive societies and (v) revived global partnership of countries, stakeholders and people.

SDG5, ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’, reflects the ever-increasing efforts of the UN towards gender equality, earmarked with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 (UN Women, 2020a ) and the adoption of landmark agreements such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979 (OHCHR, 2020 ), the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995 (UN, 1995 ), and the establishment of UN Women in 2010 (UN, 2012 ). The important role of gender equality for socio-economic development is well highlighted in the UN publication “We the Peoples” (Annan, 2000 ), emphasising the untapped development potential due to social, economic and political inequalities arising from gender discrimination, deeply rooted and persistent in many developing and developed economies, related to access to decent work and equal pay, education, healthcare, resources, decision-making, among others (Brixiová et al., 2020 ; Tsige et al., 2020 ; Connor et al., 2020 ; Maheshwari & Nayak, 2020 ). Women are still more vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and underrepresentation in the political, economic, and business spheres (Milazzo & Goldstein, 2019 ; European Commission, 2019 ). The recognition of the important role of women in global, social, economic and environmental prosperity is clearly stated in paragraphs 236–243 of the ‘Future We Want’ (UN, 2012 ) and in the Open Working Group Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals ( 2014 ).

SDG5 brings forward issues of gender-based discrimination such as unpaid work, sexual and reproductive rights, and gender-based violence (Hirsu et al., 2019 ). Achieving SDG5 is a priority that contributes to the increase in global well-being. SDG5 includes nine targets that aim at ending all forms of discrimination, as described in Table 1 . These targets set the sustainable development (SD) goals to be achieved. The indicators provide the monitoring approaches for status, progress, and assessment, chosen according to the respective objectives and measured globally, or at regional and country levels.

But despite the relevance of the SDGs as a whole and the importance of handling gender issues, in particular, there is a research gap when it comes to looking at both topics in a combined way. In order to address this research need, this paper reports on a study aimed at fostering a thorough assessment of the emphasis that gender issues should be given in order to achieve all the SDGs. The research question pursued by the paper is the following: o what extent are gender issues being considered in the overall implementation of the SDGs?

Through a literature analysis and 16 case studies discussion in a sample of 13 developed and developing countries, e.g., China, India, Spain, and Morocco, this study sheds some light on the topic. The novelty behind this study consists in not only offering a sound analysis of how gender is considered across all other SDGs, but also indicating areas where further actions may be required. The innovation of this work is also based on the fact that it offers specific insights into gender equality and the SDGs. Also, this study may offer further guidance to policy-makers, thus prioritising women’s empowerment in developing collaborative initiatives in the area of gender equality. Finally, this paper also serves the purpose of raising awareness about the need for capacity building and sensitisation around gender-related issues and their crucial contribution to the SDGs.

2 Research on gender equality and the SDGs: assessing the relations

SDGs have clear, often measurable and very straightforward targets aiming to improve the quality of life and living conditions for all. The interactions between these goals and the larger policy frameworks aiming to ensure economic growth from the country level to the regional level turns out to be more complex and challenging due to numerous types of constraints, from financial to cultural, when considering gender equality and ways of promoting it.

The global agenda for change, intent, purpose and overall goals were generally defined with the publishing of the Brundtland Report (1987), and the progress since then entered a new phase when the SDGs were adopted by the UN as the 2030 Agenda, while SD has been adopted across several economic policy fields in order to define specific objectives and goals. While highlighting SD challenges and opportunities, studies have included the gender dimension to a lesser extent, as illustrated in the existing literature that concerns the SDGs (Magendane & Kapazoglou, 2021 ; Scharlemann et al., 2020 ).

Gender inequality is pervasive across the world and women experience a series of disadvantages, in comparison to men. Yet, SD requires that we should all enjoy equal rights and be able to appreciate lives, free from violence and discrimination (UN Women, 2020a ). There has been progress in some areas of discrimination, e.g., more girls in education, fewer girls forced into marriage, and more women in leadership roles, but policy decisions related to education, health and other sectors continue to take place in gendered contexts (Morgan et al., 2020 ). A situation where approximately half of the population is denied equal opportunities, equal participation in decision-making, and equal access to resources, education and employment will contribute to severely inhibiting SD and global prosperity (Dugarova, 2018 ).

Thus, and through SDG5, gender equality is rightfully at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for SD (UN, 2015 ), recognised as an essential human right and important enough to be a goal in its own right, among other 16 SDGs . Its significance is such that it constitutes a cross-cutting theme spanning all the other 16 SDGs, with a total of 45 targets and 54 indicators gender-related. It is suggested that not only is SDG5 critical to all the other SDGs, with gender inequality being an obstacle to progress, but that it has the potential to serve as an SD accelerator, with a positive multiplier effect, to speed up the progress of the 2030 Agenda (UNSDG, 2018 ). Gender equality and women’s empowerment should have a catalytic effect on human development (Odera & Mulusa, 2020 ) if gender is in fact actively addressed across all SDGs.

There are a number of reasons why gender equality has to be considered in relation to all of the SDGs. If under-utilising part of the world’s talent, we fall short of reducing poverty (SDG1) and encouraging economic growth (SDG8). Gender equality in education and the labour market contributes to enhancing the gross domestic product and should help to reduce extreme poverty by 2030 (Dugarova, 2018 ). Compared to 1998, the gender gaps in the labour force, measured as the difference between the labour force participation rates of women and men, have decreased in most regions of the world in 2018, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern, Southern and Western Europe, but the gap has widened in Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe (Klasen, 2018 ). According to world regions, the Gender Inequality Index of 2020, can be seen in Fig.  1 . Also, the Life-course Gender Gap in 2019, translating into a deviation from gender parity, reveals the gaps in the adult population (Fig.  2 ). The studies on gender equality reveal that women worldwide are more fragile in aspects such as poverty, representativeness in public employment positions, insecurity, or physical and sexual violence, thus emphasising the need to ensure a redesigned gender-responsive approach towards implementing the 2030 Agenda (Hirsu et al., 2019 ; Liu et al., 2019 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ). Dugarova ( 2018 ) also demonstrates the multiple benefits of gender equality in relation to SD beyond SDG5, including food security, agricultural production, climate change (Caridade et al., 2022 ) and natural resource management. Similarly, Morgan et al. ( 2020 ) raise similar points but focusing on showing the importance of gender in relation to health and well-being (SDG3) and the less obvious connection between water and sanitation (SDG6) and energy (SDG7), illustrating the interconnected nature of SD and meaning that gender equality plays, in fact, an integral role to achieving all of the SDGs. Women are more likely to be impacted by unsafe water and poor sanitation (SDG6) and to die from unclean fuel (SDG7) (James et al., 2020 ), than men.

Gender Inequality Index, by developing region, 2020, modified from UNDP ( 2020 )

Life-course Gender Gap, 2019, modified from UNDP ( 2020 )

The World Employment and Social Outlook suggests that women are underpaid and under-employed (ILO, 2018 ), although playing a central role in the household economy and being important influencers in peaceful societies. The study from Manandhar et al. ( 2018 ) suggests that the concept of gender in SDG5, seeking the achievement of gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls, is narrow, focusing on women-specific limited roles. When considered in terms of social context impact, gender inequality affects justice in opportunities, leading to economic inefficiency and thus inhibiting growth and global SD (de Jong & Vijge, 2021 ).

According to Agarwal ( 2018 ), a bold interpretation of SDG5 and the establishment of synergies with the other SDGs could allow ways for women to contribute to progress in different aspects concerning SD. Asadikia et al. ( 2020 ) show the lack of influence that SDG5 alone has on an SDG index based on all observations, clearly highlighting the need to interact with other SDGs to increase SDG5 influence. Accordingly, it is important that other SDGs should refocus on the interactions of gender equality to achieve specific global sustainability objectives by 2030. Fariña García et al. ( 2020 ) used a semantic network analysis, including computational linguistics and text processing of SDGs in official documents, to measure interactions in specific countries (Nigeria and Spain), to be used to planners in every country. The results revealed that each SDG is connected with all the other remaining 16 SDGs, despite the language used to search for information. SDGs 2, 8, 11 and 12, known as the driving forces, were found to be always connected to all the others, and SDG5 was not among them, being translated into a difficulty in terms of transitioning from current to sustainable systems of governance and management, and failing to address the gender agenda (Rai et al., 2019 ).

SDG5 is clearly dependent on how governments interpret targets in order to allow women to access resources and have effective participation in all levels of societal decision-making, by involving various stakeholders in order to implement and reinforce legal and institutional arrangements on gender equality (Obura, 2020 ). The identification of interlinkage between the SDGs (Bali Swain & Ranganathan, 2021 ; Del Río Castro et al., 2021 ) is critical in allowing policy-makers to prioritise SDG5 targets and strategies for SD and achieving the 2030 Agenda indivisibility (Bennich et al., 2020 ). Biggeri et al. ( 2019 ) highlight the importance of adjusting the targets and indicators with specific goals, aiming to increase gender awareness and consciousness in the selection of parameters and to allow different strategic options to be involved in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda (Nilsson et al., 2018 ; Obura, 2020 ; Parkes et al., 2020 ). When assessing the sustainability performance of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, Lamichhane et al. ( 2020 ) found that only 35% of OECD countries had identified a key national system to monitor all SDGs, a significant gap.

Most studies suggest that progress in achieving gender equality continues to be slow. The Global Gender Gap 2020 (World Economic Forum, 2020 ) report highlights the urgency of achieving gender equality, while reporting gaps between men and women in health, education and policy areas, and across all forms of economic participation, reinforcing that there is a long way to go with a 31.4% distance to parity. Women are closer than men in indicators related to health (SDG3), but further away from them in terms of employment targets. There are undoubtedly a number of local projects addressing gender equality, but it is predicted that it will take almost 100 years to close the gap in relation to political empowerment. Even in Western Europe, the same report suggests that gender equality will not be achieved for another 54 years.

Many countries are not on track to achieving the SDGs, and the COVID-19 pandemic has and continues to exacerbating widespread gender inequity (Shulla et al., 2021 ). Lockdowns have further increased the burden placed on women in the home and putting them at increased risk from domestic violence (Huiskes et al., 2022 ), with women also accounting for 70% of healthcare workers fighting the virus (UN Department of Economic & Social Affairs, 2020 ). In this context, and considering that the SDGs are not effectively considering gender in their implementation, the gender gap may widen, rather than narrow.

3 Methodology

The work performed in the scope of this study was undertaken in three different phases:

Documenting the targets of all the 17 SDGs that would require gender issues to be accommodated before the respective SDGs can be implemented

For achieving phase 1, which also attempts to cover an information gap regarding the integration and interaction of the 17 SDGs, an effort was made to identify the main strands dominating the literature concerned with policies, aims, interactions and analytical approaches regarding SDG5 integration in the SDGs. The first step consisted in analysing how SDGs interact in the complex framework generated by the current world’s economic and social context, and therefore the methodology was based on reviewing how literature integrates gender equality leading to the UN 2030 Agenda. This resulted in a set of questions for which answers still need to be provided by considering that all SDGs need to be and are in fact interacting, guided by indivisibility, thus requiring inclusiveness as the sine qua non condition. Literature review allows to obtain a road overview of the existing scientific research, as well providing the context for new research (Hempel, 2020 ), forming the basis of all scientific research (Block & Fisch, 2020 ), while allowing the researcher to establish the key constructs of a future research agenda based on the identified gaps (Paul & Criado, 2020 ).

Presenting 16 international case studies in 13 countries that specifically reflect how gender issues are being considered when implementing the 17 SDGs

The case studies in phase 2 were selected using an open international call for collaboration, in the context of which different experts were invited to provide inputs. After a detailed and critical examination of the published research, this study allows to document the cross-cutting gender issues that should be included in the targets of each of the 17 SDGs to achieve SD, while considering SDG5. A case study was associated to each SDG, demonstrating how gender issues have been successfully infused into the actions driving the achievement of all the SDGs. Thus, by setting up the main interactions/relations and policies dominating the policy-making that addresses SDG5, and identifying current vulnerabilities, gaps and delays in this respect, the 16 international case studies reflect how gender issues are taken into account when implementing the SDGs, a necessary step in developing a judicious framework and recommendations for facilitating the achievement of SD across all SDGs, by integrating the SDG5 targets and indicators.

Develop a framework that is able to consider how gender issues across all the SDGs can be implemented to facilitate the achievement of SD at global level

In phase 3, data was first collected by documenting targets related to gender for each SDG (data from phase 1). Then, a set of case studies reflecting how gender issues have been successfully infused into the achievement of each SDG was used (data from phase 2). The combined results of both phases 1 and 2 formed the basis for the framework developed in phase 3, analysing the impact of gender issues on all the SDGs. The impact indicator showed the percentage of particular goal targets impacted by gender inequality. It was calculated for each SDG by using the following equation:

where IT represents the Impacted targets quantity, TQ , the total targets quantity of each goal and PI , the percentage impact.

The percentage values fall under one of the four categories:

Low impact: 0%—39.9%

Average impact: 40%—60%

Highly impacted: 60.1%—99.9%

Extremely impacted:100%

The combined results from the three phases are presented and discussed in the next section.

4 Results and discussion

This section reports on the literature search information and data collected. The evidence collected using the case studies allowed the development of a proposed framework that can be helpful to practitioners in promoting a cross-cutting approach to gender issues in the context of all other SDGs.

4.1 Gender equality and the SDGs

In the attempt to identify the gender issues predominant trends, the findings based on reviewing specialised literature have shown that contributions to gender equality and SDGs are mostly theoretical, focusing on trade-offs and synergies, followed by studies concerned with policy implications, and possible methodological and empirical approaches about the interactions of all the SDGs, while suggesting a wide number of indicators that are currently used or that need further refinement for properly measuring progress in achieving the SDGs. These frameworks of analyses assume particular relevance in developing countries, but also developed ones alike, as inequalities are still deeply rooted, irrespective of the SD degree.

Studies have referred to interactions among the 17 goals, while neglecting the specifics of interactions with SDG5 on gender equity studies (Abualtaher et al., 2021 ; Miola et al., 2019 ), the focus of this study. Moreover, most studies propose models and approaches often contradictory, thus delivering inconsistent outcomes regarding costs and effectiveness of policies or measures and actions for achieving the SDGs. Most of the studies are in an increasing trend of building up on the findings of other studies, while failing the novelty dimension (Magendane & Kapazoglou, 2021 ).

Faced with the vast volume of recent research and studies in approaching the dimension of the interaction between the SDGs, and by assessing the outcomes of relevant studies at this regard, it may be stated that most studies seek to bring improvements for three main processes: policy development, impact assessment, and how synergies are achieved or not (Alcamoet al., 2020 ; Biggeri et al., 2019 ; Scharlemann et al., 2020 ), while this study aims to cover both the theoretical and practical issues related to gender equity, as included in the 17 SDGs. Based on the analysed literature review, it is important to be careful about forming a generalised perspective by including general insights and gained knowledge about one SDG in relation to all other SDGs, because the context from the economic, social and environmental perspective is of paramount relevance (Nilsson et al., 2018 ). Integrated perspectives provide the best opportunities in assessing the relations and interactions with all other SDGs, while allowing for the identification of the main weaknesses, in particular regarding SDG5.

By affirming the overarching relevance of gender equality and its developments in the short time framework between 2015 and 2021 (Dugarova, 2018 ; Klasen, 2018 ; Odera & Mulusa, 2020 ), it was then possible to develop a general theoretic-empirical framework for underpinning the relevance of a gender-responsive approach to implementing the 2030 Agenda (Hirsu et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ).

The above information does reveal the need to focus on specific practical implementation at local level, though benchmarking. The case studies presented below aim to illustrate successful implementations.

4.2 Case Studies

Gender issues extend beyond SDG5 and needs to be addressed within all the other SDGs. The international case studies included in this section have thus been chosen as illustrative examples of gender equality, considered in relation to each SDG, other than SDG5. Further detail on how a focus on gender has brought a positive benefit in relation to each SDG, as the full list of case studies, is given in Online resource 1.

Non-governmental and governmental organisations are working together to help rural women improve the quality of their life by expanding access to sexual and reproductive health care in Tanzania (Engender Health, 2021 ). The Trans-Boundary Rivers of South Asia programme in Nepal promotes and supports women’s leadership in water governance to increase their social accountability (Crawford, 2020 ). A case study from China demonstrates that the implementation of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) may significantly benefit from the integration of gender analysis into the design of SCP policies, strengthening women’s participation in natural resource management and decision-making processes (Fan & Jaffre, 2020 ). In the frame of the educational programme Soochnapreneur (Information-Preneur) in India, rural women received necessary information and technology training to become change agents and assist in disseminating information regarding government schemes and benefits in communities. Participation in the programme not only develops their entrepreneurial abilities as Digital Information entrepreneurs but also allows them to charge a nominal amount for their services to sustain their livelihood (Soochnapreneur, 2021 ). In South Africa, the skills-driven project that supports the creation of rural, women-only entrepreneur craft groups contributes towards improving quality of life and developing a more sustainable community (Pretorius & Nicolau, 2020 ). The Samoa’s Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development and the Disaster Management Office are working towards increasing women’s engagement and participation in climate change and Disaster risk reduction community discussions and development projects (Aipira et al., 2017 ). The ‘Blue Economy Aquaculture Challenge’ initiative supports projects for transforming sustainable aquaculture practises with solutions linked to gender equality, among others (Australian Government, 2018 ).

The addressed case studies illustrate useful approaches for tackling a variety of local problems in a cross-cutting way, as a support for governments as they focus on gender equality issues, showing that there is room for further similar initiatives in different geographical and socio-economic contexts. The case studies presented clearly indicate that various initiatives related to gender across the globe have been successfully addressed at local levels, and these initiatives have directly and indirectly affected the achievement of the particular SDG under analysis, thus affirming the need to infuse gender issues within all the targets of the 17 SDGs to ensure more productive outcomes and achievements in the drive to SD. It has been shown that governmental and non-governmental organisations cooperate in improving the overall quality of life for women, either in rural or urban areas and in regards to health, education and access to leadership/management positions. Still, it was found that much is still to be done, as shown found below, analysing the interaction with all of the SDGs.

4.3 The proposed framework for assessing gender equality impact across the SDGs

Achieving gender equality is a matter of human rights and is crucial to progress across all the goals and targets (Dhar, 2018 ), as highlighted before. Gender inequalities intersect other inequalities, power imbalance and discriminatory practices, and as such, they unequivocal serve as routes to addressing the causes preventing SD globally (Hepp et al., 2019 ). We have pointed out that while being a goal in its own right, gender equality cuts across all other SDGs and is reflected in 86 targets for the SDGs.

Through the use of the data collected by documenting targets related to gender for each SDG (see the SDG Matrix–Online resource 2) and the identification of fruitful case studies reflecting how gender issues have been successfully infused into the achievement of each SDG, both based on a detailed analysis and synthesis of the literature, the authors have used the lessons learnt to develop a framework aimed at analysing the impact of gender issues on all the SDGs, illustrated in Fig.  3 . This framework allows to establish which SDGs need the most attention for successful SD implementation and can serve as a guide for all practitioners in accommodating and promoting a cross-cutting approach of contemplating gender issues within the target of all the SDGs.

Proposed framework for considering gender impact across all the SDGs

According to the results of calculations, the following SDGs are extremely or highly impacted by gender inequality and should be prioritised: SDG1 (No Poverty), SDG4 (Quality Education), SDG11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG14 (Life below Water) and SDG16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) (Fig.  4 ). If government and non-governmental organisations strive to achieve SD, as proposed by the 2030 Agenda, they would have to ensure that gender equality is prioritised in their endeavours, particularly in the context of the six aforementioned SDGs (1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16).

Percentage of gender inequality impact on SDG goals, according to the authors’ proposed methodology

A fundamental part of achieving SD is the reduction of poverty, and this needs greater priority in policy decisions. The literature makes it clear that high poverty is interlinked with high gender disparities (Warchold et al., 2021 ), particularly in developing countries (Workneh, 2020 ). More women are affected by poverty due to their larger share of unpaid work , limited access to resources and social protection, and lack of control over spending decisions when compared to men (UN, 2015 ). Countries that reflect statistics of more women in remunerated positions have lower poverty rates (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2018 ), though this might not be the case when the income size is below the poverty line (European Institute for Gender Equality, 2016 ). The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have deepen gender poverty gaps, affecting women more strongly than men (Leal Filho et al., 2022b , 2022c ). According to the report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, 232 million women will be living in extreme poverty in 2030, compared to 221 million men (Azcona et al., 2020 ).

Gender gaps in education negatively affect economic growth (Klasen & Lamanna, 2009 ). Globally, approximately 17% of women, compared to 10% of men, are illiterate. In developing countries, this gap is much larger. As example, only 26% of women are literate, compared to 46% of men in Mali, 27%, compared to 60% in South Sudan, and 70%, compared to 45% in Afghanistan (World Bank, 2020 a, b ). Every additional year of primary school increases the future earnings of girls, decreasing their vulnerability to violence and motivating them to marry later (UN Women, 2012 ). Addressing gender imbalance in land ownership rights and access to natural, social and economic resources is essential for responsible consumption and production (Franco et al., 2018 ). Women demonstrate a higher tendency towards product reuse, waste reduction, and purchase of organic and eco-labelled products (Bulut et al., 2017 ; OECD, 2018 ). The promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies for SD and access to justice for all are impossible without targeting gender inequalities. In 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recorded more than 82 million people fleeing war, violation of human rights, persecution or conflict, of which 48% are women and girls (UNHCR, 2021 ). The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have intensified domestic violence (Azcona et al., 2020 ; UN Women, 2020b ; Akel et al., 2021 ; Bourgault et al., 2021 ). The preliminary data indicate a 25%—100% increase in reported cases globally (UN Women, 2020c ), one of the consequences of the inability of institutions to provide equal gender access to justice and essential services, and of gender representation imbalance in global, regional or national governance (UN Women, 2018 ). Particularly in developing countries, the achievement of the social inclusion of vulnerable groups such as women can be ensured by local government policies, especially related to well-being gender budgeting (Gunluk-Senesen, 2021 ). More equal gender participation is one of the key factors to sustainable peace.

5 Conclusions

A recent major challenge impairing the proper achievement of gender equality is the COVID-19 pandemic, which is causing an expansion of inequalities in topics related to education, employment and well-being, healthcare, consumption and production, or climate change, being imperative that all stakeholders involved in SD thus prioritise and infuse gender equality in all their endeavours, while policy-makers need to critically reflect on whether their strategies for particular individual goals would be enhanced by a broader consideration of gender equality issues. While most of the previous studies investigated the potential interactions of gender equality with other SDGs (Barbier & Burgess, 2019 ; Dawes, 2022 ; Pham-Truffert et al., 2020 ; Tremblay et al., 2020 ; van Zanten & van Tulder, 2021 ; Warchold et al., 2021 ), this study contributes to a better understanding of gender equality as a cross-cutting issue among all the SDGs, underscoring the need to prioritise gender issues at all scopes of SD.

This study aimed to assess and define the relations and interactions regarding gender inequality, based on specific literature related to main gender inequality concerns, access to education, employment and implicitly to equal pay, along with all other related issues, from legal aspects to metrics of violence. An extensive body of literature was explored in this study, also documenting 16 relevant international case studies in 13 countries to emphasise the significance of positive interventions in terms of gender equality, considered as a cross-cutting issue among all the other SDGs, as reflected in 86 targets. As a result, the study proposes an innovative qualitative assessment framework, according to which targets can be impacted negatively by gender inequality, an important factor that can impair the achievement of a particular SDG. Among the most-impacted SDGs that should more attentively consider the promotion of gender equality as an important condition for their achievement are SDGs 1, 4, 11, 12, 14 and 16, being possible to notice a strong diversity of approaches involved, covering issues of concern that are equally of future interest. Understanding the strong interconnectedness of the SDGs in terms of addressing the issues related to gender equality needs to become a trend. If widely spread, this trend may serve as an accelerator for the achievement of global SD, through the 17 SDGs, and can offer further guidance to policy-makers for prioritising the achievements of the targets, by empowering women worldwide. The literature review outlines that the progress in achieving gender equality continues to be slow, as many gaps still exist between men and women in health, education, politics, and across all forms of economic participation. However, as demonstrated by the successful case studies implemented worldwide, there is a growing interest among different stakeholders to develop collaborative initiatives that give particular attention to promoting gender equality, and the trend is likely to increase in the future. However, while the presented case studies illustrate positive interventions in terms of SDG5 contribution to SD, they are clearly still insufficient.

One all-encompassing finding is that in spite of a wide range of studies and academic papers related to SDGs and SD, there continues to be divisiveness in assessing the challenges and opportunities of the 2030 Agenda, associated with the need for developing sound frameworks for drafting and assessing ex-ante policies, measures and actions for ensuring the integrated interaction among the 17 SDGs, by considering necessary trade-offs and integrating other environmental, social and economic policy objectives. All these, while not explicitly mentioned in this study, have been implicitly considered, along with policy paradigms that consider the lifestyle, technological and even healthcare/educational changes. The 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda imply by their formulation a principle of indivisibility, as SDGs address the shared concerns of all humanity. In fact, it is precisely this governing principle which is the foundation for the approach used in this study, guided by the interest in analysing how SDG5 can be assessed and further implemented when associated to the other 16 SDGs, substantiated by the fact that the 2030 Agenda has an implied target-integrated approach regarding the SDGs. Investigating SDG5 relationship with the other 16 SDGs proved to be challenging and promising, as it provided for new insights about the relationships and interactions between all the SDGs. Thus, a key implication of this study is that it illustrates the fact that more attention should be given to mainstreaming the gender equality theme within all development initiatives of every country. Also, considerations to gender issues should be included in the design of targeted policies and programmes, data collection on indicators, and also in the defining of priorities in every region.The study has limitations. The first one is the fact that, being a qualitative study, it was not possible to cover all the works published in the field. Also, the selection of the case studies was not exhaustive or intended to cover all geographical regions, and it should be only regarded as an illustration of gender equality as a cross-cutting issue. Furthermore, the sample of 13 countries does not cater for a worldwide representation. However, despite these limitations, this study represents a significant knowledge addition to the existing literature on the connections between SDG5 and overall efforts to implement global SD and successfully advancing the SDGs.

Based on the evidence collected, the following recommendations may help in efforts aimed at placing matters related to gender more centrally in the delivery of the SDGs:

Inclusion of gender issues as a cross-cutting topic in the implementation of the SDGs.

A greater emphasis on gender equality in SDGs-related projects across all themes.

An increased attention should be paid to the opinion, views and voices of women on SDGs-associated policies, a procedure often overlooked.

More attention should be given to poverty alleviation, a trend often unnoticed in gender discussions.

A more detailed and continued review of novel case studies across the globe should be undertaken to establish how existing good practices on mainstreaming gender are integrated into the targets of all the SDGs, and then to infuse these local initiatives into policy and development initiatives.

Finally, there is a perceived need to build more capacity among professionals involved in the implementation of the SDGs, so as to better sensitise them about the need to always consider gender issues, raising global awareness about gender-related matters.

Data availability

The manuscript has data included as electronic supplementary material.

Abbreviations

Convention on biological diversity

Christian blind mission

Central and Eastern Europe and the commonwealth of independent states

Civil registration centre for development

Courant research centre–poverty, equity and growth

Disability inclusive and accessible urban development

Division for public administration and development management, department of economic and social affairs

Economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

European environment agency

Economic and social commission for Asia and the Pacific

Education for sustainable development

European union

Food and agriculture organisation

Individual deprivation measure

International institute for sustainable development

International labour organisation

International telecommunication union

Joint research centre

Dutch research council

Organisation for economic co-operation and development

Open society justice initiative

Sustainable consumption and production

Sustainable development

Sustainable development goals

Swedish international development co-operation agency

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Trans-boundary rivers of south Asia

United nations

United Nations convention on the law of the sea

United Nations conference on trade and development

United Nations development programme

United Nations economic commission for Africa

United Nations economic commission for Europe

United Nations environment programme finance initiative

United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation

United Nations framework convention for climate change

United Nations high commissioner for refugees

United Nations international children's emergency fund

United Nations industrial development organisation

United Nations office on drugs and crime

United Nations sustainable development group

United Nations university–operating unit on policy-driven electronic governance

World meteorological organisation

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University of Passo Fundo, BR 285, São José, Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, 99052-900, Brazil

Barbara Fritzen

Graduate Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Passo Fundo, BR 285, São José, Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, 99052-900, Brazil

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Leal Filho, W., Kovaleva, M., Tsani, S. et al. Promoting gender equality across the sustainable development goals. Environ Dev Sustain 25 , 14177–14198 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02656-1

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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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• 06 September 2023

Gender equality: the route to a better world

You have full access to this article via your institution.

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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To achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5 (Gender Equality) by 2030, the private sector’s scale, resources, and influence are imperative. Urgent action from all stakeholders, including companies, is critical to move the world toward gender equality faster. Below, view case studies and examples of corporate action toward gender equality.

In South Africa, where the rates of gender-based violence are incredibly high, AB InBev, launched a multi-year #NoExcuse campaign to change society’s views and tolerance of GBV. Using the beer, Carling Black Label, as an entry point to grab the attention of men, AB InBev produced several videos and initiatives to empower men to change their behavior at the call of other men. From sporting events, radio, to social media, the #NoExcuses struck at the heart of what it means to be a “Champion” man and provided resources and opportunity for men to change their behavior and fight GBV. Moreover, in 2020, as COVID-19 led to stay-at-home quarantine, domestic violence calls skyrocketed. AB InBev expanded the #NoExcuses campaign to include a dedicated WhatsApp line for women and men to use to discretely report GBV and to seek assistance.

Pony Malta, an AB InBev brand, is one of the most popular beverage brands for teenagers in Colombia. Given the drink’s popularity, AB InBev used its influence to encourage girls to seek inspiration from pioneering women. The initiative, called #SheSpeaks, urges teenagers to share quotes and messages from female pioneers across social media. The initiative launched on TikTok for International Day of the Girl and used one of the platforms most popular features, dubbing. With quotes from over 100 women including Michelle Obama, Christina Koch, Malala Yousafzai, Lady Gaga and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, girls could record themselves lip syncing their words to inspire and empower others. Citing the fact that over 54% of TikTok users are women, AB InBev’s #SheSpeaks effort sought to inspire and empower young girls to be anything they want to be and encouraged them to follow women who dared to dream big.

In Colombia, Pony Malta is one of AB InBev’s leading malt beverages’ brand. The drink is popular with girls, many of whom are tech savvy and football fans. Yet, girls are underrepresented in videogames. With the support of Colombia’s ministry of technology, and NGOs in Colombia. and simultaneously launched in Ecuador and Bolivia with our non-alcohol beverage brands, AB InBev launched an initiative to increase the representation of women in videogames. Specifically, in FIFA Clubs Pro, a football game, it is only possible to create a male avatar. For this reason, many girl gamers are forced to make their football career in FIFA with avatars that do not define them. To feel represented in FIFA 2021, a group of girls created their own female avatars with the male player creation tools and, together with Pony Malta, formed SHE F.C., the first women´s club in FIFA Clubs Pro.

As a global health technology company that recruits world-class scientists and engineers, Abbott knows women are a critical factor in solving the world’s biggest problems with smart, imaginative thinking. But in the United States, women make up just 24% of the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce. Black Americans hold 4.8% of STEM jobs but make up 12.3% of the labor force. Hispanics have 6% of STEM jobs yet make up 17.6% of U.S. workers. There are a lot of reasons for this: One is that high school girls and students from underrepresented groups can often think the STEM fields aren’t for people who look like them.

Abbott knows that hands-on experiences give these students the confidence to engage in STEM. That’s why, starting in 2012, it invested in a high school internship program to demystify what it means to work in STEM. The program gives students the opportunity to work on the company’s life-changing technologies alongside engineers and scientists who look like them. Abbott recruits students from diverse partner high schools near areas where the company has facilities. Because of this, 73% of the students participating in the 2020 internship program were from diverse backgrounds. About half of the students move on to Abbott’s college internship program, and more than 70% of the high school internship alumni hired as full-time engineers are women.

Abbott has created a downloadable “Shaping the Future of STEM” blueprint and is sharing the scalable plan with any company interested in starting a high school internship program of their own. Abbott believes changing the statistics will mean a commitment from all of us to provide young people with opportunities in STEM early on.

To learn more, visit www.stem.abbott  

According to the United Nations, more than 80 million people today are displaced from their homes by conflict, natural disasters and other emergencies.

In response, governments, organizations and companies have focused on meeting urgent needs for food, water and shelter. But for many people, particularly in the aftermath of crisis, basic needs include uninterrupted care and management of chronic diseases – also known as noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Despite this, chronic diseases often don’t receive enough attention in these humanitarian settings, according to the World Health Organization.

Working together with CARE, the global healthcare company Abbott and its foundation the Abbott Fund launched one of the world’s first programs aimed at filling this gap – creating a new model, both scalable and replicable, for the effective prevention and care of NCDs in challenging settings around the world.

The three-year program in Marawi City, Philippines is focused on supporting internally displaced people affected by diabetes, hypertension and obesity. Program work includes screening to identify people with NCDs and those at risk of developing NCDs, and expanding access to needed clinical care.

A key focus for the program is mobilizing displaced communities to fill gaps in prevention and care, with an emphasis on empowering women. With an in-depth understanding of the needs of their neighbors, women volunteers lead “NCD Clubs” to advance disease prevention and management and provide vital peer support. The program also strengthens the ability of local healthcare systems to manage NCDs and raises awareness and educates on the prevention and control of NCDs.

Initial results are promising. Baseline screening found that more than half (59%) of people identified as diabetic were previously undiagnosed. And following targeted interventions, 46% of diabetic and pre-diabetic patients saw a decrease in average blood glucose (HbA1c) levels, which is an indicator of better glucose control and lower risk of complications.

To learn more, please see story and video .

In many developing countries women comprise, on average, 43% of the agricultural work force. Women are at the heart of many farming communities and are a vital link between farms and families. Yet, they are often excluded from key decisions about their farming household, economic activities and community decisions.

Cargill is a global provider of food, agriculture, financial and industrial products with 155,000 employees across 70 countries. The company connects farmers with markets, customers with ingredients, and people and animals with the food they need to thrive. Cargill combines 155 years of experience with new technologies and insights to serve as a trusted partners for food, agriculture, financial and industrial customers in more than 125 countries. The company contributes at each stage in the supply change to build farmer and community resilience. This work allows Cargill to deliver its purpose to nourish the world in a safe, responsible, and sustainable way.

For the last 12 years, one of the programs that Cargill and CARE have partnered on, has been the Nourishing the Future program in Central America; which aims to support smallholder producers across the region. Cargill brings knowledge of markets, supply chains, best practices in agricultural production and food safety to build on CARE’s expertise of building strong resilient communities through multiple sets of interventions, taking a holistic approach to address the challenges these communities face. In this work, Cargill and CARE have focused on ensuring women producers are included and are able to make their own decisions to improve productivity and market access.

CARE has also been creating groups of women promoters to act as a change agents by transferring their knowledge to other women and men. During the last year, including these last few months of the pandemic, Cargill supported CARE to continue training for these producer groups through employing virtual tools and working to ensure that women were able to access these tools. The Nourishing the Future program is also enabling women to become members and leaders of Farmer Business Organizations, helping them to be part of decision-making processes and empowering them in their farming businesses.

Cargill’s work has enabled strong market linkages for agricultural communities, including integration of producers into its grain supply chains, as well as helping to establish livestock and aquaculture production activities. It has also improved agricultural production through its comprehensive farmer field school training curriculum. Lastly, Cargill worked with communities to build women’s skills, capabilities, and access to resources so they are better enabled to make decisions, both productive decisions and household decisions, and fully participate in economic activity. These interventions together have led to more equal household decision-making, improved nutrition, increased incomes, enhanced agricultural production, and stronger market connections. Between 2008-2020, CARE and Cargill reached 689,357 women in Central America through our Nourishing the Future programming (67,341 directly and 622,016 indirectly).

The Cargill Cocoa Promise is Cargill’s commitment to cocoa farmers and their communities, enabling them to achieve better incomes and living standards while growing cocoa sustainably. This includes a strong focus on giving women more access to economic opportunities, which is vital for strengthening the socio-economic resilience of cocoa farmers, families and communities. Such interventions also improve farm productivity, helping to secure cocoa as a livelihood for generations to come. Cargill works to upskill women in cocoa communities via functional and financial literacy training and entrepreneurship trainings. This has a positive ripple effect, since women tend to reinvest any earnings into their families and communities.

In partnership with CARE, across Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa communities, the partnership supports people to access the resources, skills, and tools necessary to change their own lives. Cargill has specifically focused on facilitating access to savings and credit structures like Village Saving and Loans Associations (VSLAs) since 2008. VSLAs are established to create and support a strong savings culture in the community. Members are also able to take out small loans to build income-generating activities. These groups base their activities on trust, accountability, and transparency in all transactions. Savings and loan activities bring together neighbors who trust each other, and often these groups meet for many years.

CARE and Cargill understand the value these groups bring to communities and have focused on bringing credit closer to the farming families over the last decade. Among the chief lessons learned was to leverage technology to increase the pace of implementation and change at scale. Cargill and CARE’s VSLA approach has created an enormous value in the communities they serve, improving access to finance for women and men who are often excluded from formal financial systems. The VSLAs provide members a platform to access informal financial services and training across various topics, including financial literacy, business management, and diversification through income-generating activities.

The company aims to take the VSLA platform to the next level within the CARE-Cargill partnership, building a new generation of VSLAs that not only improve access to finance at the community level, but also open doors to the emerging digital economy. This includes digitization of the VSLA process using a shared digital platform to promote effective cashless systems by reducing security risks and increasing productivity. It also entails transforming a paper-based record system to an electronic system to improve tracking of loans and savings across VSLAs, enhancing group efficiencies, transparency, and data sharing. The evolution of VSLAs into the digital world will accelerate and deepen financial inclusion while increasing the usage of digital financial services in rural cocoa communities.

IDH, Cargill, Advans and CARE are working with cocoa producing communities on innovative solutions such as mobile money accounts or digital loans, as well as connecting the VSLAs to more formalized financial lending systems and institutions. CARE has been facilitating access to financial services for 27 VSLA groups to increase working capital, stimulate the promotion of a savings culture, and improve the quality of financial services. Between 2019-2020, these VLSAs were linked to a microfinance institution called Advans. Advans has signed a partnership with a mobile phone company to facilitate secured monetary transactions for VSLAs. To date, these VSLAs have $2,247 in invested savings with Advans. VSLA members are looking to use their savings to invest in business expansion activities, including processing, trading, transportation of agricultural products and animal husbandry. In the coming months, Cargill and CARE will focus on linking 40 more VSLAs with microfinance institutions to further secure their savings and increase the amount of loans they can access to expand their income generating activities.

The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) strives for a gender-balanced workplace. The Company believes that investing in and empowering women not only directly benefits them, but also its business and its communities. According to publicly available statistics, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams are 21% more likely to outperform on profitability. TCCC has an aspiration to be 50% driven by women, and focuses on growing and developing female leadership and its female workforce overall. To make progress, the Company has leaned into a number of initiatives:

In 2007, TCCC started a Global Women’s Leadership Council (GWLC), comprised of women and men executives, that focused on accelerating the development and promotion of women into roles of increasing responsibility and influence. The GWLC did this through actions across 3 pillars:

• Sponsorship: A sponsorship program for female leaders matched to Executive Leadership Team members including the CEO.
• Pipeline: Launching the Women in Leadership program, a global System program designed to accelerate the leadership capabilities of women in the pipeline at mid-level positions. More than 850 female employees to date have participated in the program.
• Bias Awareness: In order to help foster an inclusive culture and to engage men as allies in the pursuit of our diversity and inclusion aspirations, The Coca-Cola Company expanded the GWLC to include women and men.

The Company also established a Women’s LINC Business Resource Group (BRG), designed to engage employees in support of our gender diversity and inclusion priorities, with a mission to empower women to lead, inspire and connect. The BRG now has approximately 1,500 members in the U.S., and there also several other chapters around the world.

TCCC’s efforts have included gender-neutral paid parental leave and committing to paying all associates fairly and equitably. The company has been conducting pay equity analyses (with regard to gender and race/ethnicity) in the U.S. for the Corporate function for several years. In 2019, it extended the pay equity analysis for gender globally across all business units (now operating units) of the company, as well as employees of Coca-Cola North America. Between 2017 and September 2020 women in senior leadership roles globally in the Company increased 2.4% from 31.4% to 33.8%. In 2020, four new North America Operations Zone Presidents were appointed – all were qualified women.

Coca-Cola Women in STEM (CWIS) is an internal organization dedicated to contributing to the talent pipeline at The Coca-Cola Company by raising awareness of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) opportunities in the community, and by empowering, educating and inspiring the women of Coca-Cola to excel in leadership under the STEM umbrella. CWIS has about 5000 members and reaches thousands of middle/high school and college students each year though STEM events and scholarships.

Global Supplier Diversity and Inclusion

The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) is acutely aware that its global success is made possible, in no small part, by diverse suppliers – including women-owned businesses. A diverse supplier base helps develop stronger local communities and creates long-term growth and a competitive advantage for the Coca-Cola system. Accordingly, TCCC set a goal to increase diverse supplier 1st-tier spend to $1 billion by 2021.

TCCC’s approach begins with fully understanding the business needs and identifying the diverse supplier capabilities and capacities that matches those needs and fully engaging them in potential opportunities. Through the diverse supplier engagement process, the company gains a working knowledge of the supplier’s business which helps the Company “tell the story” initially to the Coca-Cola procurement team in question. In many cases, Coca-Cola hosts multiple capability sessions (phone calls, in-person presentations, site visits, etc.) with potential diverse suppliers to confirm and prepare them for the next level of engagement with key business decision makers within the Company.

Through our Supplier Training & Empowerment Program (STEP), the Company helps the Coca-Cola system’s women-owned suppliers stay competitive and grow their businesses. Since the program launched in 2014, STEP has trained more than 41,846 women business owners as of the end of 2020.

TCCC also offers Supply Chain Financing to diverse suppliers to help them manage their cash flow. The Finance program benefits include early payment, reduced Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), an infusion of working capital and access to an alternate source of financing (liquidity). Suppliers who have enrolled find the program financially advantageous, especially where payment is received early so that they have working capital to pay their suppliers and (or) buy raw materials. In 2020, TCCC made a commitment to increase spend with Black-owned enterprises across its supply chain by at least $500 million over the next five years. The pledge – which is more than double the company’s current spend with Black-owned businesses – will provide Black entrepreneurs and innovators with opportunities for growth and economic empowerment. This commitment is in addition to our previously stated diverse supplier spending goal of $1 billion by the end of 2021.

5by20. According to a baseline study conducted by the Company in 2011, an estimated 86 percent of small retail shops globally are owned or operated by women.

In 2010, The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) made a commitment to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women entrepreneurs across its global value chain by 2020. The decade -long 5by20 program equips women entrepreneurs to overcome social and economic barriers by providing business skills training, access to financial services and assets, and connections with peers and mentorship networks. The women participating in 5by20 work in roles across Coca-Cola’s value chain, including retailers, suppliers, producers, artisans and more. The program also covers women who have been empowered beyond the Company’s value chain, through The Coca-Cola Foundation-funded initiatives.

One example of a 5by20 program is the “Success IS ME” program in Poland. This is a nationwide project helping women to build their self-esteem and strengthen their business and life competencies. This includes building the knowledge and skills of women to start and operate profitable businesses, and to successfully search for and secure a job or to change jobs. The project operates an online knowledge sharing platform, holds regional conferences and local workshops, and has established ambassador networks in 30 cities in Poland who organize monthly workshops and provide online support through closed Facebook groups. Another example is the Philippines Sari Sari 5by20 program, that targets micro-small and medium sized women-led enterprises. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic induced health and economic crisis, disproportionately impacting women and their businesses. Together with partners in the Public and Private sector Coca-Cola Philippines set out to support over 20,000 micro-retailers by launching the Rebuilding Sari-Sari Stores Through Access to Resources and Trade program or the ReSTART program earlier in the year. This timely program specifically addressed the barriers faced by micro-retailers during the pandemic such as Lack of access to much-needed capital, guidance on how to safely re-open and operate their business, plus the needed skills and know-how to properly navigate through the uncertainty as they steadily got back on their feet.

As of the end of 2020, TCCC, working alongside its partners has achieved its goal of having enabled the economic empowerment of over 6million women in diverse programs across 100 countries.

Several lessons have been learnt from the 5by20 initiative:

• Engagement of Company leaders and partners was key throughout the process, from program inception to completion. 5by20’s shared ownership model provided the foundation for long term sustainability of the project, including aligned values, strategic leadership, the development of tactics, and the commitment of time and resources.
• Working with the right implementing partners to help scale programs and achieve our goal was key from the onset of the program.
• Technology was an emergent tool of 5by20 efforts, particularly around the use of online, digital platforms for training delivery and locations suitable for women with heavy family obligations. Technology offers a means for rapid program scaling, as well as enhancing the monitoring and evaluation of programs.
• As this was a numerical goal, we instituted a transparent and rigorous counting methodology and Governance framework for reporting – This meant a strong governance process that enabled independent third parties to validate and provide review-level attestation over the 5 million women enabled by our Program, were key to ensuring program integrity.

Colgate-Palmolive

Colgate Women’s Games is the United States’ largest amateur track series open to all girls from elementary school through college and beyond. Competitors participate in a series of meets to determine finalists who will compete for educational grants-in-aid from Colgate-Palmolive Company. Colgate’s goal is to help girls and women from underserved communities thrive, using the competition as a means to emphasize the value of education—key to Colgate’s purpose to reimagine a healthier future for all people and the planet.

Colgate-Palmolive believes creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture is key to its growth. That’s why Colgate has made the commitment to ensure gender equity in its hiring, evaluation, and retention. The company now requires a diverse slate of candidates for hiring and extra effort is made to ensure promotions are gender and racially equitable. Colgate reviews job descriptions to eliminate gender bias, and has also instituted training for unconscious bias and allyship. In addition to equal pay, managers are accountable for maintaining inclusive teams.

The company also has a longstanding partnership with Women Unlimited as well as formal leadership programs that benefit women, including Colgate Leadership Challenge and BetterUp programs for mid-level managers, and Global Leadership: Discover and Create the Future, for emerging senior executives. Women lead priority growth areas for the company, including: Colgate’s digital transformation, led by Colgate’s Chief Digital Officer, EltaMD and PCA Skin premium skin health brands Tom’s of Maine and Hello Products natural personal care brands.

Women also occupy key positions within Colgate’s Global Innovation Group, which itself is led by a female Group President, and includes women in senior leadership roles: Chief R&D Officer, Chief Clinical Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Procurement Officer, Vice President, Global Oral Care, Vice President, Global Public Health, and Vice President, Supply Chain, Latin American Division.

Fiserv is committed ensuring women have every opportunity to succeed and lead at the company. To this end, Fiserv provides an expansive gender neutral paid parental leave benefit, Women’s Leadership development programming, and has a global Women’s Impact Network designed to support, connect, and empower women employees and their allies for engagement, internal mobility, and career development and progression.

Fiserv has committed to bringing more women and girls into technology careers. The company (1) partners with Women In Technology (WIT) to inspire, hire and empower women in technical fields; (2) provides scholarships to women in technology to ensure inclusive pathways into STEAM; (3) partners with Girls Who Code and the Girl Scouts to provide access to technology at an early age; and (4) works closely with BBBS to provide STEM kits to girls in unrepresented communities.

Women, who comprise the majority of the global garment workforce, disproportionately face challenges in the workplace, especially regarding harassment. Over the years, Gap Inc. has conducted regular assessments of the facilities with which it works and has found serious violations related to gender-based discrimination and harassment. These issues require all relevant stakeholders in the garment sector to invest more time and resources to address. To do its part, in 2018, Gap Inc.’s Supplier Sustainability team worked with its suppliers in India to improve how they scope and implement policies on Gender Based Violence Prevention & Response (GBVP&R). Gap Inc.’s aim was to help its suppliers raise awareness about Gender Based Violence and the rights and responsibilities of male and female employees, including supervisors and managers. To review progress, Gap Inc. assessments include components on GBVP&R and determining areas for improvement, if needed, within a remediation plan. Gap Inc. has continued to evolve its efforts based on its learnings. Specifically, the company expanded these trainings to address gender-based discrimination and harassment in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Jordan, Nicaragua and Vietnam. By the end of 2019, Gap Inc. had conducted trainings for more than 500 facilities in its global supply chain—about 70% of all facilities it works with.

Looking ahead, Gap Inc. will build on this program to focus on women’s empowerment, which it will link to Empower@Work, a collaborative effort with BSR HERproject, ILO Better Work, and CARE. It aims to use common curriculum, best practices and collective action to advance women’s empowerment and gender equity in global supply chains.

In 1969, when Doris and Don Fisher opened the first-ever Gap store, they began to shape a culture of equality by contributing the same amount and running the business as equal partners. This was during an era where less than 40 percent of women worked outside the home. Fast forward to today, women account for nearly 76 percent of Gap Inc.’s worldwide employee base and a majority of company management. Equal Pay Day highlights the lingering discrepancy in pay between men and women, as well as the progress being made toward closing the gender pay gap. The good news is that every day is Equal Pay Day at Gap Inc., where women and men are paid equally for equal work. In 2014, Gap Inc. made history by becoming the first Fortune 500 company to publicly confirm it pays men and women equally for equal work. Third-party analysis showed no significant gender wage difference between the women and men at Gap Inc., thus confirming “equal pay for equal work.” Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, yen for yen. There is no gender pay gap across Gap, Inc. Since 2014, Gap Inc. has conducted annual reviews of its pay data by gender. While it has strong data to back its commitment to gender pay parity, it is aware that more work needs to be done. In 2020, the company began using an external firm to assess its pay data by race for all U.S. employees.

Addressing the systemic challenges of the apparel industry requires collaboration. Gap Inc. embraced this approach by working closely with its suppliers to build their capabilities, by joining industry-wide efforts to share best practices and improve efficiency and by partnering with local and international NGOs on innovative programs that benefit workers. In an effort to improve the livelihoods of garment workers and help improve supply chain transparency and efficiency, in early 2018, Gap Inc. announced a goal for all of its tier 1 suppliers to make the transition from a cash-based system to digital payments by 2020. As of the end of 2020, 96% of the company’s suppliers were using digital wage payments, and Gap Inc. had rolled out programs in 23 countries.

To support its commitment, Gap Inc. joined the UN’s Better Than Cash Alliance (BTCA), which works with the private sector, governments and international organizations to accelerate the transition to digital payments, which can help reduce poverty, build financial inclusion and support inclusive growth. It also advances supply-chain efficiency and transparency.

In addition to promotion of digital wage payments, Gap Inc. has also leveraged technology to enable workers to amplify their voices through the Workforce Engagement Program (WEP), which seeks to increase worker engagement and empower facilities to make worker-centric improvements. In India, where 100% of the facilities with which the company works now provide digital wage payments, time spent on payroll is down by 10% for finance teams and 25% for HR teams. Digital wage systems have also supported more transparency in worker payments, including overtime, which has helped ensure workers get paid what they earned. As a result, worker attrition and turnover has dropped by 15% to 20%.

The company’s suppliers benefit from cost savings via a faster, more efficient payment system. Digital wages also help to increase accountability and transparency across the garment sector. Since financial inclusion requires both access to financial services and knowledge about how to use those products and services, Gap Inc. is evaluating how it can tie its digital wage-payment work to financial-literacy training programs.

Collaboration is key to driving transformational, systemic change on issues bigger than any one of us can tackle individually. That’s why Gap Inc. partnered with BSR’s HERproject, ILO Better Work, and CARE to launch Empower@Work, a collaborative effort dedicated to empowering women and advancing gender equity in global supply chains through the sharing of knowledge, skills and networks. By harnessing the power of collective reach and pooling knowledge and resources, the company aims to support economic independence and a better future for the more than 80 million women working in the apparel industry worldwide.

The approach is built on two pillars: (1) Act to encourage and share best practices in worker training; and (2) advocate by amplifying collective voice for policy-level change. Empower@Work released an open-source worker training toolkit for women’s empowerment that includes Gap Inc.’s P.A.C.E. women’s curriculum, as well as expertise and training from the other partners. One of the core pillars of Empower@Work focuses on influencing and policy advocacy, engaging key stakeholders across the apparel industry including governments, worker organizations, brands, and others. While the development of the Empower@Work operating model is still in progress, Gap Inc. intends to leverage this platform to bring these stakeholders together to, for example, prioritize women in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. A fundamental guidepost for this work is ILO Convention C-190.

Today, women are 27 times more likely to experience online violence than men. This is why Women Techmakers, Google’s flagship program supporting women in technology, launched a campaign in partnership with Jigsaw to train and engage women developers to build scaled technical solutions to keep women safe online. Now running in five regions, Google’s goal is to train 50,000 women in online safety by the end of year. In support of domestic abuse survivors impacted by shelter-in-place, Search and YouTube, together with the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), launched a campaign called #ISeeYou to increase the visibility of available services to women globally. Alongside the campaign, Google granted $2 million in Search ads to domestic violence organizations to show our support for reducing domestic violence.

Women Will is Google’s program for economic opportunity for women, The program is making an impact in 49 countries, supporting women’s economic potential through digital skills and community building. The company’s data-driven insights show that while the gender gap persists, women are unable to truly thrive at home and at work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, through Women Will, Google’s online career development and entrepreneurship workshops reached over 80,000 women across the globe.

Johnson & Johnson

In Ethiopia’s Amhara, where rates of child, early and forced marriage are high, Johnson & Johnson implemented Towards Improved Economic and Sexual Reproductive Health Outcomes for Adolescent Girls in Ethiopia (TESFA) to address the economic rights and sexual and reproductive health of ever-married girls. Between 2015-2018, CARE worked with married adolescent girls and developed tested approaches to support positive changes in their lives. TESFA scaled up geographically, reaching 2,124 ever-married girls in 12 kebeles across the woredas of Farta and Gunabegemider. This project has been critical in replicating and geographically scaling a proven program model to improving girls sexual reproductive health and economic empowerment, and has advanced innovations in measuring social norms.

Recognizing that many employees have long commutes to the office, Kabbage, implemented flexible work schedules to allow for shared domestic responsibilities. They quickly found that worker productivity or output did not diminish and that both male and female colleagues felt less stress to rush home.

Kabbage observed that it had a dearth of women in technical positions at the company. To remedy this, the company overhauled its hiring procedures to mandate gender parity on interviewee candidate slates before the interviewing process can begin. Additionally, Kabbage changed the language in its job postings, included more inclusive pictures on our website, and offered a more flexible interview process so that women are able to choose what time of day works best. These small changes dramatically improved the hiring and retention of women. Among their central learnings from this work was that focusing community over company product was helpful in attracting and retaining a diverse workforce and that small changes can have a big impact.

The company offers free healthcare, including reproductive health services.

Kabbage’s business model is tied to the goal of democratizing access to financial services. By leveraging the customer’s real-time, online data, including transaction information, bank data, accounting information, and shipping records, to name a few of the 2.5+ million live connections, Kabbage is able to blindly underwrite businesses regardless of their race or gender. As a result over 30% of its customers are women- and/or minority- owned small business.

In 2020, Mars launched Full Potential – its platform to amplify work on gender equality across its workplaces, sourcing communities, and marketplaces where goods and services are advertised and sold. The platform fits within its enterprise wide I&D strategy that focuses on gender balance, workforce representation, and inclusion.

In its workplaces, Mars is committed to continue equal pay for male and female Associates. They are aspiring to reach 100% gender-balanced business leadership teams across the enterprise. And They are advancing Mars approach to flexible work – understanding that remote working opportunities can support individual needs and performance.

In communities, Mars recently expanded their partnership with CARE with a new $10 million investment over the next 5 years aims to empower 50,000 people in cocoa sourcing communities. This work is supplemented by an in initial $5 million contribution to CARE to advance COVID-19 response efforts across four supply chains.

In the marketplace, Mars reviews its advertising to identify and reduce gender bias to track and improve performance over time. In partnership with UN Women’s Unstereotype Alliance Mars is working to remove negative stereotypes in its advertising and increasing access to opportunity by mandating that agency bids must include a female director. And Mars is leveraging its brands, such as DOVE to raise awareness and support women in sourcing communities. Mars launched a consumer campaign #HeretoBeHeard to hear from women around the world and will use these insights to expand and amplify its work.

Mars recognized that its advertising and marketing reach could be a force for gender equality. To that end, the company has worked to remove gender bias and negative stereotypes in its advertising by becoming a founding member of the UN Women’s Unstereotype Alliance and increasing access to opportunity by mandating that agency bids include a female director. Additionally, Mars annually reviews its advertising to identify and reduce gender bias in partnership with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. The company is using these insights to track and improve its performance.

Mars recognized that for many agricultural raw materials, the least resilient link in the supply chain is the first one—where raw materials are grown and harvested. During COVID-19, pre-existing vulnerabilities in sourcing communities were compounded by disruptions including restrictions on movement and trade, changes in demand, currency devaluation, losses of work opportunities, and school closures. Moreover, women around the world face structural barriers that prevent them from thriving, especially in agriculture where raw materials are grown and harvested. Even after decades of progress, women make up two thirds of the world’s 775 million illiterate adults, carry out twice the unpaid care work, own only 20% of the world’s land and earn 24% less than men.

Recognizing these challenges and inequities, Mars committed to scale up its partnership with CARE with an investment of 10 million USD, aiming to reach more than 60,000 members in cocoa communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana by 2025. Mars’ commitment expanded Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) that help women to save and invest in West African cocoa farming communities. Through VSLAs, women have access to financial inclusion and connection to formal finance, as well as business skills and entrepreneurship training. By the end of 2020, Mars had reached more than 24,000 VSLA members, who have saved 2.9 million USD to date.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mars also made an initial $5 million contribution to CARE focused on COVID-19 response and recovery across high-risk priority supply chains focusing efforts on women and girls. To date, these efforts have reached 451,472 community members with direct COVID-19 awareness messaging; provided cash support to 1,273; food support to 5,706; gender- based violence training to over 427,589 men and women; distributed over 13,000 washing stations across various communities; and supported nearly 150,000 people with hygiene kits and PPE.

Mars is partnering with others to unlock opportunities for women across sourcing communities around the world. The company invested more than $4.5 million in initiatives that include empowering women in coconut, vanilla and shea sourcing communities with the Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming. Additionally, Mars is reaching more than 4,500 women through self-help groups in mint sourcing communities in India through the Shubh Mint program and is supporting more than 800 women rice farmers in Thailand with expanded business skills and training through the Sustainable Rice Platform.

HERfinance – The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth has worked with BSR to scale up wage digitization for ready-made garment factories and workers in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Cambodia. The program focuses on implementing workplace training, especially tailored to women, and has included the development of specialized technology training tools to help factory managers and workers effectively transition to—and use—digital financial services. Shifting behavior away from cash is an extremely challenging task, regardless of gender. However, due to their unique circumstances, women remain at an increased risk of missing out on the benefits of digital financial services. For example, they are less likely than men to appear in the tax rolls, have formal identification, or own a cell phone. Moreover, they are less likely to control household finances. The existing digital gender gap, coupled with these barriers, means women may not have the access, knowledge, or confidence to use or fully benefit from digital solutions without additional support. Well-designed programs which support the transition from cash to digital financial services and take gender biases into account can increase women’s control over their finances, enhance their prospects for economic recovery and empowerment, and improve resilience in the long run. Since empowering women is critical for gender equality and brings clear socio-economic and business gains, their needs and circumstances should be strongly considered in policy and programmatic responses. This includes prioritizing efforts to support women’s financial resilience as they recover from COVID-19 and the associated economic challenges.

The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth realized that without training, digital wages may offer little to no benefit. While digital wages programs may succeed in providing workers with accounts and transitioning factories away from cash payments, this may be a token gesture with little impact if workers are not trained and encouraged to use digital financial services. In 2017, for instance, when the garment industry in India digitized wages, there was limited training provided to workers. Three years later, research found that male and female workers are still withdrawing 100 percent of their wages on payday.

By contrast, through the HERfinance Digital Wages programs in Bangladesh, workers have been trained on using their mobile money accounts to send remittances to families, save money in their accounts (which helps them to better weather future shocks), and make payments for products in areas around the factory. As a result, they became active mobile money users: women were conducting approximately eight transactions per month and men 13 transactions. If gender is considered from the start, digital payments can enable women’s economic empowerment. In Bangladesh, for example, women are often forced to hand over some or all of their wages to husbands or male family members.

Paying women digitally does not necessarily alleviate this problem and may, in some cases, make it worse. The HERfinance Digital Wages programs have therefore devoted significant time to discussing the advantages of joint financial decision-making with both men and women, leading to female participants reporting increased control over their wages. If the specific barriers women face are accounted for and incorporated into training programs, there is an increased likelihood that gender norms can be shifted, paving the way for greater women’s empowerment.

McCormick & Company, a global leader in flavor, launched their Purpose-led Performance (PLP) sustainability strategy in 2017 with a commitment to improving the lives of people, communities, and the planet, but more specifically, the Company aims to increase the resilience of farmers, including women, across their global supply chains. To achieve this, McCormick partnered with CARE to (1) diagnose the roles that women played in their supply-chains; the challenges they face, and the risks these pose to resilience; (2) design a global framework to increase resilience and achieve its PLP goals, including increasing the resilience of women in their supply-chain; (3) deliver programming that supports communities, including in COVID-19 response; and (4) document the impact of this work so that McCormick can make strategic business decisions around resources and understand what is improving, where and how. Through a deep dive into McCormick’s supply chain, CARE developed a dashboard that allows McCormick to clearly see the risks that women face, and make effective resource-allocation decisions accordingly, that deliver on their PLP goals.

McCormick & Company, a global leader in flavor, launched their Purpose-led Performance (PLP) sustainability strategy in 2017 with a commitment to improving the lives of people, communities, and the planet, but more specifically, the Company aims to increase the resilience of farmers, including women, across their global supply chains.

To achieve this, McCormick partnered with CARE to (1) diagnose the roles that women played in their supply-chains; the challenges they face, and the risks these pose to resilience; (2) design a global framework to increase resilience and achieve its PLP goals, including increasing the resilience of women in their supply-chain; (3) deliver programming that supports communities, including in COVID-19 response; and (4) document the impact of this work so that McCormick can make strategic business decisions around resources and understand what is improving, where and how. Through a deep dive into McCormick’s supply chain, CARE developed a dashboard that allows McCormick to clearly see the risks that women face, and make effective resource-allocation decisions accordingly, that deliver on their PLP goals.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic impacts, Microsoft has focused on providing critical digital support for the world’s first responders, governments, and communities around three areas: (1) leveraging digital technology in concerted efforts to protect public health; (2) promoting inclusive economic recovery; and (3) ensuring digital safety.

To this end, in part, Microsoft launched a Global Skills Initiative, committing to helping 25 million people acquire new digital skills needed for the COVID-19 economy. This comprehensive technology initiative brings together every part of the company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub, and Microsoft. Microsoft is also partnering with local and international humanitarian organizations in communities most at risk on COVID-19 providing technology and services to help scale needed response programming. Examples of efforts promoting empowerment of women through technology include:

• Microsoft in partnership with Care Egypt Foundation and the Egyptian Government has expanded Tawar Ghayar program aiming at improving skilling and employability of Egyptian underserved youth by upskilling 250,000 youth upskilled on Digital Skills, Employability & Business Skills, empower 7,500 Youth with Career Coaching & Guiding sessions and match 4,000 youth with job opportunities.
• Partnering with CARE to help create a new modern data architecture and business intelligence reporting for its COVID-19 “Women Respond” gender and data initiative to enable CARE to identify and respond to the most urgent needs of women and girls, and advocate for equitable access to services and resources for women.
• The accelerated deployment of the UNICEF Learning Passport. Girls are at most risk losing access to education during the crisis and not returning to school post-crisis. The Learning Passport will extend education for children online and offline.
• AI for Humanitarian Action has created the focus area Needs of Women & Children where the company will seek nonprofit projects demonstrating use of AI to ensure the safety and wellbeing of women and children around the world.

PepsiCo has implemented a number of programs to support mothers and caretakers at all levels of the company. These initiatives included:

• Providing on-site childcare at PepsiCo’s New York headquarters and near-site childcare at PepsiCo Foods North America headquarters in Texas. The company also provides on-site or near-site childcare at international locations, including Mexico, India, Egypt, and Pakistan, and in, outside of the US, provides enhanced maternity leave policies, flexible work hour policies, entertainment for children at home, and well-being programs and a well-being support line;
• In more than half of company locations worldwide with 500 or more employees, the company has either dedicated mother’s rooms, wellness rooms, or alternate space available for nursing mothers and the company is actively working to expand the number of PepsiCo locations with facilities for nursing mothers in the coming years.
• Making available back-up child and elder care services are available through third party providers when a regular care provider is unavailable.
• Launching “Ready to Return” in 2017 in New York for professionals who are re-entering the workforce after taking time off to care for a loved one. Ready to Return is a 10-week paid program designed for experienced professionals who have been out of the corporate workforce for more than two years and are looking to return. To help ease the transition, participants are provided with mentoring and coaching support, training to refresh skills and formal and informal networking opportunities with PepsiCo employees. In 2018, Ready to Return was expanded to Latin America, and now includes Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. This program is a demonstration of PepsiCo’s support for working caregivers in our communities around the world and a means to build the female talent pool at PepsiCo. (5) Expanding parental leave in the U.S., starting in 2021, to be 6–8 weeks for mothers and 6 weeks for parents — a total of 12-14 weeks.

Women’s work in agriculture—essential to meet the nutrition needs of a growing global population—is often unpaid and undervalued. Research shows that if women farmers had the same access to resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20–30 percent, potentially reducing the number of hungry people in the world by up to 150 million. To that end, PepsiCo is the largest private sector partner in CARE’s She Feeds the World program, which is addressing gender inequality in the agriculture sector. The company’s $18.2 million investment aims to provide approximately 5 million female farmers and their families with education, resources and economic support that can help them increase crop yields and income. The program is active in Peru, Egypt and Uganda. In Uganda where the partnership with CARE first launched, PepsiCo has reached nearly 200,000 people with trainings that tackle issues like gender inclusive leadership, sustainable farming and sanitary food preparation.

PepsiCo made a firm commitment to having 50% of management roles held by women by 2025. In doing so, they implemented a number of programs that benefitted women at all levels of the company. These initiatives included:

• Developing a Transformational Leadership Program (TLP) designed to equip women with the tools they need to elevate their business impact and achieve career fulfillment. By providing participants with the knowledge and skills to navigate a global matrix organization and increase their effectiveness and influence, the TLP helps propel high-performing teams and innovation at PepsiCo in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Middle East, and North Africa across multiple functions and levels.
• Providing on-site childcare at PepsiCo’s New York headquarters and near-site childcare at PepsiCo Foods North America headquarters in Texas. The company also provides on-site or near-site childcare at international locations, including Mexico, India, Egypt, and Pakistan.
•  Launching “Ready to Return” in 2017 in New York for professionals who are re-entering the workforce after taking time off to care for a loved one. Ready to Return is a 10-week paid program designed for experienced professionals who have been out of the corporate workforce for more than two years and are looking to return. To help ease the transition, participants are provided with mentoring and coaching support, training to refresh skills and formal and informal networking opportunities with PepsiCo employees. In 2018, Ready to Return was expanded to Latin America, and now includes Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. This program is a demonstration of PepsiCo’s support for working caregivers in our communities around the world and a means to build the female talent pool at PepsiCo.
• Expanding parental leave in the U.S., starting in 2021, to be 6–8 weeks for mothers and 6 weeks for parents — a total of 12-14 weeks.

Starbucks is committed to 100 percent gender and racial pay equity. Indeed, Starbucks has achieved — and maintained — 100 percent pay equity for women and men and people of all races performing similar work in the United States. In 2018, when the company first hit that milestone, it also announced that it is committed to reaching 100 percent gender pay equity for our all partners in Starbucks company-operated markets globally. A year later, on March 20, 2019, Starbucks verified that it reached that goal in China and Canada — and it is continuing this work around the world.

Starbucks is also encouraging multinational companies to achieve global gender pay equity, with the support of equal rights champion Billie Jean King and her Leadership Initiative (BJKLI) and leading national women’s organizations, the National Partnership for Women & Families (National Partnership) and the American Association of University Women (AAUW) – by sharing the principles and tools the company uses.

Leveraging its experience working to achieve pay equity in the U.S., Starbucks has formulated pay equity principles – equal footing, transparency and accountability – that employers can implement to help address known, systemic barriers to global pay equity. In the U.S., we’ve also established best practices supporting each of these principles, and going forward we will establish global practices as well. To learn more, please click here .

Through funding for a multi-country project focused on worker well-being in the garment supply chain, Target has been strong support of a number of advocacy efforts in Asia aligned with CARE’s global campaign to support the ratification of ILO Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work. In Vietnam, CARE worked to ensure issues of gender equality in the workplace were considered in the national Labor Code. As a result of these efforts, specific provisions focused on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace – including a standard definition; requirements for workplace regulations to protect employees; and responsibilities of employers, employees and other stakeholders – have been included in the revised Labor Code for the first time when approved by the National Assembly in November 2019. When the Labor Code and associated Guiding Decree are implemented in 2021, it is estimated that approximately 1.2 million Vietnamese garment workers will benefit from the new provisions, along with millions more in other sectors.

Case studies

Gender impact assessment case studies

These case studies share insights and learnings from defined entities who have conducted gender impact assessments.

Gender Equality Action Plan case studies

These case studies share insights and learnings about creating a Gender Equality Action Plan.

Updated 7 February 2022

Artificial Intelligence and gender equality

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The world has a gender equality problem, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) mirrors the gender bias in our society.

Although globally more women are accessing the internet every year , in low-income countries, only 20 per cent are connected . The gender digital divide creates a data gap that is reflected in the gender bias in AI. 

Who creates AI and what biases are built into AI data (or not), can perpetuate, widen, or reduce gender equality gaps.

What is AI gender bias? 

A study by the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership analysed 133 AI systems across different industries and found that about 44 per cent of them showed gender bias , and 25 per cent exhibited both gender and racial bias.

Beyza Doğuç, an artist from Ankara, Turkey, encountered gender bias in Generative AI when she was researching for a novel and prompted it to write a story about a doctor and a nurse. Generative AI creates new content (text, images, video, etc.) inspired by similar content and data that it was trained on, often in response to questions or prompts by a user.

The AI made the doctor male and the nurse female. Doğuç continued to give it more prompts, and the AI always chose gender stereotypical roles for the characters and associated certain qualities and skills with male or female characters. When she asked the AI about the gender bias it exhibited, the AI explained it was because of the data it had been trained on and specifically, “word embedding” – which means the way certain words are encoded in machine learning to reflect their meaning and association with other words – it’s how machines learn and work with human language. If the AI is trained on data that associates women and men with different and specific skills or interests, it will generate content reflecting that bias.

“Artificial intelligence mirrors the biases that are present in our society and that manifest in AI training data,” said Doğuç, in a recent interview with UN Women.

Who develops AI, and what kind of data it is trained on, has gender implications for AI-powered solutions.

Sola Mahfouz, a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University, is excited about AI, but also concerned. “Is it equitable? How much does it mirror our society’s patriarchal structures and inherent biases from its predominantly male creators,” she reflected. 

Mahfouz was born in Afghanistan, where she was forced to leave school when the Taliban came to her home and threatened her family. She eventually escaped Afghanistan and immigrated to the U.S. in 2016 to attend college.

As companies are scrambling for more data to feed AI systems, researchers from Epoch claim that tech companies could run out of high-quality data used by AI by 2026 .

Natacha Sangwa is a student from Rwanda who participated in the first coding camp organized under the African Girls Can Code Initiative last year. “I have noticed that [AI] is mostly developed by men and trained on datasets that are primarily based on men,” said Sangwa, who saw first-hand how that impacts women’s experience with the technology. “When women use some AI-powered systems to diagnose illnesses, they often receive inaccurate answers, because the AI is not aware of symptoms that may present differently in women.” 

If current trends continue, AI-powered technology and services will continue lacking diverse gender and racial perspectives, and that gap will result in lower quality of services, biased decisions about jobs, credit, health care and more. 

How to avoid gender bias in AI?

Removing gender bias in AI starts with prioritizing gender equality as a goal, as AI systems are conceptualized and built. This includes assessing data for misrepresentation, providing data that is representative of diverse gender and racial experiences, and reshaping the teams developing AI to make them more diverse and inclusive.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report of 2023, there are only 30 per cent women currently working in AI .  

“When technology is developed with just one perspective, it’s like looking at the world half-blind,” concurred Mahfouz. She is currently working on a project to create an AI-powered platform that would connect Afghan women with each other. 

“More women researchers are needed in the field. The unique lived experiences of women can profoundly shape the theoretical foundations of technology. It can also open new applications of the technology,” she added. 

“To prevent gender bias in AI, we must first address gender bias in our society,” said Doğuç from Turkey.

There is a critical need for drawing upon diverse fields of expertise when developing AI, including gender expertise, so that machine learning systems can serve us better and support the drive for a more equal and sustainable world.

In a rapidly advancing AI industry, the lack of gender perspectives, data, and decision-making can perpetuate profound inequality for years to come.

The AI field needs more women, and that requires enabling and increasing girls’ and women’s access to and leadership in STEM and ICT education and careers.

The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that women accounted for just 29 per cent of all science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers. Although more women are graduating and entering STEM jobs today than ever before, they are concentrated in entry level jobs and less likely to hold leadership positions.

How can AI governance help accelerate progress towards gender equality?

International cooperation on digital technology has focused on technical and infrastructural issues and the digital economy, often at the expense of how technological developments were affecting society and generating disruption across all its layers – especially for the most vulnerable and historically excluded. There is a global governance deficit in addressing the challenges and risks of AI and harnessing its potential to leave no one behind.

“Right now, there is no mechanism to constrain developers from releasing AI systems before they are ready and safe. There’s a need for a global multistakeholder governance model that prevents and redresses when AI systems exhibit gender or racial bias, reinforce harmful stereotypes, or does not meet privacy and security standards,” said Helene Molinier, UN Women’s Advisor on Digital Gender Equality Cooperation in a recent interview with Devex.

In the current AI architecture, benefits and risks are not equitably distributed, with power concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, States and individuals, who control talent, data and computer resources. There is also no mechanism to look at broader considerations, like new forms of social vulnerability generated by AI, the disruption of industries and labour markets, the propensity for emerging technology to be used as a tool of oppression, the sustainability of the AI supply chain, or the impact of AI on future generations.

In 2024, the negotiation of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) offers a unique opportunity to build political momentum and place gender perspectives on digital technology at the core of a new digital governance framework. Without it, we face the risk of overlaying AI onto existing gender gaps, causing gender-based discrimination and harm to be left unchanged – and even amplified and perpetuated by AI systems.

UN Women position paper on the GDC provide concrete recommendations to harness the speed, scale, and scope of digital transformation for the empowerment of women and girls in all their diversity, and to trigger transformations that set countries on paths to an equitable digital future for all.

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Gender equity in hiring: examining the effectiveness of a personality-based algorithm

Emeric kubiak.

1 AssessFirst, Paris, France

Maria I. Efremova

2 King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Simon Baron

Keely j. frasca.

3 Birkbeck Business School, Faculty of Business and Law, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Associated Data

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because even if the data used has been anonymized by AssessFirst, the participants may choose to delete their data at any time: while the data were accessible for scientific purposes during the analysis and publication, it cannot be ensured that the same data will remain legally available in the future. For legal reasons supporting data is, therefore, not available. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to EK, moc.tsrifssessa@kaibuke .

Introduction

Gender biases in hiring decisions remain an issue in the workplace. Also, current gender balancing techniques are scientifically poorly supported and lead to undesirable results, sometimes even contributing to activating stereotypes. While hiring algorithms could bring a solution, they are still often regarded as tools amplifying human prejudices. In this sense, talent specialists tend to prefer recommendations from experts, while candidates question the fairness of such tools, in particular, due to a lack of information and control over the standardized assessment. However, there is evidence that building algorithms based on data that is gender-blind, like personality - which has been shown to be mostly similar between genders, and is also predictive of performance, could help in reducing gender biases in hiring. The goal of this study was, therefore, to test the adverse impact of a personality-based algorithm across a large array of occupations.

The study analyzed 208 predictive models designed for 18 employers. These models were tested on a global sample of 273,293 potential candidates for each respective role.

Mean weighted impact ratios of 0.91 (Female-Male) and 0.90 (Male-Female) were observed. We found similar results when analyzing impact ratios for 21 different job categories.

Our results suggest that personality-based algorithms could help organizations screen candidates in the early stages of the selection process while mitigating the risks of gender discrimination.

1. Introduction

Research dating back as far as the 1970s (see Davison and Burke, 2000 for a review, which covers multiple countries) has shown that gender discrimination in hiring occurs, and continues to be a prevalent issue in today’s hiring practices–despite the findings from cross-temporal meta-analysis indicating that belief in competence equality has grown over time ( Eagly et al., 2020 ). Yet, a recent meta-analysis of hiring discrimination experiments conducted between 2005 and 2020 ( Lippens et al., 2023 ) reveals that gender discrimination is highly complex and varied, with instances of both males and females facing discrimination in certain cases. The relative advantages of male and female candidates hinge on demand-side factors. These may include the impact of certain job characteristics that are traditionally associated with one gender over the other on selection criteria, as well as how closely a candidate aligns with the typical characteristics of their gender category. Further substantiating these findings, a comprehensive meta-re-analysis of over 70 employment audit experiments conducted across more than 26 countries and five continents concluded that in male-dominated professions, which are typically higher-paying, being female can be a disadvantage. Conversely, in female-dominated professions, which tend to be lower-paying, being female is viewed positively ( Galos and Coppock, 2023 ), thus confirming gender-role congruity bias. Besides, this bias consistently manifests in hiring decisions. For instance, Koch et al. (2015) meta-analysis concluded that it is more pronounced among male raters, and it does not diminish even when raters are provided with additional information about the candidate. However, despite both males and females facing discrimination based on occupation characteristics, the price paid by females is often higher than that of their male counterparts, as they often have limited access to higher-paying jobs and roles with greater responsibilities. In addition, in line with the backlash effect, which refers to a social and psychological phenomenon where individuals are penalized for violating societal norms or expectations regarding gender ( Williams and Tiedens, 2016 ), females are in a double-bind. As concluded by Castaño et al. (2019) in a systematic review, “if women adopt masculine roles they are perceived as cold and instrumental, whereas if women adopt feminine roles they are perceived as less competent” (p. 0.14) –an effect that men do not typically experience. As a consequence, in highly prestigious occupations, even if females perform equally, they are rewarded significantly lower ( Joshi et al., 2015 ). It results that the representation of females progressively declines higher up the hierarchy. Data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph indicates that obstacles for females begin to appear as early as at the managerial level. Globally, only 25% of female ascend to the C-Suite level, even though the ratio of male to female is nearly equal at the individual contributor level ( LinkedIn, 2022 ).

Addressing gender bias in hiring is not only a matter of ethical responsibility, but it is also crucial due to the harmful consequences such biases can engender. For example, a meta-analysis by Triana et al. (2019) found that perceived gender discrimination is negatively related to job attitudes, physical health outcomes and behaviors, psychological health, and work-related outcomes. Interestingly, even minimal biases can lead to substantial instances of hiring discrimination and losses in productivity, underscoring the significant practical impact of these biases. In a series of simulations, Hardy et al. (2022) established that a slight bias of 2.2% led to disparate treatment rates that were 13.5% higher than those observed in a bias-free model. Furthermore, the chances of a woman receiving a favorable hiring decision were almost halved, being 49% lower than the odds for their male counterparts with similar qualifications. The financial repercussions of this were significant, with bias accounting for 16.1% of new hire failure rates, ultimately leading to a utility loss per hiring due to bias amounting to -$710.54 per hire. The negative impact started to manifest with as little as 1% bias, which resulted in 8.7% disparate treatment and a utility loss of -$355.36. This effect escalated under the simulation of a higher 4% bias, where it led to 20.3% disparate treatment and a staggering utility loss of -$2,125.64. Furthermore, the authors found that contextual factors alter, but cannot obviate the consequences of biased evaluations. Consequently, it’s crucial to identify strategies that reduce bias in hiring decisions.

2. Intervention for mitigating gender bias

Efforts have been made to implement interventions for reducing gender discrimination, but yielded mixed outcomes. According to a recent systematic review, half of the intervention measuring social change in gender equality did not achieve beneficial results ( Guthridge et al., 2022 ), leading the authors to conclude that “in the past 30 years we have not uncovered the keys to social change in order to enhance gender equality and non-discrimination against girls and women” (p. 0.335). In the specific context of recruitment, studies have consistently underlined the pervasive nature of unconscious stereotypes and the ease with which these biases can be triggered. For instance, Isaac et al. (2009) , in a comprehensive review spanning over 30 years of research, found that conventional interventions, such as diversity training and employment equity programs, fail to guarantee gender equity in hiring despite their widespread use, and can even prove to be counterproductive. Similarly, counter-stereotype training appears to be effective only under specific conditions. Nevertheless, their review pinpointed several institutional interventions that could be promising to foster gender equity in hiring. They also highlighted actions that female applicants themselves could undertake. While their research suggests viable interventions to promote gender equity in hiring, it also underscores the issue’s complexity. Some recommendations appear as desperate “Hail Mary” attempts to combat gender bias. For instance, the advice, “If you are visibly pregnant, it might be wise to obscure it with your clothing” (p. 0.6), while effective, exposes the depth of societal bias we are grappling with. Also, it is important to recognize that such advice could be considered as pernicious, as it perpetuates and reinforces societal bias, rather than addressing the root causes of gender inequity in hiring practices.

Traditional interventions include diversity or counter-stereotype training ( Bezrukova et al., 2012 ), the introduction of gender quotas ( Krook and Zetterberg, 2014 ), lean-in approach ( Chrobot-Mason et al., 2019 ), and equity guidelines. Yet, according to the International Labor Organization, even though 75 percent of companies worldwide have embraced policies of equal opportunity, diversity, and inclusion, gender biases stubbornly linger in selection ( International Labour Organization [ILO], 2019 ). Indeed, despite good intentions, such interventions can have unintended consequences and potentially generate new issues. Caleo and Heilman (2019) synthesized the potential ways in which these interventions could backfire, including (1) promoting gender stereotyping, (2) reducing personal responsibility for bias, (3) fueling the perception of undeserved preference, (4) prompting negative trickle-down effects, (5) creating tokens, (6) encouraging discriminatory behavior, (7) depleting cognitive resources, and (8) doing harm to those who lead bias-reducing initiatives. Their analysis highlights the complex nature of gender bias in hiring, and the importance of carefully considering the unintended consequences of interventions. To this end, we’ll briefly explore the impact of conventional interventions in the next paragraphs.

Diversity training has been shown to be effective at reducing the extent to which assessors assign stereotypic labels to male candidates (e.g., determined and competitive) and female candidates (e.g., submissive and helpful) ( Kawakami et al., 2007 ). However, this effect did not emerge if assessors engaged in the stereotyping task immediately after their counter-stereotype training. Despite the potential impact of training interventions, their effectiveness tends to be short-lived, with discrimination resurfacing as early as 3 months after the interventions ( Derous et al., 2020 ). This finding emphasizes the limited long-term sustainability of such interventions in combating bias. Also, other research showed that training claiming to limit unconscious bias is ineffective, and ironically contributes to activating stereotypes ( Madera and Hebl, 2013 ). For instance, Dobbin et al. (2007) conducted a study revealing that despite the adoption of sensitivity and diversity training by big corporations, there was no significant increase in gender diversity. This finding raises questions about the effectiveness of such training programs in achieving meaningful change. As argued by Noon (2018) , unless the everyday discriminatory acts are effectively addressed, the adoption of such unconscious bias training in the workplace and in hiring may have limited utility to mitigate biases.

Gender quotas have been implemented as a means to address gender inequality, but research suggests that their effectiveness is not without drawbacks. While they aim to promote gender diversity, there are concerns that quotas may inadvertently reinforce stereotypes and fuel the perception that women are less competent. This is supported by findings from Leibbrandt et al. (2018) , who found evidence of a severe backlash against women under gender quotas, leading to sabotage and undermining their success. Furthermore, the impact of quotas on corporate boards has also been examined. Yu and Madison (2021) conducted research showing that quotas for women on corporate boards have primarily resulted in decreased company performance. This raises questions about the direct correlation between quotas and improved outcomes. In addition, the introduction of gender quotas may intensify the negative effects of second-generation bias and perpetuate gender inequality in the workplace, as suggested by recent work by Loumpourdi (2023) . This highlights the complex dynamics at play when implementing quotas and emphasizes the need for comprehensive approaches that address underlying biases and promote gender equality in a more nuanced and systemic manner.

Regarding equity guidelines, Ng and Wiesner (2007) found that implementing basic employment equity messages only had a positive impact when underrepresented group members were equally or more qualified than the majority group. However, when preferential treatment was given to less qualified candidates, men who were underrepresented in the profession tended to be favored over underrepresented women. Similarly, stronger employment directives typically led to detrimental outcomes whereby such perceived coercive employment equity messages resulted in men being favored over women. As a result, Castilla and Benard (2010) draws a paradoxical conclusion that in organizations that strongly advocate for meritocracy, decision-makers tend to exhibit a preference for men over equally qualified female employees. This finding highlights a discrepancy between the professed value of meritocracy and the actual biases that can influence decision-making processes.

Considering the evidence of gender biases in selection and assessment, in conjunction with interventions that are shown to be largely ineffective, there is a need to explore alternative ways of mitigating these issues. This is particularly important since gender diversity is positively related with higher employee wellbeing and positive job appraisal ( Clark et al., 2021 ), as well as with productivity in contexts where gender diversity is viewed as normatively accepted ( Zhang, 2020 ). To address these challenges, an important step is to enhance the structure of the evaluation and selection procedure. For example, Wolgast et al. (2017) showed that using tools for systematizing information about the applicants could help in mitigating biases and in selecting more competent applicants.

3. Algorithms as a solution against bias

One solution to alleviate biases could be the use of hiring algorithms, which allow us to go beyond our intuition and cognitive biases, by bringing standardization and structure to hiring decisions. An algorithm could be defined as a set of operations or tasks to be carried out following a certain logic, with the aim of answering a question or solving a problem ( Jean, 2019 ). In other words, an algorithm acts like a set of instructions, turning the information we feed into it into recommendations. The utilization of algorithms at different steps of the hiring pipeline is becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s workplace ( Tambe et al., 2019 ), and systematic review point out the potential for these algorithms to revolutionize HR management ( França et al., 2023 ). In the hiring process, algorithms learn from past data of old applicants to predict how suitable future applicants might be for a job. Basically, they figure out what attributes from past successful applicants led to good job performance, and then use this understanding to predict which future applicants might be the best fit for the job. The increasing adoption of algorithms is largely driven by their efficiency. For example, in a meta-analysis comparing mechanical and clinical data combination in selection, Kuncel et al. (2013) showed that, in predicting job performance, the difference in the validity between mechanical and clinical data combination methods resulted in an enhancement of prediction accuracy exceeding 50%. Other studies showed that algorithms make better hiring decisions in terms of the employee’s performance outcomes ( Sajjadiani et al., 2019 ; Li et al., 2020 ) and in hiring fill rate ( Horton, 2017 ). Taken together in a recent systematic literature review, these results regarding performance suggest that algorithmic hiring methods are equal or better than human when selecting the best candidates ( Will et al., 2022 ).

Recently, scholars have also been advocating for the use of such algorithms to reduce implicit biases in hiring processes and have proposed frameworks to evaluate AI-assisted interventions ( Lin et al., 2021 ). According to Leutner et al. (2022) , by using AI for hiring purposes, employers will be able to control for not only gender bias but other discriminatory characteristics as AI technology is able to be trained in a way to filter through the necessary characteristics required for candidates and to ignore other features. This is supported by several studies, showing that machine learning has no adverse impact on gender ( Sajjadiani et al., 2019 ) or that a fair ranking algorithm could increase the selection of female candidates ( Sühr et al., 2020 ). In regards to empirical evidence, Li et al. (2020) revealed that some algorithms could increase the share of women selected, up to a balance of 50%, compared to 35% for hiring decisions made by humans. Similarly, Avery et al. (2023) conducted a comparative analysis between human-evaluation and AI-evaluation treatments. The authors found that human evaluators consistently rated males higher than females by a substantial 0.15 standard deviations. This gender discrepancy was most noticeable at the higher end of the distribution, with men being 6.8 percentage points more likely to rank in the top 25%, and 7.73 percentage points more likely to land in the top 10%. In contrast, when AI was employed, the gender difference shrank considerably to just a 0.04 standardized difference. Furthermore, the representation of males and females in the top 50%, 25%, and 10% categories under the AI condition was nearly equal, showcasing the potential for AI to mitigate human biases in evaluation processes. Hiring algorithms could also benefit by increasing the perceived equity of the hiring process. For example, (1) women prefer to be judged by an algorithm because of its perceived objectivity over a human ( Pethig and Kroenung, 2023 ), (2) algorithms are perceived as less discriminatory than humans, which increases people’s comfort toward their usage ( Jago and Laurin, 2021 ), and (3) applicants with prior discrimination experiences deem algorithm-based decisions more positively than those without such experiences ( Koch-Bayram et al., 2023 ).

Despite these findings, many researchers have sounded the alarm. For instance, Drage and Mackereth (2022) , in their review of assertions made by AI providers, suggested that endeavors to eradicate gender and race from AI frequently misinterpret these concepts as discrete characteristics rather than broader structures of power, or that that using AI as a fix for gender diversity issues, an example of technosolutionism, fails to address the inherent systemic issues within organizations. Others raise concerns that algorithms could unintentionally exacerbate existing biases within recruitment processes ( Kelly-Lyth, 2021 ). Algorithmic bias takes on a discriminatory aspect when it results in consistent disparities linked to factors legally protected, such as gender. For instance, Dastin (2022) documented a case involving Amazon’s hiring algorithm, which persistently gave higher employability scores to men than to women, while Chen et al. (2018) , testing the adverse effects of candidates search engines, showed that female candidates were ranked statistically lower than male candidates. This circumstance has prompted scholars to delve into the exploration of algorithmic biases in hiring and strategies to mitigate them ( De Cremer and De Schutter, 2021 ). From a psychological perspective, research shows that, while individuals view algorithm-driven decisions as less prone to bias, they also generally regard it as less fair ( Feldkamp et al., 2023 ). Moreover, algorithmic decisions resulting in gender disparities are less likely to be perceived as biased compared to human decisions, because people tend to believe that algorithms make decisions devoid of context, thereby disregarding individual characteristics ( Bonezzi and Ostinelli, 2021 ). From a technical perspective, Rieskamp et al. (2023) identified four types of strategies aimed at reducing discrimination in these systems, namely pre-process, in-process, post-process, and feature selection. This review implies that interventions can be implemented at various stages of the algorithm development process to effectively mitigate bias. This is supported by van Giffen et al. (2022) , who listed different types of biases in algorithm and in machine learning, distinguishing, for example, biases related to the use of historical biased data ( Mehrabi et al., 2019 ), data which are not representative for the relevant population, or measurement biases. However, intervening to reduce subgroup differences in selection often presents a trade-off regarding accuracy. This situation represents what is known as the validity-diversity dilemma, which involves maintaining a balance between selecting valid performance predictors and minimizing adverse impact. While interventions aimed at reducing subgroup disparities could decrease model accuracy ( Zhang et al., 2023 ), strategies employing multi-penalty optimization are promising in addressing this issue ( Rottman et al., 2023 ).

In summary, these findings suggest that training an algorithm to predict the preferences of a recruiter and mimic human intuition will inevitably surface and amplify biases. On the other hand, training an algorithm to predict genuine success, using more gender-blind data that accurately forecast job performance, will likely mitigate biases in hiring decisions. This understanding underpins the guidelines on AI-Based Employee Selection Assessments provided by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). The organization strongly urges providers to generate scores that (1) are considered fair and unbiased, (2) are clearly related to the job, (3) predict future job performance, (4) produce consistent scores that measure job-related characteristics, and (5) documented for verification and auditing ( Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology [SIOP], 2023 ). In other words, “from both research and workplace law perspectives, a clear and theoretically founded link should be established between the outcome (e.g., predicted job performance) and the algorithmic features” ( Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology [SIOP], 2020 ).

Considering these guidelines, there is great potential for using algorithms to reduce gender discrimination in hiring if it is personality-focused since theory proposes that personality predicts job performance ( Schmitt, 2014 ), and does not vastly differ between genders. For instance, the gender similarities hypothesis ( Hyde, 2005 ) suggests that males and females are similar in most psychological variables. With respect to empirical evidence, when personality facets are examined separately, the effect sizes are close to zero in most cases ( Zell et al., 2015 ). Still, other scholars suggested that some differences between genders exist, with the most impacted facets being those related to agreeableness and neuroticism ( Weisberg et al., 2011 ; Kajonius and Johnson, 2018 ). Thus, the extent of gender differences observed in research findings is still a subject of debate among scientists: some argue that these findings are more commonly characterized by similarities, while others assert that substantial differences are frequently observed. Interestingly, new findings show that gender differences or similarities are reflecting differing ways of organizing the same data, leading Eagly and Revelle (2022) to recommend “recognizing the forest and the trees of sex/gender differences and similarities. It is necessary to step away from the individual trees, perhaps to a hilltop, to observe the patterning of trees in a forest” (p. 1355). While minor differences may exist on particular facets, it is, therefore, essential to transcend a one-dimensional understanding and view the broader picture, observing how the aggregation of various personality facets can highlight distinct differences between genders, or potentially offset certain differences observed within a single facet. For example, while larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ by gender ( Eagly and Revelle, 2022 ), one could expect that such differences will be lowered by aggregating a facet that differs by gender with others that do not. Contextualizing the measure of personality ( Judge and Zapata, 2015 ), in order to benefit from the information brought by facet-level ( Soto and John, 2017 ), as well as reducing adverse impact, is, therefore, an intriguing path to explore.

More precisely, it is interesting to look at whether or not personality facets aggregates will lead to bias and adverse impact in personality-based hiring algorithms. Recent research has examined the accuracy of personality prediction in AI-based hiring systems and found that certain tools demonstrate significant instability in measuring key facets. Consequently, these tools cannot be considered valid assessment instruments ( Rhea et al., 2022 ). However, it is still uncertain whether alternative personality-based hiring algorithms, designed to predict job performance based on personality facets, could potentially result in adverse impacts or biases. Indeed, training an algorithm based on personality data, and teaching it to identify relevant and non-gendered cues of performance for a role, could probably help (1) in hiring people who perform better, as personality is predictive of job performance ( Schmitt, 2014 ) and who turnover less ( Kubiak et al., 2023b ), and in (2) achieving natural gender balance for different roles, because even though differences in specific personality facets between genders exist, these differences are smaller compared to other attributes currently used in hiring decisions ( Kuhn and Wolter, 2022 ). Initial findings provide support for this hypothesis, demonstrating that specific personality-based algorithms exhibit gender fairness ( Kubiak et al., 2023a ). However, these studies were limited in their scope and examined a small number of roles.

Therefore, our study introduces a new breed of algorithms for multiple reasons. Firstly, it employs a personality-centric approach, which stands in stark contrast to conventional algorithms that aim to digitize existing hiring procedures by training on data from candidates’ resumes. Such data is riddled with bias ( Parasurama et al., 2022 ), which inevitably trickles down into the algorithmic results ( Houser, 2019 ). Secondly, our algorithm strives to predict future job performance, a marked departure from other algorithms that merely assess personality without making job performance projections. Thus, our study’s algorithms primarily target the identification of personality aspects that drive job performance in a specific occupation, subsequently scoring candidates by juxtaposing their personality, gauged through a personality assessment, against these predictive factors. Finally, to counteract the often-criticized “black box” effect ( Ajunwa, 2020 ), our algorithms are based on explainable regression methods, in order to ensure efficiency but also transparency of the operations.

Our study expands the current knowledge, with the objective of testing whether we can adopt a personality-based algorithm to make hiring recommendations, whilst eliminating any adverse impact with regards to gender. Therefore, we hypothesize that a personality-based hiring algorithm would recommend hiring female and male candidates in (almost) similar proportions for different roles.

4. Materials and methods

This study involved the use of diverse samples. Firstly, training samples were utilized to construct predictive models for each occupation. Predictive modeling, as defined by Kuhn and Johnson (2013) , is “a process of developing a mathematical tool or a model that generates an accurate prediction” (p. 2). In our study, a predictive model is defined as a combination of personality facets that generates an accurate prediction of job performance for a specific occupation. Secondly, a global analysis sample was employed to evaluate any potential adverse impact. For the sake of convenience, these samples will be referred to as training samples and analysis sample in the following sections.

4.1. Participants

Training samples were based on data from 18 employers, all clients of a specialized online assessment platform called “AssessFirst,” dedicated to predictive hiring and personality assessments. These employers specialized in different industries, including retail, technology, consulting, finance and banking, engineering or transportation. Furthermore, the size of the companies varied significantly within the selected group. The range included small-sized companies with approximately 100 employees, as well as large international corporations with over 50,000 employees. Most were located in France (39.90%), followed by Russia (22.60%), the USA (13.46%), and the United Kingdom (9.62%). Other countries included Brazil, Austria, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa and Ukraine. These countries provided a broad geographical base that further enhanced the generalization of the results. These employers were using the platform in a high-stake hiring context, in order to enhance their selection and assessment processes with a heightened degree of objectivity. By using the online recruitment platform, these organizations endeavored to refine their hiring practices. They utilized the platform’s capabilities to construct predictive models for the occupations they sought to fill. The process for developing predictive models is described in the next section. This approach facilitated the comparison of prospective candidates’ personality profiles against the established predictive model, providing a comprehensive analysis of how well a candidate’s personality aligns with the specific requirements of the occupation. This thorough evaluation offered them deep insights, enabling them to make well-informed and objective hiring decisions. The selection of employers for this study was based on their active usage of the online platform during the period between 2021 and 2022. The primary criterion for inclusion was their utilization of the algorithmic-driven predictive model generation feature offered by the online platform. We only integrated into the samples employers who have undergone extensive training on platform usage and have demonstrated their proficiency by creating multiple predictive models. This stringent approach guaranteed that employers who were part of the sample were utilizing the platform correctly. The selection process focused solely on these aspects, without any commercial considerations involved. The purpose of this sampling approach was to ensure that the employers chosen had experience with and utilized the specific feature being investigated, allowing for targeted analysis of the predictive models generated through the platform.

4.2. Models generation

Our study hinged on data provided by these 18 employers, involving 208 unique occupations they were recruiting for. A total of 21 job categories were represented, predominantly sales (26.92%), financial services (13.46%), customer service (10.58%) and business development (7.69%). For each occupation, a distinct predictive model was designed, totaling 208 predictive models. In our study, we focused on developing predictive models that specifically considered the personality facets relevant to job performance in a given occupation. For example, Company 1, which was recruiting for a human resource role in Hungary, generated a predictive model that incorporated the personality facets of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness. These facets were selected by the algorithm based on their statistical associations with job performance in that particular role. It is important to highlight that our algorithm exclusively relies on personality-related data (scores ranging from 1 to 10 on 20 personality facets) and performance-related data (scores ranging from 1 to 5). Our approach represents a departure from traditional hiring algorithms, which typically rely solely on data extracted from the CV or resume of candidates. Instead, we introduced a novel methodology that goes beyond CV data and incorporates personality facets relevant to job performance. Predictive models were generated directly by the employers using a dedicated feature on the online platform. The online platform provider describes the feature as an algorithm-based contact analysis tool that empowers employers to autonomously analyze their data and generate data-driven predictive models for the specific occupations they are hiring for. This tool leverages algorithms to extract insights from the data provided by employers, allowing them to uncover valuable patterns and relationships between personality facets and job performance. The process of predictive model creation in our study was, therefore, characterized by two distinct data collection stages. This was subsequently followed by the application of an algorithm, which selected the relevant personality facets to predict performance in the role. This approach ensured a well-rounded, scientific basis for all the predictive models devised in the study. The process of predictive modeling in the online platform works as follows:

• – First, employers selected a representative sample of current employees in the occupation they were recruiting for. For instance, Company 1 chose a sample of 20 employees in the Human Resources role. To accomplish this, employers simply sent invitation emails to the selected employees through the online platform. In this study, it is important to note that the authors did not have direct contact with the employees involved. Instead, the employees were invited by their respective employers to participate in the study. The responsibility of explaining the purpose of the invitation to the selected employees rested with the employers. Subsequently, each employee independently created an account on the platform and provided their consent for their data to be utilized by the employer specifically for the purpose of predictive modeling. Once their account on the online platform was created, employees were asked to complete a forced-choice personality questionnaire. On average, it took approximately 12 min to complete the questionnaire, which consisted of 90 items. The personality questionnaire utilized a hierarchical model of personality based on the Five-Factor Model (FFM). It assessed 20 facets, with each personality trait being evaluated through four distinct facets. The scoring of each facet was done using Item Response Theory (IRT) modeling, and calibrated on a scale from 1 to 10, according to a Gaussian distribution. Following the completion of the assessment, each employee was, therefore, positioned and evaluated in terms of the 20 personality facets. This positioning allows us to understand and quantify the individual’s characteristics and tendencies across the various personality facets. Extensive research has demonstrated the questionnaire’s strong predictive validity ( x ¯ = 0.63), as well as its reliability, as measured by Cronbach’s alpha (α = 0.79) and test–retest reliability ( r = 0.80). Additionally, the questionnaire exhibits high sensitivity (δ = 0.96). The number of employees across the 208 training samples of our study varied from 20 employees to 151 ( M = 41).
• – Secondly, the performance of each employee was assessed by their respective direct manager. Managers autonomously accessed the online platform and assigned a rating to each employee within their respective training sample using a standardized scale ranging from 1 (indicating very poor performance) to 5 (reflecting excellent performance). A standardized scale was privileged to ensure objectivity, consistency, comparability and easiness of data collection. During the rating process, managers were prompted to consider the employee’s proficiency and objective job performance, such as revenue generation in the case of a sales occupation. To ensure accuracy of the performance ratings, definitions for each score were directly proposed within the online platform as guidance. This allowed for a comprehensive evaluation of each employee’s performance based on the manager’s insights and observations.

Summary of validity metrics of predictive models ( N = 208).

The predictive models used in this study were autonomously created by individual employers. All relevant data pertaining to each model, including the training sample used, performance score, and results of the regression analysis (i.e., the facets taken into account in the models and score’s expectation for each), were securely stored in the database, following GDPR regulations, of the online recruitment platform. This database served as a repository for the information related to the predictive models created by each employer and was re-used for the purpose of this study.

4.3. Procedure

The initial step of the procedure involved collecting data related to the 208 predictive models from the database. During this process, no filters or selection criteria other than previously mentioned were applied, and all the predictive models created by trained clients of the online recruitment platform between 2021 and 2022 were included. This approach ensured that a comprehensive dataset was obtained, encompassing all available models within the specified timeframe, without any exclusion or bias in the selection process. Author 1 and 3, being affiliated with the online recruitment platform, had convenient access to facilitate the data collection process. For each predictive model, a dataframe consisting of various variables was available. These variables encompassed the following information: (1) name of the company, (2) job category associated with the occupation, (3) specific occupation name, (4) country, (5) data regarding the users included in the training sample, including scores for each personality facet and performance score, in a JSON format (6) facets incorporated in the predictive model and the score expected on each facet, either a high score or a low score, and (7) performance metrics of the predictive model, including accuracy, recall, precision, and ROC AUC.

The second step of the procedure was to assess the potential adverse impact of the predictive models created regarding gender. For this, we constituted a global analysis sample of “potential candidates” who had already taken the personality assessment and had profiles on the online recruitment platform was utilized. These participants have registered on the platform at different times, motivated by various reasons such as receiving invitations from companies or simply wanting to explore and learn more about themselves through the assessments. This approach was chosen for several reasons: (1) utilizing the existing pool of individuals who already had profiles and had taken the personality assessment on the online platform allowed for convenient access to a substantial sample size, (2) although these individuals may not have applied to one of the 208 specific occupations studied, they represented a global population of individuals who could potentially apply for those occupations, broadening the scope of the analysis, and (3) by utilizing this approach, we were able to explore a wider range of predictive models compared to the limitations imposed by using real candidates or specific samples for all 208 occupations. By adopting this methodology on a global scale, we were able to successfully conduct this study on a large and diverse participant pool. The testing sample, therefore, consisted of individuals who met the following criteria: (1) created an account on the online assessment platform in 2022, (2) completed the same personality assessment as described earlier, and (3) provided consent for their anonymized data to be used for scientific and publication purposes. In this specific research, individuals were not directly informed or contacted. However, their data was used with their consent once they registered on the online platform. The analysis sample comprised 273,293 individuals, with 51% identifying as females and 49% as males. The majority of the sample was primarily from France ( n = 210,364, 77%) and held either a master’s degree ( n = 97,584, 36%) or a bachelor’s degree ( n = 96,405, 35%). The study involved access to specific information for each individual in the analysis sample. The available information included the following data points: (1) a score ranging from 1 to 10, representing the measurement of 20 personality facets through the use of a personality assessment employed in this research, and (2) the gender of the individual, categorized as either male or female. By utilizing this global sample, the methodology aimed to assess the potential impact of gender, providing a comprehensive understanding of how males and females scored in relation to each predictive model and the corresponding recommendations made by the scoring algorithm. For each individual within the analysis sample, a fit score was calculated, representing the level of alignment between their personality profile and the predictive model utilized. The fit score were ranging from 0 to 100%. For the purpose of the analysis, this fit score was calculated in a simple way. If the score of the candidate on a facet aligns with the expectation of the predictive model, the candidate was attributed a maximum score for the facet. If the score of the candidate on a facet is opposite to the expectation in the predictive model, the candidate was attributed a minimum score for the facet. If the score of the candidate on a facet taken into account is neutral, the candidate was attributed a medium score for the facet. Then, a simple formula calculates the fit score by summing the individual facet scores and dividing it by the total number of facets in the predictive model. The total result is then multiplied by 100 to express it as a percentage. A higher fit score, closer to 100%, indicated a stronger alignment between the candidate’s profile and the facets that explained performance in the occupation, suggesting a higher likelihood of success on the role. Overall, individuals in the analysis sample who scored above 60% or above the 70th percentile on a predictive model were considered as recommended candidates by the online recruitment platform. Others who fell below these thresholds were not considered recommended. The choice of this threshold was based on studies conducted by the online platform, which demonstrated that individuals scoring above the 70th percentile had better performance and retention rates in the months following their hiring ( Kubiak et al., 2023b ). Following this procedure, we obtained the fit scores of the 273,293 individuals composing the analysis sample for each of the 208 predictive models. The average fit score for females was 52.97 ( SD = 11.48), and 53.22 for males ( SD = 11.56).

4.4. Analysis

To analyze fairness and adverse impact, we applied the concept of impact ratio. The impact ratio is a statistical measure used to assess adverse impact in employment practices, particularly in the context of equal employment opportunity and fair hiring practices. It generally compares the selection rate of a protected group to the selection rate of a reference group (typically the group with the highest selection rate) within a specific job or employment process. The impact ratio is calculated by dividing the selection rate of the protected group by the selection rate of the reference group. In our first analysis, the impact ratio was calculated by dividing the recommendation rate for females (proportion of females who scored above 70th percentile or fit score above 60%) by the recommendation rate for males. Instead of using the selection rate as the metric, the recommendation rate was chosen for evaluation. This decision was made because the algorithm functions as a tool to provide recommendations to employers, rather than making independent decisions. The clients utilizing the online platform are the ultimate decision-makers. Therefore, in order to assess the fairness of the algorithm’s recommendations, rather than the fairness of human decisions, the recommendation rate was deemed more relevant for the research’s objective. While the focus of the analysis was on females as the protected class, considering evidence of discrimination against them, a reverse analysis was also conducted with males as the protected class. This allowed for a comprehensive evaluation of fairness across both genders. Guidelines from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ( U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], 1979 ), specifically the four-fifths rule, were followed to assess fairness. According to the rule, a selection tool, or a predictive model in the context of our study, with an impact ratio between 0.8 and 1.0 is generally considered fair. Impact ratios below the threshold of 0.8 indicate a disparate impact, meaning the algorithm or selection method tends to recommend more of one gender over the other. The impact ratios were examined using two approaches: (1) mean weighted impact ratio across all predictive models, and (2) impact ratios broken down by job category, providing a detailed analysis of fairness in each specific job category. By considering these measures, the study aimed to evaluate the fairness of the predictive models and identify any potential disparities in recommendation rates between genders, in accordance with EEOC standards.

In the first analysis, which considered females as the protected class when calculating the impact ratio (Female-Male), we identified 124 predictive models with impact ratios ranging from 0.74 to 1 (mean weighted impact ratio = 0.91; SD = 0.06). The remaining 84 models had impact ratios higher than 1, and were, therefore, considered in the second analysis, with males as the protected class. It is worth mentioning that only eight models from the 124 had impact ratios below 0.8, and were really close to the threshold defined by EEOC. Also, Cohen’s d showed no significant effect on average (mean | d | = 0.11). Results of analysis 1 are presented in Table 2 . In the second analysis (Male-Female), as expected, 84 models were identified, with impact ratios ranging from 0.71 to 0.99 (mean weighted impact ratio = 0.90; SD = 0.06). Only 3 models missed the 0.8 threshold, and Cohen’s d showed no significant effect on average (mean | d | = 0.11). Results of analysis 2 are presented in Table 3 .

Summary of results for analysis 1 (female-male; N = 124).

Summary of results for analysis 2 (male-female; N = 84).

To examine potential impact further, we examined the average impact ratio by job category. Results are presented in Table 4 and show that the average impact ratios are above the 0.8 threshold for every category. The lowest results were for the categories “human resources” and “management board” when males were considered as the minority group, with mean weighted impact ratios of 0.82. Even so, this is in line with EECO standards and supports our study hypothesis.

Mean impact ratios by job category ( N = 208).

Also, to simulate and test each predictive model, we chose to test them on a neutral sample composed of so-called “potential candidates” who were people derived from a global population. In practice, however, candidates who will be scored by the algorithm have higher chances of holding a similar and specific position, which is related to the predictive model (e.g., salespeople for a sales representative predictive model). We ran a preliminary analysis to estimate how testing the algorithm on a specific sample would impact the results. This analysis was conducted on three different occupations: project manager, customer service representative and technician. Overall, impact ratios did not differ significantly and were still matching the EEOC requirements. Results are presented in Table 5 . While promising, these results were obtained through analyzing three jobs only, and further investigation at a larger scale is required to ensure that results replicate with specific samples.

Comparison of impact ratios depending on the type of sample.

Results in brackets are those observed using a global sample.

6. Discussion

This research focus stemmed from alarmingly high gender discrimination that is ongoing in selection and assessment, despite legislation that should prevent discrimination on the basis of gender. To overcome such biases and improve selection, recent years have seen an increase in the use of algorithms in hiring decisions. Nevertheless, little is known about how these kinds of algorithms are used in practice, and some vendors of algorithmic pre-employment assessments are too opaque about the fairness of their solution ( Raghavan et al., 2020 ). Also, while these systems are increasingly subject to technical audits regarding their performance, there is still a lack of proof to support the claims being made by such tools ( Sloane et al., 2022 ). Still, new evidence has shown that using hiring algorithms could help in making better hiring and reducing human bias in selection ( Lakkaraju et al., 2017 ; Li et al., 2020 ; Will et al., 2022 ). These examples should not, however, hide other widely publicized and criticized practices, where the use of algorithms has contributed to exacerbating gender discrimination. Instead, it must open the way to the development and usage of more ethical algorithms, where the beneficial effects prevail. To address this issue, one must rely on data which are mostly gender-blind and are truly predictive of performance. Even if they are widely used in current hiring algorithms, pieces of information from the CV do not meet this double requirement, and force the reproduction of gender bias in selection. There is, indeed, a lot of gendered data in someone’s CV ( Parasurama et al., 2022 ), and simple algorithms can differentiate gender from CV with high accuracy, even after removing the most gendered data like the names, hobbies or gendered words ( Parasurama and Sedoc, 2021 ). On the contrary, data related to personality facets seems better suited for a hiring algorithm’s training, mostly because they are less impacted by gender compared to other data traditionally used in the hiring process and are valid predictors of job performance.

Drawing upon these conclusions, our study examined the gender equity of a novel personality-based hiring algorithm. The overarching aim was to establish whether the algorithm would recommend equal numbers of males and females for several occupations; thus, not being biased toward one gender or another. As hypothesized, results demonstrate that the algorithm does not show gender inequalities when recommending the best-suited candidates for the role, meaning there is no adverse impact. In this sense, impact ratios were in the recommended standard by the EEOC for 95% of the predictive models created. Only 5% of the predictive models fell short below and are considered as having a slight impact. These results illustrate that, when they are trained with the right data, algorithms could help in building more efficient selection processes, which are also fairer for women.

From a theoretical perspective, this work improves our knowledge about how to build gender-blind hiring algorithms by using data related to personality. Also, it complements other studies, by showing that biases and adverse impacts can be reduced even when screening facet-level. Our study demonstrates that while certain distinct differences may exist between males and females concerning specific facets, these disparities become less impactful when viewed within a broader constellation of multiple facets. By aggregating these characteristics with other facets that display similarity across genders, we effectively mitigate the potential for adverse impacts. This approach ensures a more balanced and fair assessment, underscoring the fact that individual variations do not necessarily lead to gender-based discrimination when considered in a comprehensive personality algorithm framework. Ultimately, the crucial question is not about these algorithms achieving perfect fairness in their predictions. Instead, it is about determining whether they enhance existing methods and surpass the current human-driven status quo . While the use of algorithms does raise essential and legitimate concerns, their potential for fostering more efficient and fairer decision-making processes cannot be overlooked, especially when they are trained with appropriate data. In particular, their potential to ensure a more balanced playing field for women is a significant step forward in achieving equity. In addition, our study provides evidence that even simple algorithms can effectively reduce gender discrimination. Many individuals have expressed concerns about using algorithmic hiring processes due to a lack of understanding ( Liem et al., 2018 ). However, our findings demonstrate that explainable algorithms can have a significant positive impact. By showcasing the potential of such algorithms, we aim to encourage the adoption of fair and unbiased decision-making tools in hiring.

Moreover, our conclusions are opening the way for future research about personality-based hiring algorithms. First, an interesting question arising from this work is about the capacity of such algorithms to be applied in practice, where they will probably be trained on male-dominated samples, as many could be forced to do due to the current disparities in the workplace. However, even if an algorithm is trained on a male-dominated sample, it could still provide fair outcomes when applied to a balanced or neutral sample, if it leverages data equally representative of both genders. This potential fairness arises from the algorithm’s reliance on well-distributed data, where the features it uses for prediction are equally prevalent in both males and females. For example, if an algorithm is trained to predict job performance based on facets like imagination, trust or self-efficacy. Although these traits might be learned from a male-dominated sample, they are not exclusive to any gender ( Kajonius and Johnson, 2018 ). Males and females alike can exhibit high levels of imagination, trust or self-efficacy. Therefore, if the algorithm focuses on these universally applicable facets rather than gender-specific features, it should provide fair and unbiased predictions when applied to a gender-balanced sample ( Kubiak et al., 2023a ). Second, it is still unclear whether these kinds of algorithms could display the same results for other kinds of discrimination, for example, disability-based discrimination, which remains intense ( Lippens et al., 2023 ). Third, even if our study showed that there was no adverse impact for 95% of the predictive models tested, we still need to address the 5% remaining: while their impact ratios are really close to the EECO requirements and do not fall lower than 0.71, some adjustments are required in order to use them in high-stakes hiring practice and be confident that they will not harm any group based on gender. For these models, future research could focus on addressing the diversity-validity dilemma, which concerns the tradeoff between selecting valid predictors of performance while minimizing adverse impact ( Pyburn et al., 2008 ; Rupp et al., 2020 ; Rottman et al., 2023 ). As such, it seems necessary to identify strategies to target facets within the predictive model that lower the impact ratio, and to propose alternatives. It could also foster the algorithm’s explainability, by being transparent about the predictive model limitation, and how one could improve it to make it fairer regarding gender while making the smallest compromises possible about validity. For example, studies could use a feature importance framework to iteratively prune biased features with the lowest predictive power from the model.

Our work also has several practical implications. First, given the prevailing talent shortage, employers are increasingly finding it challenging to fill roles effectively. As such, it is imperative they shift focus and explore alternate indicators of potential, beyond traditional markers like academic degrees, to truly uncover and understand the essence of talent and assess the employability of their candidates ( Chamorro-Premuzic, 2017 ). Employers can consider personality as a compelling alternative to traditional CV-based assessments, as it relates performance while being less susceptible to gender bias ( Schmidt et al., 2016 ; Sackett et al., 2022 ). In addition, it is becoming increasingly imperative for employers to demonstrate that their hiring practices and tools are devoid of biases, ensuring that no particular group is unfairly disadvantaged based on their gender ( Hunkenschroer and Kriebitz, 2023 ). Our study shows great potential in helping employers to accurately identify the underlying mechanisms of performance for a specific occupation and to reduce gender biases. That way, they might be able to hire people who are better suited for the role and perform better, and who are more diverse in terms of gender. Secondly, personality-based algorithms, by increasing the fairness of the hiring process, could probably promote organizational attractiveness. Indeed, considering the existing labor talent shortages and the significant role of an organization’s recruitment process perception in determining a candidate’s decision to accept a job offer ( Hausknecht et al., 2004 ), enhancing the perceived fairness of algorithmic recruitment tools carries substantial implications. Recent research showed that algorithm-driven hiring processes are perceived as less fair compared to human-only decisions by candidates ( Lavanchy et al., 2023 ) and that people feel less capable of influencing the outcome of an algorithm compared to human judgment ( Li et al., 2021 ; Hilliard et al., 2022 ). Interestingly, fairness mediates the association between an algorithm-based selection process and organizational attractiveness and the intention to further proceed with the selection process ( Köchling and Wehner, 2022 ). Consequently, it is in the best interest of employers to utilize personality-based algorithms, due to their increased fairness, to improve their attractiveness among potential candidates. This ensures that candidates are not discouraged or deterred from the process due to the perception of algorithmic unfairness. Thirdly, implementing an algorithm-based evaluation system could potentially boost the number of female applicants for a company and enhance the completion rates for the assessment process. This is due to the observed tendency of women being more inclined to complete an assessment when informed that the evaluation is conducted by an algorithm, rather than a human recruiter ( Avery et al., 2023 ). Such a shift could play a pivotal role in fostering gender diversity within organizations by expanding the pool of female candidates applying for jobs. Heilman (1980) found that both male and female evaluators made significantly more favorable personnel decisions when females constituted 25% or more of the total candidate pool. Thus, increasing the representation of females in the candidates pool through algorithm-based evaluations could lead to more balanced hiring outcomes. Fourthly, our study serves as a useful guide for employers navigating forthcoming legislation such as New York’s AI hiring law. Recently enacted, the NYC Automated Employment Decision Tool law mandates employers using AI in hiring to disclose its use to candidates. Further, it necessitates annual independent audits to demonstrate the absence of discriminatory practices in their systems. Moreover, candidates are granted the right to request information from potential employers about what data the technology collects and analyzes. Non-compliance with these regulations could result in fines of up to $1,500. Our study helps employers align their processes with these requirements, paving the way for transparent, accountable, and unbiased algorithm-driven hiring.

7. Limitations

Several limitations of this research should be taken into consideration. First, while the strength of our study was that it considered 208 occupations across 21 categories, we did not include occupations that are more stereotypically judged as being gender specific. Therefore, future research can aim to retest our algorithm on an even wider array of job categories and focus specifically on occupations which are perceived to be predominately feminine. For example, studies showed that occupations related to caregiving are seen as being more feminine ( Couch and Sigler, 2001 ), or that it persists presumptions about the gender of people employed in healthcare, notably nurses ( Ekberg and Ekberg, 2017 ). Our sample unfortunately did not include occupations from these highly stereotypical categories. We could not include these occupations in our study, as none of the participating employers were recruiting for such roles. In fact, the employers utilizing the online platform were primarily focused on filling business-related positions (see Table 4 ).

Secondly, our study’s scope was limited to gender as a characteristic, which leaves room for further exploration. Recent research indicates the existence of intersectional effects between various attributes. For instance, Derous and Pepermans (2019) uncovered a “double jeopardy” situation for Maghreb/Arab female applicants applying for high-cognitive demand roles–an issue not apparent in applications for low-cognitive demand jobs. Such findings emphasize the necessity for more nuanced investigations that consider the interactions between multiple characteristics. Future research could delve into the potential adverse impacts of personality-based algorithms by examining intersectionality, such as the combined effect of gender and ethnicity. This could pave the way for more comprehensive understanding and better refinement of fair algorithmic-based hiring practices.

Third, our study tested the algorithm on males and females, as data collection for these genders was simpler and more easily accessible. However, we acknowledge that there are numerous gender non-conforming categories. Unfortunately, we did not find any satisfactory published research which studied how personality differs between males, females and people identifying as gender diverse. The only evidence we have drawn upon is the analysis proposed by Anzani et al. (2020) , which delved into the personality patterns of a transgender cohort compared with normative samples of cisgender females and males. Their findings revealed that transgender women scored lower than cisgender women on two primary domains (Negative Affectivity and Psychoticism) and on seven facets. Transgender men, meanwhile, scored lower than cisgender men on Antagonism and five other facets. However, these results were derived from relatively small sample sizes of transgender individuals, all of whom were pursuing medical treatments. Consequently, these findings may not accurately represent the broader transgender and gender-non-conforming population. This indicates the necessity for future investigation into the algorithm’s gender neutrality, especially when considering the inclusion of diverse groups beyond the traditional gender binary.

Finally, we should also mention potential bias in how the rating of each employee (from 1 to 5) was made by their manager. Indeed, even though managers were prompted to reflect on the employee’s productivity and objective performance, no other specific guideline was proposed. As a result, there is a chance that different managers could have reflected upon different types of performance when making their ratings. Gender bias has also frequently been identified in performance appraisal. For example, (1) Correll et al. (2020) showed that it exists differences in the language used to describe females and males performance and that the same behaviors could impact performance ratings differently depending on the employee’s gender, (2) Benson et al. (unpublished) revealed differences in potential ratings between gender, and, (3) Rivera and Tilcsik (2019) showed that the number of scale points used for the evaluations significantly affect the size of the gender gap in male-dominated fields. Still, there are reasons to believe that the ratings made were accurate estimates of objective performance: (1) as shown by Jackson and Furnham (2001) , biases such as halo do not necessarily reduce rating accuracy, and supervisor ratings are useful measures of overall performance, (2) managerial ratings have a good corrected mean correlation with objective performance for salesperson job performance ( Jaramillo et al., 2005 ), which is a type of role composing one-third of our total sample, (3) ratings have been shown to be more accurate for unskilled, skilled and professional workers compared to managerial occupations ( Miller and Thornton, 2006 ), and these three levels of occupations are the most represented in our sample, and (4) each of the scale’s point were clearly defined in the rating form. Other studies should, however, try to measure performance in a more structured and controlled manner. Furthermore, future research should also incorporate a more comprehensive understanding of job performance, considering a wide range of relevant factors. For instance, Rotundo and Sackett (2002) pinpointed three broad components of job performance: task performance, citizenship behavior, and counterproductive performance. They further demonstrated that two primary elements of performance–tasks performance and counterproductive performance–were the more weighted by raters. Recent research also suggests an increasing interest in other types of performance. Contextual performance, for example, includes behaviors that contribute to the social and psychological environment ( Ramos-Villagrasa et al., 2022 ). Adaptive performance, on the other hand, pertains to an employee’s ability to modify their thoughts, behaviors, and emotions to adapt to their evolving work environment. Such adaptations can encompass adjustments to new technologies, procedures, business processes, or work roles ( Baard et al., 2014 ). Given that meta-analyses have revealed that traits have differential relationships with contextual ( He et al., 2019 ) and adaptive performance ( Huang et al., 2014 ), it would be prudent to incorporate these insights in future research.

8. Conclusion

Gender stereotypes are incredibly stable. For example, Offermann and Coats (2018) showed that ILTs (Implicit Leadership Theories) did not change during the last 20 years, despite organizational and societal changes. Also, large-scale cross-national field experiments highlight occupational gender composition ( Birkelund et al., 2022 ; Adamovic and Leibbrandt, 2023 ), showing disparate proportions of individuals of a particular gender working in specific occupations. This is particularly salient in online hiring, which triggers the use of cognitive shortcuts about the role-specific abilities of each gender ( Galperin, 2021 ). This persistence of gender discrimination in hiring, despite all the efforts made for so many years, calls for the identification of strategies that will lead to an effective and lasting response. The findings from our research suggest that personality-based hiring algorithms serve as an effective solution, demonstrating non-adverse impact in most instances. In other words, they do not unfairly disadvantage certain groups of people based on their gender. Properly trained and used, these algorithms could help organizations to build fairer decision-making processes.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required from the participants or the participants’ legal guardians/next of kin in accordance with the national legislation and institutional requirements because written informed consent from the participants was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author contributions

EK and SB: conceptualization, methodology, data collection, and data analysis. EK: supervision. EK and ME: writing—original draft. All authors contributed to the writing—review and editing and read and agreed to the current version of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

ME, EK, and SB were employed by AssessFirst. The remaining author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Autocratic Genderwashing: Gender‐Equality Reforms in Serbia

• Jelena Lončar Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Serbia

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Guest Essay

The Gender Gap Is Now a Gender Gulf

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the coalitions supporting President Biden and Donald Trump on Nov. 5, 2024, will be significantly different from those on Nov. 3, 2020.

On May 22, Split Ticket , a self-described “group of political and election enthusiasts” who created a “website for their mapping, modeling and political forecasting,” published “ Cross Tabs at a Crossroads : Six Months Out.”

Split Ticket aggregated “subgroup data from the cross tabs of 12 reputable national 2024 general election polls” and compared them with 2020 election results compiled by Pew, Catalist and A.P.

Combining data from multiple surveys allowed Split Ticket to analyze large sample sizes and reduce margins of error for key demographic groups.

The Split Ticket report identified the groups in which Trump and Biden are gaining or losing ground.

In Biden’s case, the analysis shows the president falling behind his 2020 margins among Black voters (down 23 percentage points); urban voters (down 15 points); independents, including so-called partisan leaners (down 14); Latinos (down 13); moderates (down 13); and voters ages 18 to 29 (down 12).

“These losses,” the report noted, “reflect withheld support for Biden, as Trump has gained less than what Biden has lost to voters declaring for undecided/other. In other words, they’re unhappy with Biden, but have not realigned with Trump.”

Biden did not fully make up for his losses with gains in other groups: Republicans (plus 3 percentage points); rural voters (plus 3); voters 65 and over (plus 2); voters 50 to 64 (plus 1) and white, non-college voters (plus 1).

Even though April was one of Trump’s worst months in terms of Black support, the study found that

among Black voters, in aggregate Trump is outperforming his 2020 margin by a whopping 23 points. Relative to 2020, Biden has lost more support (–16 points) than Trump has gained (+7 points), with the remaining 9 percent moving to undecided/other. If Trump matches his April polling vote share (15 percent) among Black voters, it would be nearly double what he received in 2020, and would be the strongest performance by a Republican presidential nominee in nearly 50 years.

Among Latino voters, according to Split Ticket,

Trump is outperforming his 2020 margin by 13 points. Once again, compared to 2020, Biden has lost more support (–9 points) than Trump has gained (+3 points). If Trump ends up winning 40 percent of Latino voters, it would match the highest performance by a Republican presidential candidate in the last 50+ years, George W. Bush in 2004.

White voters were far less volatile, according to Split Ticket:

Biden has dropped by 4 points, and Trump has dropped by 3 points, with the balance moving to undecided/other. Among white college grads, Biden’s vote share has dropped by five points since 2020, while Trump’s has dropped by 1.5 points. Among white non-college grads, Biden’s vote share has dropped by three points since 2020, while Trump’s has dropped by four points.

Much of the focus this year has been on young male voters, who are one of the critical wild cards of 2024.

“Young men have repeatedly been found in recent years to be apathetic toward voting , with young women in recent election cycles constantly turning out to vote at higher rates than young men,” Elaine Kamarck and Jordan Muchnick , both of the Brookings Institution, wrote in a recent essay, “ The Growing Gender Gap Among Young People .”

Kamarck and Muchnick noted the conflicting possibilities: “There are more women than men in the country; they make up a larger portion of the electorate; they are more motivated to vote, and vote blue.”

But, they added, the disaffection of young men has potentially significant implications:

We may be in the opening stages of a social backlash to the progressive social movements of the past decades. When significant societal change occurs, some may feel left behind or cheated. Right now, young men fall into that camp.

They added, “If the aim is to build a fairer equitable future where all feel they have a role and are respected, the polling of Gen Z appears to show we are moving in the opposite direction.”

Two years ago, the Survey Center on American Life , a project of the American Enterprise Institute, conducted a poll, the results of which provide insight into the defection of young men of all races and ethnicities from the Democratic Party.

The survey, Politics, Sex and Sexuality : The Growing Gender Divide in American Life, asked 2007 adults 18 and over a series of questions about masculinity and femininity. Men were asked to define themselves as “very masculine,” “somewhat masculine” or “not too or not at all masculine.”

Among Republican men, a majority, 54 percent, described themselves as “very masculine,” 39 percent as “somewhat masculine” and 7 percent as “not too or not at all masculine.”

Among Democratic men, 33 percent said they were “very masculine,” 53 percent “somewhat masculine” and 12 percent “not too or not at all masculine.”

The authors of an analysis of the survey, Daniel A. Cox , Beatrice Lee and Dana Popky , all of the American Enterprise Institute, found that in the case of women and self-defined femininity, there was only a modest partisan division: “Women across the political spectrum are roughly as likely to identify as feminine. Roughly four in 10 Democratic women (42 percent) and Republican women (39 percent) say they are traditionally feminine.”

In other words, self-defined femininity does not differentiate Republican and Democratic women, but self-defined masculinity reflects a key partisan division among men.

Where do two crucial Democratic constituencies, Black and Hispanic men, fit in? It turns out that in terms of self-defined masculinity, they are far closer to Republican men than to Democratic men, according to Cox, Lee and Popky: “A majority of Black men (55 percent) and Hispanic men (52 percent) say they are very manly or masculine.” On this measure, there is statistically virtually no difference between Republican men, Hispanic men and Black men.

In a June 2023 essay, Cox asks in the headline, “ Are Young Men Becoming Conservative? ” He points out that the trends among young men are less easily explained than the trends among young women.

Young men, Cox wrote, “have not had the same type of formative experiences as young women.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion,

was a political accelerant for young women. The #MeToo movement and Donald Trump’s election were seminal political events in the lives of many young women. These experiences continue to shape the outlook of young women who increasingly perceive society as hostile to women and believe that the experiences of other women in the U.S. are connected to what happens in their own lives.

There were, in Cox’s view, no “comparable experiences for young men.”

Without formative political experiences, Cox argued,

what emerges is a type of political apathy. Young men are less engaged on key political issues. For young women, three issues are uniquely salient: climate change, gun policy and abortion. Young men express far less interest in these issues. Young men seem to care more about economic issues — inflation is high on their list of priorities — but they appear less invested in culture war topics or issues that do not affect them directly. Despite being generally supportive of abortion rights, it is hardly a priority for young men. In a poll we released late last year, young men were approximately 30 points less likely than young women to say abortion was a critical concern (32 percent versus 61 percent, respectively).

All of this led Cox to ask:

Are young men adversaries or allies when it comes to issues such as gender equality? Young men appear to be quiescent when it comes to ceding the historic advantages men have enjoyed in American society. Whether this is due to the fact they believe these changes are just and fair or simply inevitable is unclear.

At the same time, “nearly half of young men believe that American society has become ‘too soft and feminine.’”

The growing gender divide between young men and women in the United States is part of a decade-long international trend, according to a survey of 300,000 men and women in 20 mostly advanced nations.

In “ Polarization Extends Into Gender via Young Adults Who Lose Hope ,” Glocalities , a marketing firm based in the Netherlands, found that

young women have significantly strengthened their embrace of liberal and anti-patriarchal values over the last decade while young men increasingly are lagging behind in this trend. In 2014 older men (aged 55 to 65) were the most conservative and younger men (18 to 24) were significantly more liberal; almost 10 years later, young men have become even less liberal than older men.

Both here and abroad, Glocalities reported:

Feelings of hopelessness, societal disillusionment and rebelling against cosmopolitan values partly explain the rise of radical right anti-establishment parties. Now young men are stagnating in their progress toward liberal values. The radical right in many countries increasingly resonates with disillusioned conservative segments among them, who do not feel that establishment parties are serving their interests. This trend has already impacted elections in Poland, Portugal, Germany, Netherlands and South Korea. If policy priorities and electoral strategies remain unchanged, this trend will likely impact the European elections in June, the U.S. presidential elections in November and more to come.

While feelings of hopelessness are common among young people of both sexes, the sense of despair is pushing males and females in opposing directions. Glocalities survey determined that there is a growing “anti-authoritarian trend among young women” who

are more worried about sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect and mental health problems. These worries explain the increasing anti-patriarchal trend among young women and, for example also the rise of the #MeToo movement since it went viral in 2017. Young women demand better prospects in combination with social justice and equality at home, in the workplace and beyond. Globally, young women are likely the most liberal group in human history.

Young men, in contrast, are “more focused on competition, bravery and honor” and “are more patriarchal in their orientations overall when compared with women and even when compared with older men.” The radical right “increasingly resonates with conservative segments among young men.”

One section of the Glocalities study focused on the United States. The study measured trends from 2014 to 2023 among age cohorts of men and women on two scales — one on hope versus despair, the other on control and patriarchy versus freedom and autonomy.

The despair-versus-hope dimension was based on questions “about feeling let down by society and feelings of pessimism and disillusionment about the future.” The control-versus-freedom dimension was “based on a set of strongly differentiating values regarding support for patriarchy versus support for emancipative values including gender role flexibility, gay marriage and unmarried couples cohabitating.”

The survey found that over the past decade, men over the age of 55 became happier and their values moved from controlling and patriarchal toward freedom and autonomy. Men ages 34 to 54 basically stayed in place. Men 18 to 34 moved decisively toward despair and modestly toward patriarchal values (and away from emancipatory values).

Women of all ages became stronger in their belief in freedom and autonomy. Young women, however, stood out, moving almost as much as young men from hope to despair.

I asked Martijn Lampert , the research director of Glocalities, to elaborate on developments over the past 10 years in the United States, including the influence of the #MeToo movement. He replied in an email, “The #MeToo movement globally was a strong driver for young women to become more liberal and emancipated, but we do not consider the #MeToo movement specifically as a driver for young men to shift to the right.”

Instead, in the case of young men,

we interpret the stagnating progress of men on the control-freedom axis to be caused by factors that affect their ambitions first and foremost. Given that their values focus a lot on success, status, recognition et cetera, the current situation does not facilitate this ambition. Because of this they not only become more pessimistic (as we see happening in the United States even more than in Europe), but also become more susceptible to populist forces and a “politics of bravery.’’

Young men, Lampert continued, “are not necessarily conservative in a traditional sense (and in the United States, young men are still more freedom oriented than older men) but are more geared toward ambition, bravery, honor, innovation, loyalty, success, wealth and luxury.”

While young men, in Lampert’s view, are not “a prime target for Trump or the MAGA movement, because Trump positions himself as culturally conservative while young men are still more emancipated and liberal, there certainly are young men who resonate with Trump’s bravery, ambition and his emphasis on success, honor and loyalty.”

What does the future hold?

“Based on the research outcomes, we expect the conflict between emancipatory/feminist values and patriarchal beliefs among young men and women to become more intense.”

Melissa Deckman , the chief executive of P.R.R.I. and author of the forthcoming book “ The Politics of Generation Z : How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy,” described by email what she found in her research: First and foremost, “Gen Z women are unique from older generations of women in that they are more engaged in politics than their male counterparts.”

But, Deckman added, “while Gen Z women are fiercely feminist and progressive, Gen Z men are more ideologically diverse. P.R.R.I.’s study on Gen Z shows a gender gap, certainly, on ideology, but Gen Z men are still slightly more likely to self-identify as liberal than conservative.”

Deckman provided The Times with P.R.R.I. poll data showing that among young voters ages 18 to 25, women identify themselves as decisively Democratic (41 percent, compared with 18 percent Republican) and firmly liberal (47 percent, compared with 24 conservative).

Men ages 18 to 25 are Democratic by a much smaller margin (30 percent, compared with 24 percent) and much less liberal (38 percent, compared with 31 percent).

More ominous for Democrats are P.R.R.I.’s data on 13-to-17-year-olds, who will soon become eligible to vote.

Self-described partisanship among girls ages 13 to 17 was 31 percent Democratic to 20 percent Republican, an 11-point Democratic advantage, compared with a 23-point Democratic advantage among women 18 to 25.

Among boys ages 13 to 17, 24 percent said they were Democrats, and 23 percent said they were Republican, a one-point Democratic advantage, compared with the eight-point Democratic edge among men 18 to 25.

In their 2020 paper “ Precarious Manhood Predicts Support for Aggressive Policies and Politicians ,” Sarah H. DiMuccio , a consultant with the Danish firm Mannaz , and Eric D. Knowles , a professor of psychology at N.Y.U., suggested another set of reasons for Trump’s appeal to some men:

Perhaps more than any politician in recent history, Donald Trump has rooted his political persona in traditional notions of masculinity. As a candidate and as president, Trump presents himself as dominant, unyielding and virile. From threatening foreign nations with attack to alluding favorably to the size of his penis and testosterone levels, the president’s behavior suggests a desire to place his manhood beyond reproach.

In this light, DiMuccio and Knowles wrote,

we argue that support for harsh political policies, Trump and the present-day Grand Old Party reflects (in part) the psychology of precarious manhood. On this account, some men harbor doubts about their masculinity, which they, in turn, seek to reaffirm through voting behavior and policy preferences that can be characterized as “politically aggressive.”

The authors cited research showing that

laypeople tend to associate the Republican Party with masculinity and the Democratic Party with femininity. Moreover, a content analysis of primary debates in 2012 and 2016 found that Republican candidates utilized more aggressive discourse against their intraparty opponents than did Democrats — with Donald Trump proving to be the most rhetorically aggressive candidate in the history of American presidential debates.

To test their argument, DiMuccio and Knowles conducted a detailed geographic analysis of internet searches for subjects they determined signal anxiety over masculinity or precarious masculinity. The searches included hair loss, steroids, Viagra and more salacious subjects.

They then correlated the data with presidential voting in 2008, 2012 and 2016. In the case of the two earlier contests, Obama-McCain and Obama-Romney, there was no strong linkage between presidential voting and the level of precarious masculinity internet searches.

In the 2016 contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton, however, DiMuccio and Knowles found that “Trump received a higher share of votes in media markets where precarious masculinity-related searches were particularly popular and that this relationship held after adjusting for a range of search-based and demographic covariates.”

Why did the linkage between presidential voting and precarious masculinity emerge with Trump but not in the previous elections?

The authors’ answer:

Trump and the Republican Party he leads appear more consistently aggressive than high-profile G.O.P. politicians of the recent past — including Mitt Romney and John McCain.

“While the recent ideological evolution of the Republican Party may not have occurred without Trump,” the authors went on to say, it is “likely that these changes will far outlast Trump as a political force. Thus, we believe the link between precarious masculinity and Republican voting will generalize to future elections.”

Biden’s struggles with young men, however, have far deeper roots than precarious masculinity.

In 1949 the chemist Carl Djerassi and his co-workers synthesized norethisterone , a potent available progestin that eventually led to the emergence of oral contraceptives . For his obituary, The Guardian used the headline “ How the Inventor of the Pill Changed the World for Women .”

With the backing of two liberal Supreme Court decisions — Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, overturning a state law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives, and Roe v. Wade in 1973, legalizing abortion nationwide — the birth control pill set in motion the slow but steady emancipation of women and the erosion of men’s dominance in politics and in society writ large.

In this context, the struggle over the 2024 election is the latest chapter in a long saga.

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An earlier version of this article misstated details of an analysis comparing previous and recent support for President Biden. The previous data is from 2020, not 2000, and the differences in support are in percentage points, not percentages. The article also misstated the title of a paper by Sarah H. DiMuccio and Eric D. Knowles. It is “Precarious Manhood Predicts Support for Aggressive Policies and Politicians,” not “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.”

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall