sample research proposal gender studies

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essays Samples >
• Essay Types >
• Research Proposal Example

Gender Research Proposals Samples For Students

109 samples of this type

Regardless of how high you rate your writing skills, it's always a worthy idea to check out an expertly written Research Proposal example, especially when you're handling a sophisticated Gender topic. This is exactly the case when WowEssays.com catalog of sample Research Proposals on Gender will come in useful. Whether you need to think up an original and meaningful Gender Research Proposal topic or survey the paper's structure or formatting peculiarities, our samples will provide you with the necessary data.

Another activity area of our write my paper website is providing practical writing assistance to students working on Gender Research Proposals. Research help, editing, proofreading, formatting, plagiarism check, or even crafting completely original model Gender papers upon your demand – we can do that all! Place an order and buy a research paper now.

Good Women Empowerment In A Conservative Society Research Proposal Example

Criminal justice research proposal example, does the gender and race of a victim influence perception of the jurors, gender differences in dieting research proposal samples, introduction.

Don't waste your time searching for a sample.

Get your research proposal done by professional writers!

Just from $10/page

Free Research Proposal About Social Media, Swearing And Gender: Identifying New Trends In Language

Women in media research proposal, women in media, free gender inequality at the workplace research proposal sample, good example of women discrimination in the workplace; organizational research proposal, commitment - saudi arabia, free research proposal about the decline of men, research proposal on diversity at the workplace, research proposal on what are men and women.

Is the word man, restricted just to the representation of the male gender and woman to the female gender or is there any evidence of differentiation between the two major human species? Primarily there are mixed notions about the use of the word sex and gender to distinguish men and women. Sex is the genetic demarcation of male and female whereas gender is a range of anatomical, psychological and behavioral characteristics distinctive between masculinity and femininity. Today, however, as males and females, we expect things, of each other which our ancestors would never have expected (Lofas, MacMillan, 1995).

Men symbolize masculinity and women, femininity.

Research proposal on gender discrimination and the workforce, sample research proposal on gender stereotypes in fairytales – a research proposal, free research proposal about gender awareness in information technology companies (7 pages), redefining fairytales: once upon a time research proposals example.

INTRODUCTION

Free Gender And Violent Offending: Equality As Victims Research Proposal Sample

Good gender inequality research proposal example, good sexism in the workplace in saudi arabia research proposal example, biasness in children research proposal example, are women in public office held to a higher standard than men research proposal sample, research purpose, gender wage gap research proposals examples, example of research proposal on concept paper, research proposal on gender and gender-fluidity.

Gender is an incredibly broad topic, and one that is growing in popularity in terms of discussion. How someone identifies with regards to their gender certainly changes everything, from the way their view the world to how other people in the world view them as a person.

Education Research Proposal Samples

Research proposal on need for the study, is gender (male and female) a factor in memory loss in elderly with alzheimer’s disease, child sexual abuse: exemplar research proposal to follow, abortion research proposal samples, introduction and theoretical framework.

Abortion can surely be taken to be a physical as well as mental strain for the females. It needs to be reckoned that abortion and the factors influencing it are highly influenced by the issues related to gender inequality and patriarchy. Ideally the females should have the utmost liberty and decision-making power in matters relating to child-birth as well as abortion. But, in practice, the scenario is quite different with the predominance of males coming into play in such a major decision of life.

Statement of the Problem

Good example of representation of female masculinity on television research proposal, good research proposal on hiv and gender, free research proposal on attractiveness of male offenders.

Answer to Question

A. Variables 1. IV #1: Ordinary manipulated between

Levels: Robbery

Forgery 2. IV #2: Attractive manipulated between

Forgery 3. DV: the mean number of sentencing months determined using arithmetic test

B. Hypotheses

Racial bias in drug in related arrests in united state of america research proposal sample, research proposal on diversity management in contemporary companies, i: introduction, research proposal on social implications that influence younger people to want to stay slim, good statement of the problem research proposal example, research proposal on female gender roles in ancient or modern chinese society, research proposal about cyberbullying among 13-19 y.o. schoolchildren, good example of research proposal on research question, preventing the use of tobacco among youth and young adults research proposal, mathematics.

Regina M. Benjamin, M.D., M.B.A. Surgeon General Authors: Regina M. Benjamin, M.D., M.B.A. Surgeon General

Research Questions:

Example of legalizing marijuana research proposal, experimental plan (week 3), research proposal on loneliness, research methods statistics study, good example of cultural diversity at advocate health care research proposal, free effectivity of fenwick’s recruitment and selection process research proposal example.

at incorporating diversity and providing opportunities for training

Challenges And Barriers That Impact Women Participating In Continuing Higher Education Research Proposals Examples

Challenges and barriers that impact women participating in continuing higher education., free research proposal on the relationship between preschool programs and kindergarten readiness, example of research proposal on global domestic violence against women, research proposal on human trafficking, research proposal on self confidence in children with aging parents, example of the role of gender among turkish family: a case of women's labor force research proposal.

Thesis Statement Facing the challenges imposed by the Islamic tradition and the social changes generated by the modern society, Turkish families are in a phase of transition, in which the women’s role becomes more pregnant. Although there are encountered various difficulties in finding work and the employment in Turkey is still far from being equal between men and women, the recent trends and the changes in the social structure indicate that women tend to emancipate, jumping from their traditional role linked to the household, outside this universe, by finding jobs and becoming financially independent.

Research Proposal On Coping Strategies Used By African American Women To Deal With Racism And Sexism

Free effect of social networking media on face-to-face communication behaviors and social interaction skills research proposal sample, marital satisfaction and work-family balance research proposals examples, marital satisfaction and work-family conflict, religion and law impact on marriage research proposal example, research design research proposals example, example of two cases under consideration research proposal, research proposal on glass ceiling effect, free the effects of workplace diversity training on team performance in call centers in saudi arabia research proposal sample, chapter one: introduction, good example of research proposal on the effects of multicultural classrooms on early childhood education, chapter one, good alcohol consumption patterns effect on consumer behavior research proposal example, multivariate analysis, coordination game: minimum effort research proposal samples, literature review, good research proposal on sociology: do villains in movies cause/are an, free research proposal about why women stay in abusive relationships.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Thesis & Proposal

<—Back to Ph.D. program requirements.

Ph.D. Thesis

Each student will complete a dissertation based on original research conducted by the candidate on a topic in women and gender studies, approved by the Supervisory Committee. The dissertation must constitute a significant contribution to the knowledge of the field, and must be based on research conducted while registered for the Ph.D. Program. It will be submitted and evaluated according to the procedures specified by the School of Graduate Studies.

Ph.D. Proposal

A student’s research formally begins with the submission of a dissertation proposal to the Dissertation Committee. The Dissertation Committee consists of at least three faculty members including a supervisor from the WGSI graduate faculty. The dissertation proposal is normally about 20-30 pages (not including references); it should draw in significant part on the work done for the comprehensive exams. The proposal is expected to: state the issue that the doctoral project seeks to address; situate the research within the relevant literatures and debates; indicate the contribution that the research is anticipated to make; and describe the methods and approaches to be employed in the research.  It should include a bibliography and a tentative timeline for completion of different stages of the dissertation.

The student will submit the proposal to all Dissertation Committee Members who will review the proposal for approval after the student’s satisfactory completion of the written submission and oral exam.

The dissertation proposal will be accepted no later than  August 31 st   of the second year of Ph.D. studies  for students admitted with an M.A. degree; it will be accepted no later than  December 31 st   of the third year of Ph.D. studies  for direct-entry students.

Students whose projects involve the study of human subjects must submit an ethics protocol and have it approved before field work begins.  Ethics approvals should be submitted in time for review by the Research Ethics Boards and in any event no later than the deadline for the submission of the dissertation proposal.  The review process normally takes 6-8 weeks; students should review the following websites to obtain more details on this process:

• http://www.research.utoronto.ca/faculty-and-staff/research-ethics-and-protections/humans-in-research/
• http://www.research.utoronto.ca/forms/protocol-submission-for-supervised-and-sponsored-research/
• Meeting dates of REBs: http://www.research.utoronto.ca/about/boards-and-committees/research-ethics-boards-reb/

Sample Independent Research Topics

A centerpiece of the Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe program is the independent field research that students carry out on a topic chosen by each student in consultation with the Program Director prior to arrival in Europe. Drawing on skills developed in the feminist and queer theory and methodology seminars, students select appropriate research methods and conduct a sustained research project with a transnational, cross-cultural, and comparative focus, based on resources located and/or developed by the student in the countries visited.

Below is a sampling of research conducted by past WGSE participants:

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

• I Don’t Want to Be a Man. I Want to Be Just Me: Discursive Practices of Real Men. Attitudes Towards Masculinity Among Males in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
• Sex Education and Hetero-normativity in Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands.
• The Status of Women in Science in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland.
• Welfare Policies and Women’s Independence across Western and Central Europe.
• Public Bathrooms as Gender-Policing Spaces in Germany, Netherlands, Poland and the UK.
• Tracing Transmemories for Memorial Candle Grandchildren 
• Empowered or Exploited? Women and the Sex Industry in Eastern and Western Europe. 
• Gender Advertising in Dutch, German and Czech Women’s Magazines. 
• Lots of Mothers and a Father too? Parental Leave Policies and Gendered Representations of Care in Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands 
• There Is No Business like Show Business: Male Sex Work and the Performance of Power and Control.
• Same-Sex Marriages:  A Question of Legitimacy, A Problem of Privilege 
• Research Experiences Exploring Trans Social Policy in Europe: Gender-Sensitive Sexuality Education as a Tool for Gender Mainstreaming in Europe.
• Parental Resources and Reproductive Rights within the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic
• The Impacts of Fatphobia on Fat Women in the Netherlands and Germany
• Catholic Politics: How Relations Between Church and State Affect the Lives of European Women.
• Queer and Jewish in Europe: An Oral History Project
• Immigration and Muslim Women’s Issues in the Netherlands and Germany. 
• Religion and Reproductive Rights in Germany, the CR and Poland. 
• Towards a Jewish Women’s Identity: The European Feminist Approach.
• European Public Art focusing on Violence against Women. 
•  LGBTQ Art, Queer Space, and Creativity: Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic
• Gender Issues in the Graffiti and Street Art in Berlin, London, and Krakow 

Political Science

• Bodies and Borders: Gendered Figures in Public Spaces as Sites of National Identity Formation in Krakow, Prague, and Berlin.
• The European Women’s Lobby’s Policies concerning Sex Trafficking 
• Women in Transition: The Post-Socialist Experience of Women in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
• Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women in Europe 
• Barriers Beyond Legislation: Abortion Access and Pro-Choice Activism in Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands. 
• Autonomy, Anarchism, and the Individual: Accounts of Creating and Living in Collective Space in the Netherlands and Germany 
• Legislating Lust: A Comparative Analysis of the Legal Frameworks on Prostitution. 
• The Effects of the Anti-Genderist Movement on the Pro-Abortion Rights NGO Women on Web

Cross-Cultural Studies

• The Perception of Fatness in the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, the UK, and the US
• Parental Gender Roles and “Male Role Models” in Lesbian-Parented Families: Across Three Generations in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Czech Republic 
• Transgender Identity in Europe from a Cross-cultural Perspective. 
• Policy-making and Accessibility: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland.
• Affective Engagements in Online Spaces: A case study of Dutch, German and US Feminist-of-Color Collectives.
• Sitting at the Table of Power: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of the Context and Meaning of Disability Inclusion and Activism in the Netherlands, Germany, and the USA. 
• Going and Growing Home: The Postponed Homecomings of Mixed-Race American, Afro-German and Dutch Indonesian Women. 
• Towards a Geography of (Queer) Urban Sexualities: A Comparative Survey and Examination of LGBT Spaces and Queer Sites of Resistance in Berlin, Prague and Krakow. 
•  I am Not a Feminist, But . . .  Different Conceptualizations of Feminism in Germany, the Netherlands, the CR and Poland.
• Latine Migrants in Europe
• Vietnamese Migrant Communities in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland
• White Innocence, and Responses to the Traveling Black Body in The Netherlands, Germany, and Czechia
• Experiences of LGBTQ Individuals in Counseling and Therapy Services in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the US

Anthropology

• Combatting Femme Invisibility through Femme-inist Ethnography. 
• Historical Insights into Dutch and German Cultures through Swear Words

• Utility Menu

Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

• Mailing List
• Past Thesis Topics
• Concentration Requirements
• Junior Tutorial
• Senior Tutorial
• Undergraduate Secondary Field
• Career Paths
• Forms and Downloads

• USF Research
• USF Libraries

Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > Women's and Gender Studies > Theses and Dissertations

Women's and Gender Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2023 2023.

Social Media and Women Empowerment in Nigeria: A Study of the #BreakTheBias Campaign on Facebook , Deborah Osaro Omontese

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Going Flat: Challenging Gender, Stigma, and Cure through Lesbian Breast Cancer Experience , Beth Gaines

Incorrect Athlete, Incorrect Woman: IOC Gender Regulations and the Boundaries of Womanhood in Professional Sports , Sabeehah Ravat

Transnational Perspectives on the #MeToo and Anti-Base Movements in Japan , Alisha Romano

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Criminalizing LGBTQ+ Jamaicans: Social, Legal, and Colonial Influences on Homophobic Policy , Zoe C. Knowles

Dismantling Hegemony through Inclusive Sexual Health Education , Lauren Wright

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Transfat Representation , Jessica "Fyn" Asay

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Ain't I a Woman, Too? Depictions of Toxic Femininity, Transmisogynoir, and Violence on STAR , Sunahtah D. Jones

“The Most Muscular Woman I Have Ever Seen”: Bev FrancisPerformance of Gender in Pumping Iron II: The Women , Cera R. Shain

"Roll" Models: Fat Sexuality and Its Representations in Pornographic Imagery , Leah Marie Turner

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Reproducing Intersex Trouble: An Analysis of the M.C. Case in the Media , Jamie M. Lane

Race and Gender in (Re)integration of Victim-Survivors of CSEC in a Community Advocacy Context , Joshlyn Lawhorn

Penalizing Pregnancy: A Feminist Legal Studies Analysis of Purvi Patel's Criminalization , Abby Schneller

A Queer and Crip Grotesque: Katherine Dunn's , Megan Wiedeman

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

"Mothers like Us Think Differently": Mothers' Negotiations of Virginity in Contemporary Turkey , Asli Aygunes

Surveilling Hate/Obscuring Racism?: Hate Group Surveillance and the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hate Map" , Mary McKelvie

“Ya I have a disability, but that’s only one part of me”: Formative Experiences of Young Women with Physical Disabilities , Victoria Peer

Resistance from Within: Domestic violence and rape crisis centers that serve Black/African American populations , Jessica Marie Pinto

(Dis)Enchanted: (Re)constructing Love and Creating Community in the , Shannon A. Suddeth

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

"The Afro that Ate Kentucky": Appalachian Racial Formation, Lived Experience, and Intersectional Feminist Interventions , Sandra Louise Carpenter

“Even Five Years Ago this Would Have Been Impossible:” Health Care Providers’ Perspectives on Trans* Health Care , Richard S. Henry

Tough Guy, Sensitive Vas: Analyzing Masculinity, Male Contraceptives & the Sexual Division of Labor , Kaeleen Kosmo

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Let’s Move! Biocitizens and the Fat Kids on the Block , Mary Catherine Dickman

Interpretations of Educational Experiences of Women in Chitral, Pakistan , Rakshinda Shah

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Incredi-bull-ly Inclusive?: Assessing the Climate on a College Campus , Aubrey Lynne Hall

Her-Storicizing Baldness: Situating Women's Experiences with Baldness from Skin and Hair Disorders , Kasie Holmes

In the (Radical) Pursuit of Self-Care: Feminist Participatory Action Research with Victim Advocates , Robyn L. Homer

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Significance is Bliss: A Global Feminist Analysis of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Privileging of Americo-Liberian over Indigenous Liberian Women's Voices , Morgan Lea Eubank

Monsters Under the Bed: An Analysis of Torture Scenes in Three Pixar Films , Heidi Tilney Kramer

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Can You Believe She Did THAT?!:Breaking the Codes of "Good" Mothering in 1970s Horror Films , Jessica Michelle Collard

Don't Blame It on My Ovaries: Exploring the Lived Experience of Women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Creation of Discourse , Jennifer Lynn Ellerman

Valanced Voices: Student Experiences with Learning Disabilities & Differences , Zoe DuPree Fine

An Interactive Guide to Self-Discovery for Women , Elaine J. Taylor

Selling the Third Wave: The Commodification and Consumption of the Flat Track Roller Girl , Mary Catherine Whitlock

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Beyond Survival: An Exploration of Narrative Healing and Forgiveness in Healing from Rape , Heather Curry

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

Gender Trouble In Northern Ireland: An Examination Of Gender And Bodies Within The 1970s And 1980s Provisional Irish Republican Army In Northern Ireland , Jennifer Earles

"You're going to Hollywood"!: Gender and race surveillance and accountability in American Idol contestant's performances , Amanda LeBlanc

From the academy to the streets: Documenting the healing power of black feminist creative expression , Tunisia L. Riley

Developing Feminist Activist Pedagogy: A Case Study Approach in the Women's Studies Department at the University of South Florida , Stacy Tessier

Women in Wargasm: The Politics of Womenís Liberation in the Weather Underground Organization , Cyrana B. Wyker

Theses/Dissertations from 2008 2008

Opportunities for Spiritual Awakening and Growth in Mothering , Melissa J. Albee

A Constant Struggle: Renegotiating Identity in the Aftermath of Rape , Jo Aine Clarke

I am Warrior Woman, Hear Me Roar: The Challenge and Reproduction of Heteronormativity in Speculative Television Programs , Leisa Anne Clark

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

Reforming Dance Pedagogy: A Feminist Perspective on the Art of Performance and Dance Education , Jennifer Clement

Narratives of lesbian transformation: Coming out stories of women who transition from heterosexual marriage to lesbian identity , Clare F. Walsh

The Conundrum of Women’s Studies as Institutional: New Niches, Undergraduate Concerns, and the Move Towards Contemporary Feminist Theory and Action , Rebecca K. Willman

Theses/Dissertations from 2006 2006

A Feminist Perspective on the Precautionary Principle and the Problem of Endocrine Disruptors under Neoliberal Globalization Policies , Erica Hesch Anstey

Asymptotes and metaphors: Teaching feminist theory , Michael Eugene Gipson

Postcolonial Herstory: The Novels of Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine): A Comparative Analysis , Oksana Lutsyshyna

Theses/Dissertations from 2005 2005

Loving Loving? Problematizing Pedagogies of Care and Chéla Sandoval’s Love as a Hermeneutic , Allison Brimmer

Exploring Women’s Complex Relationship with Political Violence: A Study of the Weathermen, Radical Feminism and the New Left , Lindsey Blake Churchill

The Voices of Sex Workers (prostitutes?) and the Dilemma of Feminist Discourse , Justine L. Kessler

Reconstructing Women's Identities: The Phenomenon Of Cosmetic Surgery In The United States , Cara L. Okopny

Fantastic Visions: On the Necessity of Feminist Utopian Narrative , Tracie Anne Welser

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

The Politics of Being an Egg “Donor” and Shifting Notions of Reproductive Freedom , Elizabeth A. Dedrick

Women, Domestic Abuse, And Dreams: Analyzing Dreams To Uncover Hidden Traumas And Unacknowledged Strengths , Mindy Stokes

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Safe at Home: Agoraphobia and the Discourse on Women’s Place , Suzie Siegel

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Women, Environment and Development: Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America , Evaline Tiondi

Advanced Search

• Email Notifications and RSS
• All Collections
• USF Faculty Publications
• Open Access Journals
• Conferences and Events
• Theses and Dissertations
• Textbooks Collection

Useful Links

• Women's and Gender Studies Department Homepage
• Rights Information
• SelectedWorks
• Submit Research

Home | About | Help | My Account | Accessibility Statement | Language and Diversity Statements

Privacy Copyright

Search term

How to address diversity in research proposals - a guide.

Writing robust, detailed gender and/or diversity plans in grant applications has become increasingly important. With some funders requiring explicit descriptions on how one addresses dimensions of gender and diversity in one's project, this guide provides some prompts for thinking about the gender/diversity dimensions of your project in a comprehensive way. 

For example, Horizon Europe grant proposal templates now contain a specific one-page section titled “Gender dimension.” It used to be sufficient for applicants to mention gender balance in team composition and sample populations, as well as sex balance in animal models and cell lines. It was also sufficient for applicants to say that they will follow their institution’s gender equality or diversity plan.

However, gender and/or diversity dimensions of research proposals extend beyond team composition. They require thinking carefully about the nature of your research, your methods, and the organisation and implementation of the project, including governance, dissemination, and outreach. Also, funders expect more than a mention of a university's gender plan.      Below is our guide, which provides pointers for addressing this dimension in different sections.

Download the guide here to get started right away !

Purpose of this guide Which proposal sections have 'diversity dimensions'? What does diversity mean?

Do you know of additional relevant resources (e.g., websites, articles, tools, etc.) that could be added to this guide? If your answer is YES, then please don't hesitate to  send us an email !

Purpose of this guide

This guide contains some prompts/questions to enable you to think comprehensively about the gender/diversity dimensions of your project. Please note a couple of things: 

• The prompts are meant to spark further thinking, especially during project planning and proposal writing phases. 
• The list isn't exhaustive -- other prompts may occur to you.
• The list isn't intended to be a checklist. 
• We chose to make it suitable for a range of fields rather than comprehensive for any single field. 
• It is suitable for individual and collaborative projects.
• It is not intended to be a guide to all of the best practices for diversity and inclusion in scholarly research, science, or academic culture. Hopefully it will prompt you to look for useful resources.

This guide is specifically focused on ensuring that proposals are competitive because they describe considerations about sex, gender, and other elements of diversity comprehensively and in the appropriate places. Check out UM Pride's video 'Sex and Gender: What?, Why?, and How?' on our D&I Education and Social Safety page for the relevance of sex and gender in research.

What diversity topics should you address (if they are relevant)?

Also : For a management section/work package, it might be appropriate to discuss the diversity of the team and how you will ensure that it flourishes.

Don’t have answers to any of these questions? Learn more by going to this page .

Which proposal sections have ‘diversity dimensions’.

There are specific sections on gender diversity, sometimes titled “gender dimension plan,” in Horizon Europe templates. Any dimensions of diversity relevant to the proposal should be addressed here.     In addition, other sections of research proposals related to/interwoven with gender and diversity are, for example: 

• Organisation and implementation of the project
• Specific sections on activities related to open science. Many diversity issues intersect with open science considerations.
• Sections/work packages on project management, including recruitment and hiring processes, and composition of external advisory boards. These should mention how advisory board members are recruited and compensated. They should also mention how early stage researchers are encouraged and promoted in the project, if relevant. 
• Methodology sections, especially regarding subject recruitment, data collection, data analysis.
• Sections on outreach dissemination
• Sections on community involvement 
• Sections on scientific, economic, and societal impact and knowledge utilisation

What does diversity mean? 

Many of our prompts here focus on gender because it is the minimum element of diversity consideration that many funding agencies currently ask for. For an explanation of sex vs. gender, please consult this resource .      However, “diversity” obviously encompasses many other attributes, including race, ethnicity, age, religion, language, language proficiency, having care responsibilities, country of origin, (dis)ability, sexuality, socio-economic position, and political preference/ideology. All these aspects may be taken into consideration when assessing the gender and diversity dimension of research proposals, depending on e.g., the research topic, scope, population and used methods.      Also, EU proposals often require participation from diverse EU member states as well, and participation from underrepresented countries is particularly encouraged.

About this guide

This guide was created by Constance Sommerey and Michael Erard in the fall of 2021, prompted by a presentation that Constance made to the UM funding advisor group. Additional comments were provided by Bart Penders, Aurélie Carlier (on behalf of FEM), Sueli Brodin, Latifa Abidi, and Hans Bosma. UM funding advisors (Eva Rijkers, Merle Achten, Vivian Brakers, Pan Xu, Willem Wolters, Marcel Giezen, Raymunde Neven, Anouk Holsgens, Marco Berndes and Anne Gisling) also provided valuable feedback.

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

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.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

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).

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 9. UN. Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. General Assembley 70 Session; 2015.
• 11. Nature. Get the Sustainable Development Goals back on track. Nature. 2020;577(January 2):7–8
• 37. Fronzetti Colladon A, Grippa F. Brand intelligence analytics. In: Przegalinska A, Grippa F, Gloor PA, editors. Digital Transformation of Collaboration. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland; 2020. p. 125–41. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233276 pmid:32442196
• 39. Griffiths TL, Steyvers M, editors. Finding scientific topics. National academy of Sciences; 2004.
• 40. Mimno D, Wallach H, Talley E, Leenders M, McCallum A, editors. Optimizing semantic coherence in topic models. 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; 2011.
• 41. Wang C, Blei DM, editors. Collaborative topic modeling for recommending scientific articles. 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining 2011.
• 46. Straka M, Straková J, editors. Tokenizing, pos tagging, lemmatizing and parsing ud 2.0 with udpipe. CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies; 2017.
• 49. Lu Y, Li, R., Wen K, Lu Z, editors. Automatic keyword extraction for scientific literatures using references. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Innovative Design and Manufacturing (ICIDM); 2014.
• 55. Roelleke T, Wang J, editors. TF-IDF uncovered. 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval—SIGIR ‘08; 2008.
• 56. Mihalcea R, Tarau P, editors. TextRank: Bringing order into text. 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; 2004.
• 58. Iannone F, Ambrosino F, Bracco G, De Rosa M, Funel A, Guarnieri G, et al., editors. CRESCO ENEA HPC clusters: A working example of a multifabric GPFS Spectrum Scale layout. 2019 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS); 2019.
• 60. Wasserman S, Faust K. Social network analysis: Methods and applications: Cambridge University Press; 1994.
• 141. Williams JE, Best DL. Measuring sex stereotypes: A multination study, Rev: Sage Publications, Inc; 1990.
• 172. Steele CM, Aronson J. Stereotype threat and the test performance of academically successful African Americans. In: Jencks C, Phillips M, editors. The Black–White test score gap. Washington, DC: Brookings; 1998. p. 401–27

• How It Works
• PhD thesis writing
• Master thesis writing
• Bachelor thesis writing
• Dissertation writing service
• Dissertation abstract writing
• Thesis proposal writing
• Thesis editing service
• Thesis proofreading service
• Thesis formatting service
• Coursework writing service
• Research paper writing service
• Architecture thesis writing
• Computer science thesis writing
• Engineering thesis writing
• History thesis writing
• MBA thesis writing
• Nursing dissertation writing
• Psychology dissertation writing
• Sociology thesis writing
• Statistics dissertation writing
• Buy dissertation online
• Write my dissertation
• Cheap thesis
• Cheap dissertation
• Custom dissertation
• Dissertation help
• Pay for thesis
• Pay for dissertation
• Senior thesis
• Write my thesis

100 Gender Research Topics For Academic Papers

Gender research topics are very popular across the world. Students in different academic disciplines are often asked to write papers and essays about these topics. Some of the disciplines that require learners to write about gender topics include:

Sociology Psychology Gender studies Business studies

When pursuing higher education in these disciplines, learners can choose what to write about from a wide range of gender issues topics. However, the wide range of issues that learners can research and write about when it comes to gender makes choosing what to write about difficult. Here is a list of the top 100 gender and sexuality topics that students can consider.

Controversial Gender Research Topics

Do you like the idea of writing about something controversial? If yes, this category has some of the best gender topics to write about. They touch on issues like gender stereotypes and issues that are generally associated with members of a specific gender. Here are some of the best controversial gender topics that you can write about.

• How human behavior is affected by gender misconceptions
• How are straight marriages influenced by gay marriages
• Explain the most common sex-role stereotypes
• What are the effects of workplace stereotypes?
• What issues affect modern feminism?
• How sexuality affects sex-role stereotyping
• How does the media break sex-role stereotypes
• Explain the dual approach to equality between women and men
• What are the most outdated sex-role stereotypes
• Are men better than women?
• How equal are men and women?
• How do politics and sexuality relate?
• How can films defy gender-based stereotypes
• What are the advantages of being a woman?
• What are the disadvantages of being a woman?
• What are the advantages of being a man?
• Discuss the disadvantages of being a woman
• Should governments legalize prostitution?
• Explain how sexual orientation came about?
• Women communicate better than men
• Women are the stronger sex
• Explain how the world can be made better for women
• Discuss the future gender norms
• How important are sex roles in society
• Discuss the transgender and feminism theory
• How does feminism help in the creation of alternative women’s culture?
• Gender stereotypes in education and science
• Discuss racial variations when it comes to gender-related attitudes
• Women are better leaders
• Men can’t survive without women

This category also has some of the best gender debate topics. However, learners should be keen to pick topics they are interested in. This will enable them to ensure that they enjoy the research and writing process.

Interesting Gender Inequality Topics

Gender-based inequality is witnessed almost every day. As such, most learners are conversant with gender inequality research paper topics. However, it’s crucial to pick topics that are devoid of discrimination of members of a specific gender. Here are examples of gender inequality essay topics.

• Sex discrimination aspects in schools
• How to identify inequality between sexes
• Sex discrimination causes
• The inferior role played by women in relationships
• Discuss sex differences in the education system
• How can gender discrimination be identified in sports?
• Can inequality issues between men and women be solved through education?
• Why are professional opportunities for women in sports limited?
• Why are there fewer women in leadership positions?
• Discuss gender inequality when it comes to work-family balance
• How does gender-based discrimination affect early childhood development?
• Can sex discrimination be reduced by technology?
• How can sex discrimination be identified in a marriage?
• Explain where sex discrimination originates from
• Discuss segregation and motherhood in labor markets
• Explain classroom sex discrimination
• How can inequality in American history be justified?
• Discuss different types of sex discrimination in modern society
• Discuss various factors that cause gender-based inequality
• Discuss inequality in human resource practices and processes
• Why is inequality between women and men so rampant in developing countries?
• How can governments bridge gender gaps between women and men?
• Work-home conflict is a sign of inequality between women and men
• Explain why women are less wealthy than men
• How can workplace gender-based inequality be addressed?

After choosing the gender inequality essay topics they like, students should research, brainstorm ideas, and come up with an outline before they start writing. This will ensure that their essays have engaging introductions and convincing bodies, as well as, strong conclusions.

Amazing Gender Roles Topics for Academic Papers and Essays

This category has ideas that slightly differ from gender equality topics. That’s because equality or lack of it can be measured by considering the representation of both genders in different roles. As such, some gender roles essay topics might not require tiresome and extensive research to write about. Nevertheless, learners should take time to gather the necessary information required to write about these topics. Here are some of the best gender topics for discussion when it comes to the roles played by men and women in society.

• Describe gender identity
• Describe how a women-dominated society would be
• Compare gender development theories
• How equally important are maternity and paternity levees for babies?
• How can gender-parity be achieved when it comes to parenting?
• Discuss the issues faced by modern feminism
• How do men differ from women emotionally?
• Discuss gender identity and sexual orientation
• Is investing in the education of girls beneficial?
• Explain the adoption of gender-role stereotyped behaviors
• Discuss games and toys for boys and girls
• Describe patriarchal attitudes in families
• Explain patriarchal stereotypes in family relationships
• What roles do women and men play in politics?
• Discuss sex equity and academic careers
• Compare military career opportunities for both genders
• Discuss the perception of women in the military
• Describe feminine traits
• Discus gender-related issues faced by women in gaming
• Men should play major roles in the welfare of their children
• Explain how the aging population affects the economic welfare of women?
• What has historically determined modern differences in gender roles?
• Does society need stereotyped gender roles?
• Does nature have a role to play in stereotyped gender roles?
• The development and adoption of gender roles

The list of gender essay topics that are based on the roles of each sex can be quite extensive. Nevertheless, students should be keen to pick interesting gender topics in this category.

Important Gender Issues Topics for Research Paper

If you want to write a paper or essay on an important gender issue, this category has the best ideas for you. Students can write about different issues that affect individuals of different genders. For instance, this category can include gender wage gap essay topics. Wage variation is a common issue that affects women in different countries. Some of the best gender research paper topics in this category include:

• Discuss gender mainstreaming purpose
• Discuss the issue of gender-based violence
• Why is the wage gap so common in most countries?
• How can society promote equality in opportunities for women and men in sports?
• Explain what it means to be transgender
• Discuss the best practices of gender-neutral management
• What is women’s empowerment?
• Discuss how human trafficking affects women
• How problematic is gender-blindness for women?
• What does the glass ceiling mean in management?
• Why are women at a higher risk of sexual exploitation and violence?
• Why is STEM uptake low among women?
• How does ideology affect the determination of relations between genders
• How are sporting women fighting for equality?
• Discuss sports, women, and media institutions
• How can cities be made safer for girls and women?
• Discuss international trends in the empowerment of women
• How do women contribute to the world economy?
• Explain how feminism on different social relations unites men and women as groups
• Explain how gender diversity influence scientific discovery and innovation

This category has some of the most interesting women’s and gender studies paper topics. However, most of them require extensive research to come up with hard facts and figures that will make academic papers or essays more interesting.

Students in high schools and colleges can pick what to write about from a wide range of gender studies research topics. However, some gender studies topics might not be ideal for some learners based on the given essay prompt. Therefore, make sure that you have understood what the educator wants you to write about before you pick a topic. Our experts can help you choose a good thesis topic . Choosing the right gender studies topics enables learners to answer the asked questions properly. This impresses educators to award them top grades.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment * Error message

Name * Error message

Email * Error message

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

As Putin continues killing civilians, bombing kindergartens, and threatening WWIII, Ukraine fights for the world's peaceful future.

Ukraine Live Updates

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

PhD Proposal - Expanding the Concept of Gender Through Defeated Epistemologies

As Post Colonial and Decolonial Studies developed in the late 20th Century, some crucial questions that were given as solved in Latin America, Africa, and other colonized parts of the world were again brought to the surface. Many scholars take the opportunity to problematize some political, social and even environmental points that should be developed from colonized peoples’ perspective. But one important aspect was neglected during the forge of these studies. Even though gender is an essential aspect of academic theory and life, Gender Theories have been undoubtedly one of the least addressed issues in current decolonial studies. This proposal came as a starting point to fill this gap. My PhD proposal focuses on Gender and Epistemology. My work intends to explore decolonization possibilities by expanding Gender Studies, based both on Indigenous and African-Brazilian epistemologies and theories recently shaped by Latin American and African scholars.

Related Papers

Ane Molina (she/they)

À medida que os Estudos Pós-Coloniais e Decoloniais se desenvolveram no final do século 20, algumas questões cruciais que foram dadas como resolvidas na América Latina, África e outras partes colonizadas do mundo foram novamente trazidas à superfície. Muitos estudiosos aproveitaram a oportunidade para problematizar alguns pontos políticos, sociais e até ambientais que devem ser desenvolvidos a partir da perspectiva dos povos colonizados. Mas um aspecto importante foi negligenciado durante a formação desses estudos. Embora o gênero seja um aspecto essencial da teoria e da vida acadêmicas, as Teorias de Gênero têm sido, sem dúvida, uma das questões menos abordadas nos estudos descoloniais atuais. Essa proposta veio como um ponto de partida para preencher essa lacuna. Minha proposta de doutorado se concentra em Gênero e Epistemologia. Meu trabalho pretende explorar as possibilidades de decolonização por meio da expansão dos Estudos de Gênero, com base nas epistemologias indígenas e afro-brasileiras e nas teorias recentemente moldadas por estudiosos latino-americanos e africanos.

Revista Psicologia & Sociedade

Vívian Matias dos Santos

This paper requests to share reflections, tensions and intentions that the decolonial thought can provide in the studies on gender and science, meaning a possible movement of insubmission capable of fortification the feminist critique of science. In this, the ideas are produced by the bibliographical research on decolonial thinking in contrast with a trajectory of previous researches on gender discrimination in the universities and Policy of Science, Technology & Innovation in the Northeast of Brazil. As a principal contribution, it puts epistemic disobedience as necessary to feminist critique - as contraposition to sexism only in an abstract way, but to understand it as an inseparable part of racial, ethnic, economic, and epistemic relations.

Design and Culture Journal

Mahmoud Keshavarz , Ece Canlı , Luiza Prado de O. Martins , Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira

This roundtable was conducted by the eight founding members of Decolonising Design Group in October 2017, using an online messaging platform. Each member approached design and decoloniality from different yet interrelating viewpoints, by threading their individual arguments with the preceding ones. The piece thus offers and travels through a variety of subject matter including politics of design, artificiality, modernity, Eurocentrism, capitalism, Indigenous Knowledge, pluriversality, continental philosophy, pedagogy, materiality, mobility, language, gender oppression, sexuality, and intersectionality.

Ndumiso Ncube

This synopsis proves a comparative reading of post-coloniality and de-coloniality. While the argument is somewhat tired, this synopsis has a potential of advancing decolonial research in the fields of border-thinking, coloniality of gender and decolonial border feminism which seem to be attracting a wealth of scholarship at present.

Thula Rafaela de Oliveira Pires

Andrea H Tapia

This special issue of Transmodernity, " Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique, " stands on three fundamental premises that serve as the starting point for the dialogical encounters between intellectuals from Latin America, the Caribbean, and from minoritized sectors in the United States, particularly Latina/o and African American, who are featured here. The first one is that just as there has been a linguistic and a pragmatic turn, among other such turns in theory and philosophy, there has also being a decolonial turn with distinct features, some of which will be elucidated in these two issues. 1 Different from these other turns, however, the decolonial turn has long existed in different ways, opposing what could be called the colonizing turn in Western thought, by what I mean the paradigm of discovery and newness that also included the gradual propagation of capitalism, racism, the modern/gender system, and the naturalization of the death ethics of war. 2

Juan Poblete

New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power offers researchers and students from different theoretical fields an essential, turn-organized overview of the radical transformation of epistemological and methodological assumptions in Latin American Studies from the end of the 1980s to the present. Sixteen chapters written by experts in their respective fields help explain the various ways in which to think about these shifts. Questions posited include: Why are turns so crucial? How did they alter the shape or direction of the field? What new questions, objects, or problems did they contribute? What were or are their limitations? What did they displace or prevent us from considering? Among the turns included are: memory, transnational, popular culture, decolonial, feminism, affect, indigenous studies, transatlantic, ethical, post/hegemony, deconstruction, cultural policy, subalternism, gender and sexuality, performance, and cultural studies.

The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (3 volume set)

Cathryn Teasley

Chapter in book: Steinberg, Shirley R. & Down, Barry (Eds.) (2020). The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (Vol. 1, pp. 186–204). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-critical-pedagogies/book257052#preview Critical intersectionality informs the analysis conducted in this chapter of three overlapping epistemological approaches to denouncing and fighting racist colonialities in and through education: critical anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogies with strong links to Critical Theory; postcolonial pedagogies emerging mostly from non-Western Cultural Studies scholarship in the English language; and decolonial pedagogies influenced by alternative perspectives on Development Theory and Social Theory arising mainly from Latin America and the geopolitical South. The aim here is to identify the convergences among these various epistemologies in order to forge synergetic pedagogical practices capable of countering the neocolonial forces of racist neoliberalism and patriarchy so characteristic of the dominant world-system today. Keywords: Racism, coloniality, intersectionality, epistemology, critical pedagogy

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Pedro Paulo Pereira

Celani Mthethwa

RELATED PAPERS

Adan Garcia

KNOWLEDGES BORN IN THE STRUGGLE: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South

Maria Paula Meneses

Language Discourse and Society, 8(1)

Viviane M Resende

Epifania Amoo-Adare

Polina Manolova , Katarina Kušić , Philipp Lottholz

Carol Lynne D'Arcangelis

Taylor Rogers

Marc Woons & Sebastian Weier (eds.). Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands: Developing a Critical Epistemology of Global Politics

Christian Langer, FRHistS

Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics

Matt Gordner

Lucas Schucht

Lelya Troncoso Pérez

Rosalba Icaza

Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics. Edited by Marc Woons and Sebastian Weier. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, pp. 46-62

Karsten Schulz

Panagiota Bampatzimopoulou

Tanja Winkler

Sarah Oxford

Diego Ubaque-Casallas

Handbook of Sociology of Gender , Co-edited by Barbara Risman, Carrissa Froyum, and William Scarborough

Pallavi Banerjee

Tiffany Lethabo King

Feminist knowledge production and the potential of postcolonialism, poststructuralism and postmodernism

Mireia Colomer Vilarrubla

Melissa Weiner

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Camilla de Magalhães Gomes

Research Repository_University of Essex

Marina Barsy Janer

Nancy Tuana

Boris Bertolt

gregory pappas

Cahiers du CEDREF

Falquet Jules

Falquet Jules , Artemisa Flores Espínola

International Studies Perspectives

Maïka Sondarjee

Feminist Theory

Redi Koobak

Gabriel Mantelli

Padini Nirmal

Postcoloniality - Decoloniality - Black Critique. Joints and Fissures

Gabriele Dietze

Sara C Motta , Tiina Seppälä

Duke University Press

Macarena Gómez-Barris

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology

Cassidy Thomas , Jordan Dyett

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Gender Research Paper

This sample gender research paper features: 5800 words (approx. 19 pages), an outline, and a bibliography with 134 sources. Browse other research paper examples for more inspiration. If you need a thorough research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A! Feel free to contact our writing service for professional assistance. We offer high-quality assignments for reasonable rates.

Introduction

Theorizing gender, heterosexual normality and biological/social reproduction, bodies, sex, and gender, conclusion: gender and future research.

• Bibliography

More Gender Research Papers:

• Bioethics, Health, and Gender Research Paper
• Economics of Gender Research Paper
• Feminism and Gender Research Paper
• Gender and Crime Research Paper
• Gender and Development Research Paper
• Gender and Politics Research Paper
• Gender and Sexual Orientation Research Paper
• Imperialism and Gender Research Paper
• Victimization and Gender Research Paper
• Women’s and Gender History Research Paper

The use of the concept of gender to explain the social differences between males and females is a fairly recent focus in sociology. This is not to say that differences between the two have been ignored by sociologists but that those differences were understood as immutable biological facts and that the social was, in the last instance, powerless to change. The presumed “natural” binary of sex was taken for granted by nineteenth-century and most twentieth-century theorists, for whom men were the primary focus of sociological interest, with women making an appearance usually in discussions of marriage and the family.

Academic Writing, Editing, Proofreading, And Problem Solving Services

Get 10% off with 24start discount code.

The relative invisibility of women in the sociological enterprise, as in all Western intellectual traditions, was challenged with the advent of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. The challenge was not confined to the academy. Betty Friedan’s (1963) popular best-seller, The Feminist Mystique, and Kate Millet’s (1970) Sexual Politics critiqued the oppressive nature of male/female relationships, and the numerous consciousness-raising groups as well as feminist groups that emerged from various left and civil rights organizations also mounted trenchant critiques. Central to the critiques was the conviction that the “personal is political,” that feminist scholarship must be allied to feminist activism. In the academy, the marginality of women to the “intellectual, cultural, and political world” (Smith 1987:1) was contested, and vital interdisciplinary exchanges began the process of putting the natural binary under the microscope (Hess and Ferree 1987).

In the early years, research focused on sex roles rather than gender. Sex as well as class and race were “traditional” variables used in social science research, with the assumption that sex, as a biological given, simply meant checking a box for male or female on government or social science survey forms. Using the concept of sex roles was a way of introducing social and cultural factors into the research. The assumption was that socialization into appropriate male/female roles, although resting on a “natural” biological foundation, allowed, in theory at least, some possibility of social change in the unequal relationships between men and women. But the influential work of Talcott Parsons indicated that there were limitations to the use of role theory. Parsons and Bales (1955) linked sex roles to differences in social functions, with males normatively adopting instrumental functions and females expressive functions. These functional social roles were, however, tied to the dictates of a biological binary, and any profound variation in the roles and functions, such as women having careers, was understood to be dysfunctional to the stability of the social system (Parsons [1942] 1954).

Sex-role research was fruitful, however, in producing several empirically based studies on male/female differences (Maccoby and Jacklin 1975), which tended to show that there were no significant differences and that “ women and men are psychologically very similar, as groups” (Connell 2002:42). Later research refined the concept of sex roles as defining “ situated identities —assumed and relinquished as the situation demands—rather than master identities, such as sex category, that cut across situations” (West and Zimmermann 1987:128). It was also pointed out that roles are prescriptive expectations that vary culturally and historically and are not enacted passively; rather, both men and women actively and reflexively shape their sex roles (Connell 1987; Stacy and Thorne 1985). Consequently, the “functional ideas embedded in the concepts of ‘sex role’ and ‘socialization’” were shown to be “inadequate” because people often “do not become what they are expected to be” (Hess and Ferree 1987:14). More significant, critics pointed out that the concept of sex roles could not explain why men were nearly always the more valued members of any social group. In addition, the concept was theoretically problematic because sociologists did not refer to “race roles” or “class roles” (Eichler 1980; Hess and Ferree 1987).

Critiquing the concept of sex roles did not, however, eliminate the problem of the foundational assumption of immutable biological differences, which made the issue of significant change in male/female relationships problematic. In attempting to navigate the nature/nurture binary, Stoller’s (1968) distinction between “sex” as the biological evidence from chromosomes, hormones, and external genitalia and “gender” as the social, psychological, and cultural manifestations was influential. The distinction was initially used in psychoanalytic work on sex and gender “anomalies,” such as hermaphrodites and transsexuals (see Money and Ehrhardt 1972). For feminists, the distinction was a useful way of acknowledging the significance of sex and at the same time freeing them to concentrate on the social elaborations of gender differences. As Dorothy Smith (2002) points out, the distinction was a “political move” because “we had to believe that change was possible, that the repressions to which women were subjected were not the simple effect of biology” (p. ix). For example, Rubin (1975) suggested that the existence of two sexes gave rise to the social organization of gender in kinship systems, which are the “observable and empirical forms of sex/gender systems” (p. 169). Rubin’s analysis retained the assumption of two sexes as foundational, whereas Delphy (1984) maintained that gender precedes sex and that choosing the “bodily type” to explain the hierarchical division of men and women is an arbitrary choice that does not make sense either logically or historically. Biology itself does not necessarily “give birth to gender,” and to assume that it does means that the “existence of genders—of different social positions for men and women—is thus taken as a given and not requiring explanation” (p. 25). It became apparent that the ubiquity of the two-sex model needed to be dismantled if gender was to, as Delphy (p. 24) put it, to “take wing” theoretically.

Before looking at how gender “took wing,” two points need to be made about the following discussion. First, the initial investigations into gender were largely undertaken by feminist researchers. Some male researchers did initiate research on male roles and masculinity, but these discussions were often marginal to the central feminist debates theorizing gender (Brod 1987; David and Brannon 1976; Farrell 1975; Kimmel and Messner 1989; Pleck 1981). The focus of most research, as the subsequent discussion will illustrate, was mainly on the position of women and their experiences, to the extent that it often seemed that men did not “have” gender, that the universal male subject of Western theory remained intact. The second point has to do with the sex/gender distinction, which will loom large in our discussion. As Donna Haraway (1991:127) discovered, when asked to contribute the sex/gender entry to a feminist keywords text, this is a distinction that other languages and other non-English-speaking feminists do not make. The concept of sex/gender remains a problem for cross-cultural feminist debates, exemplified most recently in the responses to Felski’s (1997) article “The Doxa of Difference” and Hawkesworth’s (1997) article “Confounding Gender” and the responses to Hawkesworth’s article. To the extent that the following concentrates largely on the work of Englishspeaking feminists, the somewhat contested epistemological status of the sex/gender distinction should be kept in mind.

By the late 1970s, gender was the central concept for feminist research, although the issue of “sex” in relation to gender remained contentious. For example, sociobiology maintained that women’s reproductive biological destiny invariably results in social, sexual, political, and economic double standards that favor males (Barash 1977; Dawkins 1976; Wilson 1975). The sociobiological position was not uncontested, but sex became the “Achilles’ heel of 1970s feminism” despite its being relegated to the “domain of biology and medicine” (Fausto-Sterling 2005:1493). In general, gender was used to “supplant sex” but “not to replace it” (Nicholson 1994:80).

In the initial forays into gender research, Marx and Freud were the two theorists whose work provided a basis for critique. Marxist analysis, with its focus on oppression and exploitation, seemed to promise an appropriate revolutionary perspective for change. Both Marx and Engels agreed that the first form of class subordination was the subordination of women to men, and for this reason, Engels (1935) maintained that “in any given society the degree of women’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation” (p. 39). Critiquing Freud’s work was seen as a necessity because it provided the psychological theory that supported the idea of universal patriarchy and offered an explanation for women’s compliance with these arrangements. At the same time, Freud’s assumption of pre-Oedipal bisexuality and a common libido offered the possibility of reconceptualizing the development of sexual difference.

Some of the first approaches concentrated on “documenting gender difference” and understanding “how gender difference is constructed” (Marshall 2000:26). In this context, unpacking the historical and social nature and impact of patriarchy was a central issue. Max Weber ([1925] 1978) had defined patriarchy as the power of “men against women and children; of able-bodied as against those of lesser capability; of the adult against the child; of the old against the young” (p. 359). Following Weber, patriarchy was used as a general term denoting the nearuniversal male domination of women, having its basis in the family and household. Gerda Lerner (1986) pointed out that the foundation for family patriarchy was the control of women’s “sexual and reproductive capacity,” which occurred “ prior to the formation of private property and class society” (p. 8). Women’s subordination preceded the formation of class societies, so class “is not a separate construct from gender; rather, class is expressed in genderic terms” (p. 213).

Although Lerner was at pains to point out that patriarchy was tied to the appropriation of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities, it was class issues filtered through Marx that initially took theoretical precedence in Anglophone sociology. Many feminists pursued the issue of patriarchy through vigorous debates over the connection between patriarchy and capitalism (Barrett 1980; Eisenstein 1979; Firestone 1970; Mitchell 1973; Sargent 1981; Walby 1990). What quickly became clear was that it was not possible to analytically separate the two, that capitalist patriarchy formed a unitary system. The debates produced important work on social class (Acker 1973; Giddens 1973; Kuhn and Wolpe 1978; Sargent 1981); the nature of women’s labor, especially domestic labor (Fox 1980; Luxton 1980; Oakley 1974; Seccombe 1974); and the variable role of the State in the perpetuation of gendered power relations (Balbus 1982; Coontz and Henderson 1986; Coward 1983; Eisenstein 1979; Elshtain 1982; Lowe and Hubbard 1983). In the last context, a considerable amount of work focused on the ways in which gender, class, and race have played out in civic entitlements, especially with respect to welfare benefits (Fraser 1989; Gordon 1994; Marshall 1994; Pateman 1988; Pringle and Watson 1992).

The focus on capitalist patriarchy, however, tended to leave traditional Marxist analyses of productive relations intact and simply added a “separate conception of the relations of gender hierarchy” (Young 1981:49). For example, the domestic labor debates of the 1970s pointed to the usefulness of domestic labor to capital but “became trapped in trying to assess whether housework produced surplus value or was just unproductive labor” (Thistle 2000:286). Furthermore, the dualisms of work/home, public/private appeared not as “mutually dependent but as separate and opposed. It is accordingly, virtually impossible to bring them together within a logically coherent and consistent account of social life” (Yeatman 1986:160). In general, the debates did not displace in practice or in theory what Connell (2002:142) calls the patriarchal dividend. 2 The dividend refers to the very real advantages that men, as a group, derive from the unequal gender order. These advantages operate at all levels, from the local to the global, whatever the cultural, racial, or social differences. Connell concludes that most men have an interest in “sustaining— and, where necessary, defending—the current gender order” (p. 143).

The concern with class and stratification was also critiqued as ignoring race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The assumption seemed to be that the visibility of gender oppression required the invisibility of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and even class (Mohanty 1992:75). Many women of color, as well as gays and lesbians, correctly identified the way in which earlier discussions had privileged the position and interests of white, Western, heterosexual women, similar to the way in which “man” had been shorthand for white, Western, heterosexual males in post-Enlightenment sociological discourse (Barrett 1980; Collins 1990; hooks 1981; Rattansi 1995).

At the beginning of the United Nations Decade of Women, 1976, the idea of a “global sisterhood” suffering the same gender oppression came under fire, and it was pointed out that many white, privileged Western women were implicated in the patriarchal dividend enjoyed by their male counterparts (Bhavnani 2001). Critics pointed out that gender is constructed in and through differences of “race and class and vice versa” (Lovell 1996:310) and that race is “integral to white women’s gender identities” (Glenn 1992:35).

But recognizing “race” often resulted in black women, Third World women, and native women becoming the trendy “Other.” Ann duCille (1994) asked, “Why have we—black women—become the subjected subjects of much contemporary investigation, the peasants under the glass of intellectual inquiry in the 1990s?” (p. 592). Gayatri Spivak (1988) also critiqued the privileging of “whiteness” as the natural, normal condition that produced the colonial object on the assumption that race is something that belongs to others. A particularly important observation was that many white, Western, academic feminists were complicit in the “othering” process in using “native” informants to “build their academic careers, while the knowledgeable ‘objects of study’ receive nothing in return” (Mihesuah 2000:1250).

The focus on race was particularly significant to U.S. sociology given its history of race relations. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) conceptualizes the black experience in the United States, in its critical difference from the experiences of “whites,” as embodying an “outsider-within” perspective. She illustrates how African American women have their own take on their oppression and that they are “neither passive victims of nor willing accomplices in their own oppression” (p. xii). Collins points to the significance of everyday practices as the basis for understanding the intersection of race and gender that produces a “Black women’s standpoint,” not a “Black woman’s standpoint,” emphasizing the “collective values in Afrocentric communities” (p. 40, fn. 5).

In Collins’s work and that of others, the key point is that there are multiple and interlocking layers of oppression and domination (see also B. Smith 1983; D. Smith 1987). The “matrix of domination” points to power relations tied to an individual’s location on the interrelated structures of gender, race, class, and sexuality (Collins 1990). A significant part of the matrix was a “heterosexual norm” that produced taken-for-granted assumptions about sex, sexual identity, sexual desire, and sexual practice (Blackwood 1994). Sex and the biological binary, always an undercurrent in any of the debates discussed above, took on greater significance as feminists examined how people “have” and “do” gender and how or if, when considering human reproduction, biological essentialism can be avoided.

Feminists recognized that Freud’s theories provided psychological support to biological assumptions of “natural” sex differences that, in turn, supported the structural subordination of women under patriarchy (Coward 1983; Mitchell 1975). Jacqueline Rose (1986) suggested that Freud’s work gave an “account of patriarchal culture as a trans-historical and cross-cultural force” that “conforms to the feminist demand for a theory which can explain women’s subordination across specific cultures and different historical moments” (p. 90). As Jean Walton (2001) points out, psychoanalysis has always excluded race. The reworking of Freud by Lacan and the comments of other theorists such as Foucault and Derrida provided, and continue to provide, significant contributions to these debates (Braidotti 1991; Butler 1990, 1993; Butler and Scott 1992; Diprose 1994; Irigaray 1974; Kristeva 1986; Rose 1986). A key issue addressed was the presumed inevitability of a tie between biological reproduction and social mothering, which, in turn, was tied to the assumption of heterosexual normality. Chrys Ingram (1994) maintains that the idea that “institutionalized heterosexuality constitutes the standard for legitimate and prescriptive sociosexual arrangements” is one of the “major premises” of sociology in general and of some “feminist sociology” (p. 204). And Rosalind Petchesky (1980) pointed out “women’s reproductive situation is never the result of biology alone, but of biology mediated by social and cultural organization” (p. 667).

The significance of reproduction, reproductive choice, motherhood, and mothering was the focus of what has been called maternal feminist debates. Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) work was important to these debates. She suggested that while there are historical and cross-cultural variations in family and kinship structures, it is generally the case that women mother. This “mother-monopolized childrearing produces women who are able to and will want to mother in their turn” in contrast to men “who have a separate sense of self and who lack the capacity or the desire to nurture others” (Sydie 1987:151). Chodorow’s (1978) object-relations psychoanalytic analysis focuses on the primary, pre-Oedipal identification of both male and female children with the mother and the different ways in which separation occurs for each child. While the son’s identification with the father follows the process described by Freud, that of the daughter is different. Chodorow maintains that the daughter, who shares her sex with her mother, does not completely reject the mother, and in her “personal identification with her mother” she learns “what it is to be womanlike” (pp. 175–76). It is not biological sex as such but the “early social object-relationships” located mainly in the unconscious that determine the development of sexed identities and, in the case of women, produce mothers (p. 54).

Masculinity is thus more difficult to achieve and is largely predicted on distinguishing self from the feminine. Dorothy Dinnerstein (1977), whose work parallels Chodorow’s in many respects, suggested that both sexes have a terror of “sinking back wholly into the helplessness of infancy” so that for “Mother-raised humans, male authority is bound to look like a reasonable refuge from female authority” (pp. 161, 175). According to Dinnerstien, Freud was unable to account for the nearuniversal fear and hatred of women, but she maintains that this stance is the logical result of mother-monopolized child rearing, producing the male need to control women and women’s more or less willing submission. Both Chodorow and Dinnerstein suggest that the solution is to change the nature of parenting to include both men and women.

The accounts by Chodorow and Dinnerstein were criticized on several counts, not the least of which were the implicit Western nuclear family model they assumed and the lack of clarity as to how men might be incorporated into parenting and what happens if this does occur, for the child’s primary identification (Hirsch 1981; Lorber 1981; Spelman 1988). In such a situation, would the identification be bisexual, and if so, what are the consequences? (O’Brien 1981; Sayers 1982). Interestingly, Freud did posit an original bisexuality and common libido in the preOedipal child that the castration fear resolves and that “normally” produces heterosexual gender identities (see Irigaray 1974). In general, it is this assumption of the normality of heterosexuality in these accounts that is a problem. MacKinnon (1982) summarized the heterosexual norm’s effects on women as follows: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” (p. 515).

Adrienne Rich’s (1980) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” was an influential intervention into the sexuality and maternal feminist debates. Rich claimed that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needed to be “recognized and studied as a political institution ” (p. 637). She points out that the structures that maintain heterosexuality and the ideology that claims its normality ensures the compliance of most women in their own subordination. Rich asks “ why in fact women would ever redirect that search ” (p. 637) if women are the primary love object. Her answer is that they are forced to do so because women’s identification with women could make them “indifferent” to men, introducing the possibility that “men could be allowed sexual and emotional—therefore economic—access to women only on women’s terms” (p. 643). Consequently, heterosexuality is something that has to be “imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force,” and lesbian existence and the lesbian continuum of “women-identified experience” throughout women’s lives has to be denied.

Many of the critiques on the hegemony of heterosexuality looked at its manifestations in and on the body, and about the body as a “ text of culture” and a “ practical, direct locus of social control” (Bordo 1989:13). 4 The body as “text” was indebted to Foucault’s concept of bio-power and body aesthetics. Other critiques concentrated on the Western conception of the organically discrete, natural, two-sex human body as a social construction (Laqueur 1990; O’Neill 1985; Schiebinger 1993). Donna Haraway (1991) went further in her claim that the naturalized body was a fiction, that bodies must be understood as “biotechnical-biomedical” bodies in a “semiotic system” that produces the “cyborg” as “our ontology” (pp. 150, 211). While not necessarily producing cyborgs, biotechnological and biomedical interventions in reproduction, such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, sex selection, and cloning, have been critiqued as not necessarily producing positive outcomes for women’s health and their social, political, and economic welfare (Overall 1989; Sawicki 1999; Shildrick and Price 1998).

Michel Foucault’s (1976) conceptualization of the body as the site for the exercise of power through “disciplines of the body and the regulation of populations” and his understanding of power as productive as well as prohibitive and punitive provided an initial entry into the conceptualization of the body as the effect of discourse. In addition, Foucault’s demonstration that sexuality has been a “central preoccupation” of modern society that required the confession of a “true” sex identity—male or female, certainly not hermaphrodite—was suggestive. For Foucault, sex was the “naturalised product of a moral code which, through techniques of discipline, surveillance, self-knowledge, and confession organizes social control by stimulation rather than repression” (Foucault 1980:57). But as several feminists pointed out, Foucault’s observation that power is all-pervasive and constituted in the practices of the subjected prompts the question, How is resistance possible? (Diamond and Quinby 1988; Fraser 1989; Ramazanoglu 1993; Sawicki 1991). Further, the relations of power/ knowledge charted by Foucault may change, but they seem to do so by reaffirming “women’s marginal status” (Ricci 1987:24), and there appears to be “no moral high ground where the individual can exercise agency outside of the social codes which constitute desire asymmetrically” (Diprose 1994:24). Foucault himself was not particularly concerned with the gender of dominated subjects of a power/knowledge regime and did not take account of the “relations between masculinist authority” and, therefore, the gendered “language, discourse and reason” (Diamond and Quinby 1988:xv).

Judith Butler (1990), however, found Foucault’s notion of the constructed subject useful. She pointed out that this does not preclude the possibility of the subject’s agency; on the contrary, the construction is the “necessary scene of agency” (p. 147). If subjects are discursive productions and identities unstable fictions, then this allows feminists to “contest the rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms.” The binaries anyway produce “failures”—the assertive female, the effeminate male, the lipstick lesbian, and so on (p. 145). Gender is not simply constructed; it is performed and performed in relation to the sexual obverse—that is, heterosexual and homosexual bodies and practices are interdependent, produced by the regulative norms of compulsory heterosexuality. Furthermore, gender must be continually reproduced; there is no “original.” Nor does anything, performatively, go. In Bodies That Matter, Butler (1993) points out that the construction and performance of gendered bodies does not mean that some constructions are not necessary constructions. For example, Evelyn Fox Keller (1989) suggests that it is the “vital process that issues in the production of new life” that has compelled “people of all kinds throughout history, and across culture, to distinguish some bodies from others” (p. 316). We may play with, perform, and deconstruct sex and gender, but how can we develop “strategies for eliminating (not only resisting) certain kinds of gendered and sexual subordination and violence, precisely those that are not easily subject to resignification” (Brown 2003:368)? And it is reproduction, and its extension mothering, that seems especially resistant to resignification.

The deconstruction of sex and gender and their manifestations in bodies was important in the development of queer theory and for the increasing focus on the “trans”— transgender, transsexual, intersexuality, bisexuality, and various other “transgressions” of sex and gender dimorphisms (Findlay 1995). More specifically, Eva Sedgwick (1990), in her Epistemology of the Closet, claimed that to understand “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture,” it is necessary to “incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (p. 1).

Queer theory seeks to challenge the “master categories” of heterosexuality and homosexuality as “marking the truth of sexual selves,” by understanding them as “categories of knowledge, a language that frames what we know as bodies, desires, sexualities, identities: . . . a normative language that erects moral boundaries and political hierarchies” (Seidman 1994:174). Queer theory also points to the poverty of sexuality studies in mainstream sociology, which has used labeling theory and/or a deviance perspective to study gay, lesbian, and alternative “subcultures” (Namaste 1994:227), although Epstein (1994:193) claims that the “involvement of sociologists in the study of sexuality” was a significant subset of mainstream sociology, stemming initially from Kinsey’s work, which has diminished only in recent years.

There has been a veritable explosion of research under the general rubric of queer theory, although much of the work also falls under the general rubric of cultural studies rather than sociology (for a general review of the academic history and current status of queer theory, see Marcus 2005). Steven Seidman (1994) states that although queer theory challenges the “regime of sexuality itself” and “aspires to transform homosexual theory into general social theory or one standpoint from which to analyze whole societies,” to date, “queer theory and sociology have barely acknowledged one another” (p. 174).

A critical issue for queer theorists remains the underlying question of how biology figures in these social constructions. Seeing identities as “multiple, unstable, and regulatory” as well as “pragmatic” and relating this to “concerns of situational advantage, political gain, and conceptual utility” may be a laudable standpoint for the contested social and cultural arena of sex/sexuality/gender studies (Seidman 1994:173). Meanwhile biology, especially evolutionary biology, continues to retain a binary take on physical bodies based on the assumption of natural chromosomal, hormonal, and genital binary difference (Haraway 1991).

Ignoring biology and concentrating on social construction seems to be a misguided position for feminists given the focus of some recent medical research. For example, medicine has searched for gay genes and for differences in brain structures between men and women as well as homosexuals and heterosexuals, and in biology, the studied attempts to deny the existence of “homosexuality” as well as the general “plethora of sex diversity” in the nonhuman animal world persists (Hird 2004). Anne Fausto-Sterling (2005) points out that although contemporary biomedical research seems to deal with sex “in the 1970s feminist meaning of the word, sex sometimes strays into arenas that traditional feminists claim for gender” (p. 1497). FaustoSterling concludes with a “call to arms” for feminists to recognize that “culture is a partner in producing body systems commonly referred to as biology” (p. 1516).

Attention to the treatment of the body of the intersexed is one of the ways in which the culture/body relation has been examined in recent years (Heyes 2003; Hird 2000, 2003, 2004; Kessler 1990). According to Hird (2003), the intersexed, defined as “infants born with genitals that are neither clearly ‘female’ nor ‘male,’” (p. 1067) are estimated to comprise up to 2 percent of births. These infants present a “profound challenge to those cultures dependent on a two-gender system,” and intersexed infants are “routinely surgically and hormonally gender reassigned” (p. 1068). The reassignment occurs despite some compelling evidence that for many of these infants, the process is traumatic and often less than successful in producing a stable gender identity in later years (see Hird 2004:135 on the John/Joan case). A critical point in the definition of and treatment of the intersexed is made by Wilchins, who asks, “Why are [intersex] people forced to produce a binary sexed identity? . . . What kinds of categories of analysis would emerge if nontransgendered anthropological bodies were forced to explicate themselves in terms of intersexuality, rather than the other way around?” (quoted in Hird 2003:1068).

Feminist attention to medical treatments of sex identity is more than warranted given the fact that although medicine “requires a biological definition of the intersexual’s ‘sex,’ the surgeons, endocrinologists and psychiatrists themselves clearly employ a social definition” (Hird 2004:136). Kessler (1998) calls medicine’s surgical interventions a “failure of the imagination” in not recognizing that “each of their management decisions is a moment when a specific instance of biological ‘sex’ is transformed into a culturally constructed gender” (p. 32). Furthermore, the insistence on choosing one of two “sexes” is ironic given the fact that the majority of human cells are intersexed, chromosomes have no sex, and there are many species that do not require sex for reproduction. In sum, although the corporeal body in its external fleshy manifestation is important, “beneath the surface of our skin exists an entire world of networks of bacteria, microbes, molecules, and inorganic life,” and they take “little account of ‘sexual difference’” and indeed exist and reproduce without any recourse to what we think of as reproduction” (Hird 2004:142). In addition, the insistence on “identity” as the manifestation of a sovereign “human” subject is compromised by the fact that the Human Genome Diversity Project has shown that humans share the vast majority of their genes with animals, especially with primates. The Genome Project “far from fixing ‘proper’ human identity . . . has shown it to be impure and fluid from the start,” illustrating “profound interconnections and shared genetic identity, with everyone drawing on a common gene pool” (Shildrick 2004:162, 160).

This more recent feminist focus on science, especially biological science, in attempting to sort out sex, sexuality, and gender returns to but confounds the old nature/nurture problem that the sex/gender and biology/social distinctions were to address. The distinctions were initially a fruitful way for feminism to mount important critiques of socialcultural gender inequity, but they were always unstable. Understanding the complexity of our animality is a part of the recognition that dichotomies, in any context, are poor science and poor sociology.

As the discussion above illustrates, the concept of gender has proven to be ambiguous, complex, and contradictory, and this is unlikely to change in the near future. In the midst of the debates, Chafetz’s (1999) point is worth remembering: “All theory pertaining to gender is not feminist, although all feminist theory centers much or all of its attention on gender” (p. 4). There is still a need to unpack the “taken-for-granted assumptions about gender that pervade sociological research, and social life generally” (Ferree, Lorber, and Hess 1999:xii). For example, Stephanie Knaak (2004) points out that when the “standard ‘gender = male/female’ variable” is used in research “as the main proxy for gender,” this superficial assumption threatens the “overall quality of our research” (p. 312).

There are some directions that might be fruitfully explored in the future, although they by no means exhaust all possibilities; others may have quite different ideas of how to go on in the sociological enterprise. One suggestion is to “bring men back in.” Jeff Hearn (2004) suggests that it is

time to go back from masculinity to men, to examine the hegemony of men and about men. The hegemony of men seeks to address the double complexity that men are both a social category formed by the gender system and dominant collective and individual agents of social practices. (P. 59)

Hearn points out that “men” are “ formed in men’s hegemony . . . and form that hegemony” and that the individual as well as the collective hegemony of men is reproduced and contested in all societies “both as a social category and in men’s practices” (p. 61). Tania Modleski (1991), however, registers a caution with respect to scholars who, under the guise of feminist sympathies, appropriate “feminist analysis” to “negate the critiques and undermine the goals of feminism—in effect delivering us back to a prefeminist world” (p. 3).

The second direction to explore in greater depth is the way in which control by bio-power is deployed on a global scale as bio-political power. Rather than the disciplined subject “whose behaviour expresses internalized social norms,” control, according to Clough (2003), “aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles and preference listings; that is to say, bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data” (p. 360). If sex and gender are deployed as “natural” binaries in national and global statistical reports about “distributed chances of life and death, health and morbidity, fertility and infertility, happiness and unhappiness, freedom and imprisonment” (p. 361), the use of such information for any emancipatory practices is limited. For this reason, a return to macrolevel stratification theory on the order of Lenski’s application of POET—“population, organization, ecology and technology”—as suggested by Huber (2004:259), could be useful.

Gender theorists still contend with “two powerful, mutually canceling truths in feminism: on the one hand, there is no stable sex or gender and on the other, women too often find themselves unable to escape their gender and the sexual norms governing it” (Brown 2003:366). These two conceptions must also contend with the frequent reports of the “death of feminism,” most particularly from a variety of conservative, often religiously inspired, traditionalists—both male and female (Hawkesworth 2004). The view from the antifeminist or nonfeminist women must not be simplistically dismissed as “false consciousness”; what is needed is to “know how they think as they do, how and in what terms and with what conflicts they experience their femininity” (Scott 1997:701).

Finally, sociologists as gender theorists need to contend with the tendency of the discipline to marginalize or co-opt gender issues, especially when these issues are linked to systems of inequality in the politics of everyday life (Young 1994). This returns us to the initial starting point of feminist appropriation of gender—the recognition that the concept is a political, economic, and social marker of inequality, whatever its theoretical stability. As Nancy Fraser and Nancy A. Naples (2003) contend, some of the debates in recent feminist theory that tended to see inequities as problems of culture left us “defenseless against free-market fundamentalism” and helped to “consolidate a tragic historic disjunction between theory and practice” (p. 1117). This is particularly troubling given the “acceleration of globalization” and the transformation of “circumstances of justice” by undermining the sovereignty of states. The struggle over governance as “representation” must therefore be added to the “(economic) dimension of redistribution and the (cultural) dimension of recognition.”

The above suggestions are but a few that emerge from feminist struggles with the concept of gender. The issues, like all the issues and debates outlined above, are not confined to the disciplinary boundaries of sociology however they may be construed. But if sociology is to have any relevance in the twenty-first century, then gender, as a critical focus of sociological analysis, is important, especially if sociology is to be true to its origins as an engaged political and ethical scientific practice.

Bibliography:

• Acker, Joan. 1973. “Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism.” American Journal of Sociology 78:936–45.
• Balbus, Isaac. 1982. Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political and Technological Liberation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Barash, David. 1977. Sociobiology and Behavior. New York: Elsevier.
• Barrett, Michele. 1980. Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis. London, England: Verso.
• Bhavnani, Kum-Kum, ed. 2001. Feminism and Race. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Blackwood, Evelyn. 1994. “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females.” Pp. 301–15 in Theorizing Feminism: Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by A. C. Herrman and A. J. Stewart. Boulder, CO:Westview Press.
• Bordo, Susan. 1989. “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought.” Signs 11:439–56.
• Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1971. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Braidotti, R. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance. Translated by E. Gould. Oxford, England: Polity Press.
• Brod, Harry. 1987. The Making of Masculinities. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
• Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Gender in Counterpoint.” Feminist Theory 4:365–68.
• Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
• Butler, Judith and Joan W. Scott, eds. 1992. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
• Chafetz, Janet Saltzman. 1999. “The Varieties of Gender Theory in Sociology.” Pp. 3–23 in The Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by J. S. Chafetz. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
• Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2003. “Affect and Control: Rethinking the Body ‘Beyond Sex and Gender.’” Feminist Theory 4:359–64.
• Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought. Cambridge, England: Unwin.
• Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Connell, R. W. 2002. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
• Coontz, Stephanie and Peta Henderson. 1986. Women’s Work, Men’s Property: The Origins of Gender and Class. London, England: Verso.
• Coward, Rosalind. 1983. Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• David, Deborah and Robert Brannon, eds. 1976. The Forty-Nine Percent Majority. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
• Delphy, Christine. 1984. Close to Home. London, England: Hutchinson, in association with the Explorations in Feminism Collective.
• Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby, eds. 1988. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections of Resistance. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.
• Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1977. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper & Row.
• Diprose, Rosalyn. 1994. The Bodies of Women. London, England: Routledge.
• DuCille, Ann. 1994. “Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies.” Signs 19:7591–629. Durkheim, Émile. [1897] 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press.
• Durkheim, Émile. [1893] 1984. The Division of Labour in Society. Translated by W. D. Halls. London, England: Macmillan.
• Eichler, Margrit. 1980 . The Double Standard: A Feminist Critique of Feminist Social Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Eisenstein, Zillah, ed. 1979. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Elshtain, Jean B. 1982. Public Man, Private Woman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Engels, Friedrich. 1935. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York: International Publishers.
• Epstein, Steven. 1994. “A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality.” Sociological Theory 12:188–202.
• Farrell, Warren. 1975. The Liberated Man. New York: Random House.
• Fausto-Sterling,Anne. 2005. “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1: Sex and Gender.” Signs 30:1491–527.
• Felski, Rita. 1997. “The Doxa of Difference.” Signs 23:1–21.
• Ferree, Myra, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess, eds. 1999. Revisioning Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Findlay, Deborah. 1995. “Discovering Sex: Medical Science, Feminism and Intersexuality.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 32:25–52.
• Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex. New York: Bantam Books.
• Foucault, Michel. 1976 . The History of Sexuality. 1, An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.
• Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1971–1977. Brighton, England: Harvester.
• Fox, Bonnie. 1980. Hidden in the Household. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Women’s Press.
• Fox Keller, Evelyn. 1989. “Holding the Center of Feminist Theory.” Women’s Studies International Forum 12:313–18.
• Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Fraser, Nancy and Nancy A. Naples. 2003. “To Interpret the World and to Change It: An Interview with Nancy Fraser.” Signs 29:1103–24.
• Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell.
• Giddens, Anthony. 1973. The Class Structure of Advanced Societies. London, England: Hutchinson.
• Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs 18:1–43.
• Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890–1935. New York: Free Press.
• Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
• Hawkesworth, Mary. 1997. “Confounding Gender.” Signs 22:649–85.
• Hawkesworth, Mary. 2004. “The Semiotics of Premature Burial: Feminism in a Postfeminist Age.” Signs 29:961–86.
• Hearn, Jeff. 2004. “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men.” Feminist Theory 5:49–72.
• Hess, Beth B. and Myra M. Ferree, eds. 1987. Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
• Heyes, Cressida. 2003. “Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender.” Signs 28: 1093–120.
• Hird, Myra. 2000. “Gender’s Nature: Intersexuals, Transexualism and the ‘Sex’/‘Gender’ Binary.” Feminist Theory 1:347–64.
• Hird, Myra. 2003. “Considerations for a Psycho-Analytic Theory of Gender Identity and Sexual Desire: The Case of Intersex.” Signs 28:1067–1092.
• Hird, Myra. 2004. Sex, Gender and Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Hirsch, Marianne. 1981. “Mothers and Daughters.” Signs 7:200–22. hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press.
• Huber, Joan. 2004. “Lenski Effects on Sex Stratification Theory.” Sociological Theory 22:258–68.
• Ingram, Chrys. 1994. “The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories of Gender.” Sociological Theory 12:203–19.
• Irigaray, L. 1974. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by G. C. Gill. New York: Cornell University Press.
• Kessler, S. 1990. “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersex Infants.” Signs 16:3–26.
• Kessler, S. 1998. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Kimmel, Michael S. and Michael A. Messner. 1989. Men’s Lives. New York: Macmillan.
• Knaak, Stephanie. 2004. “On the Reconceptualizing of Gender: Implications for Research Design.” Sociological Inquiry 74:302–17.
• Kristeva, J. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by T. Moi. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
• Kuhn, A. and A Wolpe, eds. 1978. Feminism and Materialism. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Laqueur, T. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
• Lorber, Judith. 1981. “On the Reproduction of Mothering: A Methodological Debate.” Signs 6:482–514.
• Lovell, Terry. 1996. “Feminist Social Theory.” Pp. 307–39 in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by B. S. Turner. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
• Lowe, Marian and Ruth Hubbard, eds. 1983. Woman’s Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality. New York: Pergamon.
• Luxton, Meg. 1980. More Than a Labour of Love. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Women’s Press.
• Maccoby, Eleanor E. and Carol N. Jacklin. 1975. The Psychology of Sex Differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catherine. 1982. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” Signs 7:515–44.
• Marcus, Sharon. 2005. “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay.” Signs 31:191–218.
• Marshall, Barbara. 1994 . Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change. Boston, MA: Polity Press/Northeastern University Press.
• Marshall, Barbara. 2000. Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.
• Mihesuah, Devon A. 2000. “A Few Cautions at the Millennium on the Merging of Feminist Studies with American Indian Women’s Studies.” Signs 25:1247–51.
• Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mitchell, Juliet. 1973. Women’s Estate. New York: Vintage Books. Mitchell, Juliet. 1975. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Vintage Books.
• Modleski, Tania. 1991. Feminism without Women. London, England: Routledge.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1992. “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience.” Pp. 74–92 in Destabilizing Theory, edited by M. Barrett and A. Phillips. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
• Money, J. and A. A. Ehrhardt. 1972. Man and Woman, Boy and Girl. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
• Namaste, Ki. 1994. “The Politics of Inside/Out: Queer Theory, Poststructuralism and a Sociological Approach to Sexuality.” Sociological Theory 12:220–31.
• Nicholson, Linda. 1994. “Interpreting Gender.” Signs 20:79–105. Oakley, Ann. 1974. The Sociology of Housework. New York: Pantheon Books.
• O’Brien, Mary. 1981. “Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic.” Signs 7:144–57.
• O’Neill, John. 1985. Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Overall, C. 1989. The Future of Human Reproduction. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Woman’s Press.
• Pareto, Vilfredo. [1916] 1935. The Mind and Society. 2. London, England: Jonathan Cape.
• Parsons, Talcott. [1942] 1954. Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
• Parsons, Talcott and Robert Bales. 1955. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. New York: Free Press.
• Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
• Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. 1980. “Reproductive Freedom: Beyond a Woman’s Right to Choose.” Signs 5:661–85.
• Pleck, Joseph. 1981. The Myth of Masculinity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Pringle, R. and S. Watson. 1992. “‘Women’s Interests’ and the Poststructural State.” Pp. 53–73 in Destabilizing Theory, edited by M. Barrett and A. Phillips. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Ramazanoglu, Caroline, ed. 1993. Up against Foucault. London, England: Routledge.
• Rattansi, Ali. 1995. “Just Framing: Ethnicities and Racisms in a ‘Postmodern’ Framework.” Pp. 250–86 in Social Postmodernism, edited by L. Nicholson and S. Seidman . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Ricci, N. P. 1987. “The End/s of Woman.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11:11–27.
• Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5:631–60.
• Rose, Jacqueline. 1986. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London, England: Verso.
• Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Pp. 157–210 in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by R. R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Sargent, Lydia, ed. 1981. Women and Revolution. Montreal, Québec, Canada: Black Rose Books.
• Sawicki, Jana. 1999. “Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the New Reproductive Technologies.” Pp. 190–202 in Feminist Theory and the Body, edited by J. Price and M. Shildrick. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
• Sawicki, 1991. Disciplining Foucault. New York: Routledge.
• Sayers, Janet. 1982. Biological Politics. London, England: Tavistock.
• Schiebinger, L. 1993. Nature’s Body. London, England: Pandora.
• Scott, Joan. 1997. “Comment on Hawkesworth’s ‘Confounding Gender.’” Signs 22:697–702.
• Seccombe, Wally. 1974. “The Housewife and Her Labor under Capitalism.” New Left Review 83:3–34.
• Sedgwick, Eva Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Seidman, Steven. 1994. “Symposium: Queer Theory/Sociology: A Dialogue.” Sociological Theory 12:166–77.
• Shildrick, M. and J. Price, eds. 1998. Vital Signs. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
• Shildrick, M. 2004. “Genetics, Normativity and Ethics.” Feminist Theory 5:149–65.
• Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.
• Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
• Smith, Dorothy. 2002. “Forward.” Pp. ix–xii in Doing Gender, Doing Difference, edited by S. Fenstermaker and C. West. New York: Routledge.
• Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Spencer, Herbert. [1899] 1969. The Principles of Sociology. 3. New York: Macmillan.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Pp. 271–313 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Stacy, J. and B. Thorne. 1985. “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology.” Social Problems 32:301–16.
• Stacy, J. and B. Thorne. 1996. “Is Sociology Still Missing Its Feminist Revolution?” Perspectives: The ASA Theory Section Newsletter 18:1–3.
• Stoller, Robert. 1968. Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House.
• Sydie, R. A. 1987 . Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological Theory. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Methuen.
• Thistle, Susan. 2000. “The Trouble with Modernity: Gender and the Remaking of Social Theory.” Sociological Theory 18:275–88.
• Walby, Sylvia. 1990. Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
• Walton, Jean. 2001 . Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Weber, Max. [1925] 1978. Economy and Society. 2, edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Weber, Max. [1915] 1946. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” Pp. 323–59 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
• West, Candace and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1:125–51.
• Wilson, Edward O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Yeatman, Anna. 1986. “Women, Domestic Life and Sociology.” Pp. 157–72 in Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, edited by C. Pateman and E. Gross. Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
• Young, Iris. 1981. “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory.” Pp. 43–69 in Women and Revolution, edited by L. Sargent. Montreal, Québec, Canada: Black Rose Books.
• Young, Iris. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective.” Signs 19:713–39.

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER