research projects on gender studies

Current Projects

Under the direction of Adrian Daub, the Clayman Institute continues to incorporate Stanford students and fellows into our research initiatives, a priority of his as director and a longstanding goal of the Institute. We bring together faculty, postdoctoral fellows, professional scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students to collaborate on projects and share new research ideas.

At the Clayman Institute, an interdisciplinary approach is represented by researchers from different disciplines working collaboratively together: they share a common goal and resources, make decisions in a team, but approaches differ, and thus enrich each other. This is exactly what the Clayman Institute for Gender Research practices and values. During the academic year 2022-23, the Clayman Institute comprises scholars from six disciplines: feminist and gender studies, German studies, history, literature, psychology, and social sciences.

Our in-house projects focus on intersectional inequalities, gender-based violence, and intersectional feminism. Examples of current research topics include #MeToo and how the disclosure of sexual violence by public figures shapes how individuals understand their own experiences and, in some case, galvanize them toward activism. A related study examines social media comments about a high-profile defamation case and subsequent backlash to feminism and #MeToo. Another study examines workplace harassment and how legal mechanisms such as Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and Arbitration Agreements silence survivors and, in some cases, embolden perpetrators. One study observes how COVID-19 impacted experiences of domestic violence and the services survivors seek. Finally, another project studies the continuity of the feminist movement and the intersectional activism that has propelled the feminist movement over the last forty years. Additional projects include those at the intersection of gender/race/sexuality. 

As part of current research projects, the Clayman Institute seeks participants for one interview study. Please contact us, in case you are interested in joining

Study on Non-Disclosure Agreements and Forced Arbitration

Have you experienced and reported workplace sexual harassment and/or other forms of discrimination? Did your employer require you to attend arbitration or sign an NDA?  If so, contact us!

All interviews are strictly confidential and can take place online or in person. All people eligible receive up to $ 50 gift card.

ndaresearchstudy2023 [at] lists.stanford.edu (ndaresearchstudy[at]stanford[dot]edu)

Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.

Gender studies asks what it means to make gender salient, bringing a critical eye to everything from labor conditions to healthcare access to popular culture. Gender is never isolated from other factors that determine someone’s position in the world, such as sexuality, race, class, ability, religion, region of origin, citizenship status, life experiences, and access to resources. Beyond studying gender as an identity category, the field is invested in illuminating the structures that naturalize, normalize, and discipline gender across historical and cultural contexts.

At a college or university, you’d be hard pressed to find a department that brands itself as simply Gender Studies. You’d be more likely to find different arrangements of the letters G, W, S, and perhaps Q and F, signifying gender, women, sexuality, queer, and feminist studies. These various letter configurations aren’t just semantic idiosyncrasies. They illustrate the ways the field has grown and expanded since its institutionalization in the 1970s.

This non-exhaustive list aims to introduce readers to gender studies in a broad sense. It shows how the field has developed over the last several decades, as well as how its interdisciplinary nature offers a range of tools for understanding and critiquing our world.

Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler, “Editorial.” Signs , 1975; “Editorial,” off our backs , 1970

The editorial from the inaugural issue of Signs , founded in 1975 by Catharine Stimpson, explains that the founders hoped that the journal’s title captured what women’s studies is capable of doing: to “represent or point to something.” Women’s studies was conceptualized as an interdisciplinary field that could represent issues of gender and sexuality in new ways, with the possibility of shaping “scholarship, thought, and policy.”

The editorial in the first issue of off our backs , a feminist periodical founded in 1970, explains how their collective wanted to explore the “dual nature of the women’s movement:” that “women need to be free of men’s domination” and “must strive to get off our backs.” The content that follows includes reports on the Equal Rights Amendment, protests, birth control, and International Women’s Day.

Robyn Wiegman, “Academic Feminism against Itself.” NWSA Journal , 2002

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies, which consolidated as an academic field of inquiry in the 1970s. Wiegman tracks some of the anxieties that emerged with the shift from women’s to gender studies, such as concerns it would decenter women and erase the feminist activism that gave rise to the field. She considers these anxieties as part of a larger concern over the future of the field, as well as fear that academic work on gender and sexuality has become too divorced from its activist roots.

Jack Halberstam, “Gender.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition (2014)

Halberstam’s entry in this volume provides a useful overview for debates and concepts that have dominated the field of gender studies: Is gender purely a social construct? What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry? Halberstam’s synthesis of the field makes a compelling case for why the study of gender persists and remains relevant for humanists, social scientists, and scientists alike.

Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, “Defeating Bigenderism: Changing Gender Assumptions in the Twenty-First Century.” Hypatia , 2009

Scholar and transgender activist Miqqi Alicia Gilbert considers the production and maintenance of the gender binary—that is, the idea that there are only two genders and that gender is a natural fact that remains stable across the course of one’s life. Gilbert’s view extends across institutional, legal, and cultural contexts, imagining what a frameworks that gets one out of the gender binary and gender valuation would have to look like to eliminate sexism, transphobia, and discrimination.

Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories.” Social Problems , 2006

Judith Lorber identifies the key paradigm shifts in sociology around the question of gender: 1) acknowledging gender as an “organizing principle of the overall social order in modern societies;” 2) stipulating that gender is socially constructed, meaning that while gender is assigned at birth based on visible genitalia, it isn’t a natural, immutable category but one that is socially determined; 3) analyzing power in modern western societies reveals the dominance of men and promotion of a limited version of heterosexual masculinity; 4) emerging methods in sociology are helping disrupt the production of ostensibly universal knowledge from a narrow perspective of privileged subjects. Lorber concludes that feminist sociologists’ work on gender has provided the tools for sociology to reconsider how it analyzes structures of power and produces knowledge.

bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women.” Feminist Review , 1986

bell hooks argues that the feminist movement has privileged the voices, experiences, and concerns of white women at the expense of women of color. Instead of acknowledging who the movement has centered, white women have continually invoked the “common oppression” of all women, a move they think demonstrates solidarity but actually erases and marginalizes women who fall outside of the categories of white, straight, educated, and middle-class. Instead of appealing to “common oppression,” meaningful solidarity requires that women acknowledge their differences, committing to a feminism that “aims to end sexist oppression.” For hooks, this necessitates a feminism that is anti-racist. Solidarity doesn’t have to mean sameness; collective action can emerge from difference.

Jennifer C. Nash, “re-thinking intersectionality.” Feminist Review , 2008

Chances are you’ve come across the phrase “intersectional feminism.” For many, this term is redundant: If feminism isn’t attentive to issues impacting a range of women, then it’s not actually feminism. While the term “intersectional” now circulates colloquially to signify a feminism that is inclusive, its usage has become divorced from its academic origins. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s based on Black women’s experiences with the law in cases of discrimination and violence. Intersectionality is not an adjective or a way to describe identity, but a tool for analyzing structures of power. It aims to disrupt universal categories of and claims about identity. Jennifer Nash provides an overview of intersectionality’s power, including guidance on how to deploy it in the service of coalition-building and collective action.

Treva B. Lindsey, “Post-Ferguson: A ‘Herstorical’ Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies , 2015

Treva Lindsey considers the erasure of Black women’s labor in anti-racist activism , as well as the erasure of their experiences with violence and harm. From the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s contributions and leadership have not been acknowledged to the same extent as their male counterparts. Furthermore, their experiences with state-sanctioned racial violence don’t garner as much attention. Lindsey argues that we must make visible the experiences and labor of Black women and queer persons of color in activist settings in order to strengthen activist struggles for racial justice.

Renya Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians , 2007

Renya Ramirez (Winnebago) argues that indigenous activist struggles for sovereignty, liberation, and survival must account for gender. A range of issues impact Native American women, such as domestic abuse, forced sterilization , and sexual violence. Furthermore, the settler state has been invested in disciplining indigenous concepts and practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship, reorienting them to fit into white settler understandings of property and inheritance. A Native American feminist consciousness centers gender and envisions decolonization without sexism.

Hester Eisenstein, “A Dangerous Liaison? Feminism and Corporate Globalization.” Science & Society , 2005

Hester Eisenstein argues that some of contemporary U.S. feminism’s work in a global context has been informed by and strengthened capitalism in a way that ultimately increases harms against marginalized women. For example, some have suggested offering poor rural women in non-U.S. contexts microcredit as a path to economic liberation. In reality, these debt transactions hinder economic development and “continue the policies that have created the poverty in the first place.” Eisenstein acknowledges that feminism has the power to challenge capitalist interests in a global context, but she cautions us to consider how aspects of the feminist movement have been coopted by corporations.

Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Afsaneh Najmabadi remarks on the existence of sex-reassignment surgeries in Iran since the 1970s and the increase in these surgeries in the twenty-first century. She explains that these surgeries are a response to perceived sexual deviance; they’re offered to cure persons who express same-sex desire. Sex-reassignment surgeries ostensibly “heteronormaliz[e]” people who are pressured to pursue this medical intervention for legal and religious reasons. While a repressive practice, Najmabadi also argues that this practice has paradoxically provided “ relatively safer semipublic gay and lesbian social space” in Iran. Najmabadi’s scholarship illustrates how gender and sexual categories, practices, and understandings are influenced by geographical and cultural contexts.

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore’s “Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?” Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2008

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore map the ways that transgender studies can expand feminist and gender studies. “Transgender” does not need to exclusively signify individuals and communities, but can provide a lens for interrogating all bodies’ relationships to gendered spaces, disrupting the bounds of seemingly strict identity categories, and redefining gender. The “trans-” in transgender is a conceptual tool for interrogating the relationship between bodies and the institutions that discipline them.

David A. Rubin, “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs , 2012

David Rubin considers the fact that intersex persons have been subject to medicalization, pathologization, and “regulation of embodied difference through biopolitical discourses, practices, and technologies” that rely on normative cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Rubin considers the impact intersexuality had on conceptualizations of gender in mid-twentieth century sexology studies, and how the very concept of gender that emerged in that moment has been used to regulate the lives of intersex individuals.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs , 2005

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provides a thorough overview of the field of feminist disability studies. Both feminist and disability studies contend that those things which seem most natural to bodies are actually produced by a range of political, legal, medical, and social institutions. Gendered and disabled bodies are marked by these institutions. Feminist disability studies asks: How are meaning and value assigned to disabled bodies? How is this meaning and value determined by other social markers, such as gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, national origin, and citizenship status?

The field asks under what conditions disabled bodies are denied or granted sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy and how disability impacts the exploration of gender and sexual expression in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood historical and contemporary pathologization of genders and sexualities. It explores how disabled activists, artists, and writers respond to social, cultural, medical, and political forces that deny them access, equity, and representation

Karin A. Martin, “William Wants a Doll. Can He Have One? Feminists, Child Care Advisors, and Gender-Neutral Child Rearing.” Gender and Society , 2005

Karin Martin examines the gender socialization of children through an analysis of a range of parenting materials. Materials that claim to be (or have been claimed as) gender-neutral actually have a deep investment in training children in gender and sexual norms. Martin invites us to think about how adult reactions to children’s gender nonconformity pivots on a fear that gender expression in childhood is indicative of present or future non-normative sexuality. In other words, U.S. culture is unable to separate gender from sexuality. We imagine gender identity and expression maps predictably onto sexual desire. When children’s gender identity and expression exceeds culturally-determined permissible bounds in a family or community, adults project onto the child and discipline accordingly.

Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes.” Signs , 2013

Sarah Pemberton’s considers how sex-segregated prisons in the U.S. and England discipline their populations differently according to gender and sexual norms. This contributes to the policing, punishment, and vulnerability of incarcerated gender-nonconforming, transgender, and intersex persons. Issues ranging from healthcare access to increased rates of violence and harassment suggest that policies impacting incarcerated persons should center gender.

Dean Spade, “Some Very Basic Tips for Making High Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.” The Radical Teacher , 2011

Lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade offers a pedagogical perspective on how to make classrooms accessible and inclusive for students. Spade also offers guidance on how to have classroom conversations about gender and bodies that don’t reassert a biological understanding of gender or equate certain body parts and functions with particular genders. While the discourse around these issues is constantly shifting, Spade provides useful ways to think about small changes in language that can have a powerful impact on students.

Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese , 2010

Feminist philosophy of science is a field comprised of scholars studying gender and science that has its origins in the work of feminist scientists in the 1960s. Richardson considers the contributions made by these scholars, such as increased opportunities for and representation of women in STEM fields , pointing out biases in seemingly neutral fields of scientific inquiry. Richardson also considers the role of gender in knowledge production, looking at the difficulties women have faced in institutional and professional contexts. The field of feminist philosophy of science and its practitioners are marginalized and delegitimized because of the ways they challenge dominant modes of knowledge production and disciplinary inquiry.

Bryce Traister’s “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies.” American Quarterly , 2000

Bryce Traister considers the emergence of masculinity studies out of gender studies and its development in American cultural studies. He argues that the field has remained largely invested in centering heterosexuality, asserting the centrality and dominance of men in critical thought. He offers ways for thinking about how to study masculinity without reinstituting gendered hierarchies or erasing the contributions of feminist and queer scholarship.

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Five new research projects to bridge evidence gaps, inform gender-responsive policy, practice and research

• Evidence module
• Markets and value chains
• Women's empowerment

The CGIAR GENDER Platform is pleased to announce five newly commissioned research projects to generate evidence that will inform policy, practice and research. The projects, which will continue until March 2022, will develop and communicate evidence-based recommendations for ensuring that development activities promote—rather than jeopardize—gender equality.

Gender equality in agriculture and food systems is at the intersection of many development issues: poverty reduction, hunger eradication, water security, sustainable production and use of land and water, good nutrition, agricultural innovation systems as well as climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Gender research globally addresses the distributional dimensions of these factors. Yet, evidence is generally lacking about how to best use institutions, policies and activities to improve the lives of women and men in rural areas. Evidence regarding what works for whom under which conditions can contribute directly to more effective policies.

Several years ago, a shift in focus from inputs and technologies to realizing beneficial outcomes was seen as a major step forward for research – particularly where it concerns women’s needs and their participation. The shift also called for an increased recognition of the need for evidence on gender equality and women’s empowerment. CGIAR has been undertaking systematic efforts to integrate gender into core programs that have yielded important insights into what works best for whom at different stages of development. These have contributed to new knowledge on gender in agriculture and the identification of opportunities for future research.

The knowledge base is now shifting toward implementation and impact through the use of gender data and analysis to inform interventions such as participatory approaches to natural resource management, credit program design and implementation, improved market access for smallholders, various types of land reforms and advocacy campaigns around issues like political representation.

Five new projects to inform policy, practice and research

The CGIAR GENDER Platform’s Evidence module has issued new research grants to produce sound evidence using appropriate rigorous and cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative methods and approaches to inform policy, practice and research on gender equality in agriculture and food systems.

The Evidence module will provide financial support for these new research projects that advance the state of knowledge in three priority gender research themes, as outlined below:

Theme 1: Gendered dimensions of institutions and governance of sustainable land and water systems

Exploring women’s empowerment pathways in water governance for better livelihoods in Bangladesh, led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)

This project will study gender and power relations and associated dynamics in water governance and how they contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment in the polders in Bangladesh. This study will fill a key evidence gap by assessing the extent and nature of women and men’s participation in water management groups. It will examine the political, economic, cultural and biophysical contexts that influence women’s participation and decision-making in water governance processes. The findings will help find the best strategies, methods and interventions for achieving women’s empowerment and gender equality in the water governance of the polders. Project partners include Shushilan.

Transforming the rules of the game: Gendered liveability in peri-urban Dhaka, Bangladesh, led by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

Through contemporary feminist political economy frameworks, this project will provide evidence on the factors that constrain resilient, sustainable and equitable food systems by asking the following questions: 1) how does the governance of food water environment systems impact gender power politics and difference, and 2) how do social positioning and relations determine connections to institutions and well-being, including food related experiences? Applying cutting-edge feminist approaches, the study will undertake a nuanced, critical analysis of power politics and difference in everyday experiences of living and being. The researchers will map how material institutional and physical environments shape gendered social positioning, livability and food security through innovative methods, including theatre for social change. The project’s partners are the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, the International Potato Center (CIP), the Bangladesh Agriculture University, BotTala Theatre for Awareness and RUAF Urban Agriculture and Food Systems.

Theme 2: Women’s empowerment through engagement in agricultural value chains

Gender and empowerment inquiry into the downstream rice value chain, led by AfricaRice

The study aims to determine whether women's participation in downstream nodes of the rice value chains in Uganda, namely processing and marketing, is as beneficial and empowering as would be expected. The study will address several research questions, including:

• To what extent are women and men involved in processing and marketing nodes of the rice value chain and what roles and activities do they perform at each node?
• What are the different factors likely to constrain or enable women's effective engagement at different downstream rice value chain nodes?
• How do women and men's remunerations differ and what factors cause the disparities?
• What are the welfare benefits and value chain gains of women's engagement in rice value chains?
• Can disengagement contribute to women’s empowerment?

The project’s partners are Makerere University and the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) in Uganda.

Promoting women's empowerment in value chains through a sustainable livelihoods approach in Papua New Guinea and Cambodia, led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

This project will take a sustainable livelihoods approach to evaluate and compare women's labor participation in production and non-production nodes in agricultural value chains. To identify levers for promoting women’s entrepreneurship and equitable sharing of benefits, the study will also evaluate linkages between livelihood strategies of women and analyze measures of women's empowerment to quantify costs and benefits of interventions providing job opportunities for women in different sectors. The study’s partners include the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, the National Agricultural Research Institute of Papua New Guinea, the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea and the Cambodia Agriculture Research and Development Institute.

Theme 3: Enhancing gender equality and women’s empowerment through climate-smart agriculture

Assessing gender-responsive, climate-smart solutions for women cocoa farmers in Ghana, led by the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT

By bringing together traditional social science frameworks with human-centered design, this study will provide an innovative approach to gender research by simultaneously investigating women's intersectional experiences of climate vulnerability in cocoa and inviting women farmers to participate in designing solutions that will empower them to overcome such vulnerabilities.

This study assesses the barriers and enablers of climate-smart agriculture adoption for women-headed cocoa farms and women cocoa farmers. To support women-headed cocoa farms, a gender-sensitive climate-smart agriculture approach could include increasing women's access to labor-saving technologies and developing women's groups for accessing loans or specialized training. The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT will partner with the University of Ghana’s Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness.

Related content

Research grants for evidence generation to inform policy, practice and research

Gender research rightfully takes center stage in new One CGIAR strategy

International Day of Rural Women 2021

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• Published: 22 October 2022

The impact of gender diversity on scientific research teams: a need to broaden and accelerate future research

• Hannah B. Love   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0011-1328 1 , 2 ,
• Alyssa Stephens 2 , 3 ,
• Bailey K. Fosdick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3736-2219 2 ,
• Elizabeth Tofany 2 &
• Ellen R. Fisher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6828-8600 1 , 2 , 4  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  386 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Business and management
• Complex networks
• Science, technology and society

Multiple studies from the literature suggest that a high proportion of women on scientific teams contributes to successful team collaboration, but how the proportion of women impacts team success and why this is the case, is not well understood. One perspective suggests that having a high proportion of women matters because women tend to have greater social sensitivity and promote even turn-taking in meetings. Other studies have found women are more likely to collaborate and are more democratic. Both explanations suggest that women team members fundamentally change team functioning through the way they interact. Yet, most previous studies of gender on scientific teams have relied heavily on bibliometric data, which focuses on the prevalence of women team members rather than how they act and interact throughout the scientific process. In this study, we explore gender diversity in scientific teams using various types of relational data to investigate how women impact team interactions. This study focuses on 12 interdisciplinary university scientific teams that were part of an institutional team science program from 2015 to 2020 aimed at cultivating, integrating, and translating scientific expertise. The program included multiple forms of evaluation, including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and surveys at multiple time points. Using social network analysis, this article tested five hypotheses about the role of women on university-based scientific teams. The hypotheses were based on three premises previously established in the literature. Our analyses revealed that only one of the five hypotheses regarding gender roles on teams was supported by our data. These findings suggest that scientific teams may create ingroups , when an underrepresented identity is included instead of excluded in the outgroup , for women in academia. This finding does not align with the current paradigm and the research on the impact of gender diversity on teams. Future research to determine if high-functioning scientific teams disrupt rather than reproduce existing hierarchies and gendered patterns of interactions could create an opportunity to accelerate the advancement of knowledge while promoting a just and equitable culture and profession.

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Introduction

Diversity in scientific teams is often a catalyst for creativity and innovation (Misra et al., 2017 ; Smith-Doerr et al., 2017 ), and numerous studies have documented that gender diversity, the equitable representation of genders, is important for the development, process, and outcomes of scientific teams (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Hall et al., 2018 ; Misra et al., 2017 ; Riedl et al., 2021 ; Smith-Doerr et al., 2017 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ). Furthermore, research has found evidence that a higher proportion of women on a team increases collective intelligence (Riedl et al., 2021 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ), and that gender-balanced teams lead to the best outcomes for group process (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Carli, 2001 ; Taps and Martin, 1990 ). When scientists hear that the proportion of women influences team performance, they often ask “What proportion is needed, and why does the proportion of women impact team success?”

The answers to these questions remain unclear. To date, most research on the impact of gender composition on scientific teams only uses quantitative metrics (e.g., comparing team rosters and bibliometric data) (Badar et al., 2013 ; Lee, 2005 ; Lerback et al., 2020 ; Pezzoni et al., 2016 ; Wagner, 2016 ; Zeng et al., 2016 ). Although these quantitative metrics provide a reasonable starting point, they emphasize the presence of women rather than their levels of integration or participation, which may perpetuate tokenism on scientific teams. As Smith-Doerr et al. ( 2017 ), reported

Our journey through the literature demonstrated a critical difference between diversity as the simple presence of women and minority scientists on teams and in workplaces, and their full integration (p. 140).

Similarly, Bear and Woolley ( 2011 ) conducted a meta-analysis of the literature from multiple disciplines and found that when diverse team members were integrated holistically, team diversity contributed to innovation. Conversely, in studies where teams had diverse membership but failed, these teams were often relying on token members and did not have authentic and full integration of those diverse members. Bear and Woolley ( 2011 ) suggest that the proportion of women on a team roster should be studied as follows:

It is not enough to simply examine the number of women in a particular institution or role. … In order to be truly effective, the role that women play in scientific teams should also be taken into consideration and promoted in order to yield the substantial benefits of increased gender diversity (p. 151).

These recent studies signal a paradigm shift in literature in the perceptions of diversity on teams because historically, diversity on teams was perceived as negative. In 1997, Baugh and Graen ( 1997 ) described teams with women and minorities were perceived to be less effective. Benschop and Doorewaard ( 1998 ) described how teams simply (re)produce gender inequality and they did not see a future in teams providing opportunities for women. Guimerà et al. ( 2005 ) claimed that while diversity may potentially spur creativity, it typically promotes conflict and miscommunication. Today, it is well accepted in the literature that to create new knowledge and solve complex global problems, studies in the science of team science (SciTS), knowledge innovation, creative, and more have documented that diversity in teams is important for the process, interactions, and outcomes (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Hall et al., 2018 ; Misra et al., 2017 ; Riedl et al., 2021 ; Soler-Gallart, 2017 ; Ulibarri et al., 2019 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ).

Numerous researchers have called for varied approaches to the study of women on teams. Madlock-Brown and Eichmann ( 2016 ) wrote that we “need a multi-pronged approach to deal with the persisting gender gap issues” (p. 654). Bozeman et al. ( 2013 ), explained that we understand collaboration from a bibliometric standpoint, but much more qualitative research is needed about the meaning of collaboration and the more informal side of collaboration, including mentoring, ingrained biases, and balancing collaborations (Reardon, 2022 ). Further, many of these studies about women on teams were conducted with undergraduate students within curricular settings, not with real-world scientific teams. Fundamentally, to understand gender patterns in scientific collaborations, qualitative and mixed methods research approaches are needed that study the process of scientific team development and not just team outcomes (Keyton et al., 2008 ; Wooten et al., 2014 ).

This study focused on 12 interdisciplinary university scientific teams that were part of an institutional team science program from 2015 to 2020 aimed at cultivating, integrating, and translating scientific expertise. Team science is research conducted collaboratively by small teams or larger groups (Cooke and Hilton, 2015 ). The program included multiple forms of evaluation, including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and surveys at multiple time points. More specifically, gender diversity was explored by using mixed-methods data from team interactions to investigate two primary research questions: (1) what is the role of women on scientific teams? and (2) how do women impact team interactions?

Members of the 12 teams completed social network surveys about their relationships including who they seek advice from, who is a mentor, who serves on student committees, who they learn from, and who they collaborate with. Social network analysis studies the behavior of the individual at the micro level, the pattern of relationships (network structure) at the macro level, and the interactions between the two (Stokman, 2001 ). In the context of team science, social network analysis provides insights into how interactions are related to team success and how the social processes teams use supports the knowledge-creation process (Cravens et al., 2022 ; Giuffre, 2013 ; Granovetter, 1977 ; Love et al., 2021 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ). Utilizing these data, we calculated the indegree for each team member’s relationship with other team members. Indegree quantifies the number of other team members that stated they had the selected relationship with the given individual. For example, the advice indegree counts the number of other team members that reported receiving advice from that person. To compare results across the teams, the indegree and outdegree measures were scaled by the number of respondents to account for the total number of possible connections for individuals. These social network measures allowed us to test five hypotheses based on the current team science literature and other disciplines about how women impact team interaction and collaboration.

Hypothesis 1 : Women faculty will have a higher indegree than men faculty within the mentoring and student committee networks. Men faculty members will have a higher indegree than Women faculty members in the advice and leadership networks.

Hypothesis 2 : Men at all career stages will be more likely to be considered a leader on the team than women, measured by having a higher average scaled indegree in the leadership network.

Hypothesis 3 : Various networks will be correlated as follows:

Leadership and advice networks will be positively correlated.

Mentoring networks will not be positively correlated with leadership or advice networks.

Mentoring and student committees will be correlated.

Hypothesis 4 : The social and collaboration relations will be more positively correlated for women than for men.

Hypothesis 5 : Non-faculty team members will have more social connections on teams with a senior woman relative to those on teams without a senior woman.

These hypotheses are grounded in the literature on the persistent, latent, and subtle ways gender inequality is reproduced within organizations (Acker, 1992 ; Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998 ; Cole, 2004 ; Fraser, 1989 ; Gaughan and Bozeman, 2016 ; Madlock-Brown and Eichmann, 2016 ; Sprague and Smith, 1989 ). Many theories regarding the impact of gender diversity assume that teams reproduce socialized patterns of behavior. Zimmerman and West ( 1987 ) wrote that gender is not a biological concept, but it is a social construction that “involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures’” (West and Zimmerman, 1987 ). Gender is thus created by social organization and performed in our everyday lives and the ways we interact with one another (Butler, 1988 ). Gender, albeit a social construct, is an influential schema that impacts behaviors and interactions in society (West and Zimmerman, 1987 ).

According to Zimmerman and West ( 1987 ) and Butler ( 1988 ), the process of gender socialization includes ideas about who is a leader, how leaders should act, and even what leaders should look like. Many studies have found that women may not be perceived as leaders even when their status or contributions to the team are high (Bunderson, 2003 ; DiTomaso et al., 2007 ; Humbert & Guenther, 2017 ; Joshi, 2014 ). Other studies have found that men were more influential in groups, even when they were in the minority (Craig and Sherif, 1986 ), and that teams with women and minorities were perceived to be less effective (Baugh and Graen, 1997 ). Furthermore, although leadership responsibilities often become attached to specific roles, they can also be conferred and performed based on the perception of the individual qualities or capabilities of team members (Butler, 1988 ). For example, if a woman is a principal investigator (PI), a man on the team may also be considered a leader and vice-versa. These conferred roles may impact individual responsibilities and further solidify the perception of who is the team leader .

Perceptions about the roles of women and men can also impact the responsibilities they are assigned during meetings and the duties they are expected to perform in the workplace. In academia, faculty are frequently expected to engage in service work to support the university, the discipline, and the community. Service work may include mentoring, advising, and serving on committees. Recent studies suggest what has been long perceived within academia, that when controlling for rank, race/ethnicity, and discipline, women spend significantly more hours on service work when compared to their male colleagues, (Guarino and Borden, 2017 ; Misra et al., 2011 ; Urry, 2015 ). In STEM disciplines, women spend a higher percentage of their time on mentoring than their male counterparts (21% for women vs. 15% for men) (Misra et al., 2011 ). Researchers have not yet explored whether team science exacerbates or mitigates this disparity in service work.

Literature has documented that collaboration patterns are different for women and men. Women faculty and students participate in more interdisciplinary research in almost all fields at every career stage (Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007 ). In addition, women tend to have more collaborators than men (Bozeman and Gaughan, 2011 ), and studies have found that being well-connected correlates with success for women (Madlock-Brown and Eichmann, 2016 ). Is it possible that having a senior woman on the team creates a culture of collaboration, such that non-faculty, which might be traditionally marginalized on a team, are more well-connected? We evaluate this here by comparing the connectedness of non-faculty on teams with and without a senior woman.

In part, the lack of understanding about why gender diversity matters on scientific teams result from primarily studying member demographic profiles rather than studying how teams are functioning, including exchanges of knowledge, power dynamics, and the team development process which is critical to team success (Smith-Doerr et al., 2017 ). This study moves beyond team composition to expand and examine real-world scientific teams through analysis of relational data to answer the questions: What is the role of women on scientific teams; and How do women impact team interactions?

This study was conducted at a land grant, R1 University in the western region of the United States. The primary sample for this study was 12 self-formed, interdisciplinary scientific teams with varied research foci, who were participants in a competitive university-funded team science program from 2015 to 2020. To apply for funding, each team submitted a written application and competed in a pitch fest (a brief oral presentation of their proposed project) that was followed by an intensive question and answer session by the review team. The topics for the interdisciplinary teams that were selected were broadly defined across STEM-related fields. The teams were expected to contribute to high-level program goals, which included:

Increase university interest in multi-dimensional, systems-based problems

Leverage the strengths and expertise of a range of disciplines and fields

Shift the funding landscape towards investing in team science/collaborative endeavors

Develop large-scale proposals; high caliber research and scholarly outputs; new, productive, and impactful collaborations

These overarching goals were measured by having the teams report on a variety of outcome metrics, including publications, proposals submitted, and awards received.

Participation in the team science program occurred through two cohorts and lasted 24–30 months for each cohort. However, a team in the second cohort left the program after 12 months. During the program, teams met with administrative leadership, the team science research team, and some external partners every 3–4 months to provide progress updates on stated milestones and receive feedback and mentorship. Additional support was provided through individualized trainings/workshops approximately every few months throughout the program. These sessions provided additional instruction on team science principles, social network analysis interpretation, marketing/branding, diversity and inclusion, opportunity identification, philanthropic fundraising, technology transfer, visioning, and team management/leadership. Some of the training was attended by multiple teams, but often these were specifically designed for the needs and developmental stage of each team. An additional team volunteered to participate in the study but was not part of the formal program. This team, also self-formed, was an interdisciplinary team that had received a large award through a federal grant. The 13 teams were randomly assigned a number from 1 to 13 to maintain anonymity and are referred to in this study by their team number. Team 2 was excluded from the study altogether because two of the authors were members of this team.

Data collection

Multiple types of evaluation data, at multiple points in time, were collected throughout the university-based team science program including participant observation, focus groups, turn-taking data, rosters, interviews, and surveys. This study utilized the resulting data from rosters, participant observation, field notes, and responses to a social network survey. Data for this article is from social network surveys at the conclusion of the program or the closest associated data point. Selecting data from a similar timepoint follows the recommendations of Wooten et al. ( 2014 ) who differentiated between development, process, and outcome metrics for scientific teams.

Teams submitted rosters with demographic information including name, email, self-identified gender, title, college, department, and role on the team (i.e., PI, member, graduate students, etc.). Rosters were updated annually during the program and provided the data to define senior woman and junior faculty and other demographic categories.

Social network survey

Each team member on the roster was sent an email after the program end date and was asked to complete an online social network survey that had two sections: demographic and social network relational questions (see Appendix Table 2 ). Following IRB protocol #19-8622H, participation was voluntary, and all subjects were identified by name on the social network survey to allow for the complete construction of social networks. Names were deleted prior to data analysis and result reporting.

To ensure that respondents had the option to select a self-identified gender, the social network survey included a demographic question that asked participants to self-identify their gender by filling in a blank space rather than choosing from a prescribed drop-down list. This was the gender attribute used for analysis in this article. Two respondents did not answer the gender demographic survey question, and the roster data was used for these participants. There was no variability in the level of missingness across questions. Respondents either completed the survey or did not.

The network survey’s relational questions asked about the presence and absence of interactional mentoring, advice, leadership, and collaborative relationships with other members of the team. The first set of questions was developed by the research team primarily to collect information about scientific collaborations since joining the team. The survey asked, who have you:

talked about possible joint research/ideas/concepts/connections

worked on research, collaborations, tech projects, or consulting projects

worked on joint publications presentations, or conference proceeding

worked on or submitted a grant proposal; and sat on a student’s committee together (or is a member of your thesis/dissertation committee)

The second set of questions focused on social relationships within the team, including:

I learn from [ this person ]

I seek advice from [ this person ]

I hang out with [ this person ] for fun

[ this person ] is a leader on the team

[ this person ] is a mentor to me

[ this person ] is a friend

[ this person ] energizes me

Participant observation and field notes

A researcher attended two to six team meetings for each team to collect observational data. There were two exceptions to this as Team 1 did not have face-to-face team meetings, precluding participant observation; and Team 5 did not consent to observation at their meetings. After the meetings, the researcher recorded field notes to provide qualitative insights into the progress of the team development, their patterns of collaboration, and gender interactions as suggested by Marvasti ( 2004 ). The field notes supported the development of the senior women classification (see Appendix Table 1 for classification definitions). In addition to roster information, many teams had separate leadership teams that met and determined the scientific direction of the team. If a team had a woman on the leadership team, as recorded in field notes, then they received the designation of having a senior woman .

Statistical analysis

RStudio (R Studio Team, 2020 ) was used to analyze the social network data. The data were summarized using outdegree, indegree, and average degree. The outdegree of an individual is a measure of how many other team members they indicated receiving advice, mentorship, etc. from on the team. Alternatively, the indegree of an individual is a measure of how many other team members reported receiving advice, or mentorship, from that person. Average degree is the average number of immediate connections (i.e., indegree plus outdegree) for a person in a network (Giuffre, 2013 ; Hanneman and Riddle, 2005 ). To compare results across the teams, the indegree and outdegree measures were scaled by the number of respondents to account for the total number of possible connections for individuals (which is a function of both team size and response rate). The scaled indegree is thus the proportion of the team that named that team member for a given category. For example, if a team member has a scaled mentor indegree of 0.10, then 10% of the responding team members consider this individual to be a mentor. Confidence intervals for scaled indegrees were calculated using a t -distribution due to limited sample size.

The social relation question set responses were also analyzed separately and then combined for further statistical analysis. Three measures were created: collaboration, social, and professional support. To create the measure called collaboration , the following questions were combined: worked on research, collaborations, tech projects, or consulting projects; worked on joint publications presentations, or conference proceedings; worked on or submitted a grant proposal. To create the measure called social , the measures: I hang out with [this person] for fun and [this person] is a friend were combined. Finally, to create the measure called professional support , the measures: I seek advice from [this person], [this person] is a mentor to me, and sat on a student’s committee together (or is a member of your thesis/dissertation committee) were combined (see Appendix Table 2 for Terms and Associated Survey Questions).

In addition, data from the social network relational questions were used to construct multiple social network diagrams, wherein nodes represent the team members, and an edge exists from participant A to participant B if A perceived a relation with B. For example, in the mentorship network, a link from A to B signified that A considered B to be a mentor.

Field notes were analyzed using a constant comparative method (Mathison, 2013 ) to provide qualitative insights into the progress of overall and individual team development, patterns of collaboration, and gender interactions as suggested by Marvasti ( 2004 ).

Classifications

For analysis purposes, three classifications were created from the demographic data. Senior woman indicates there was a woman PI or a woman on the leadership team. Faculty was defined as an assistant, associate, and full professor. Non-faculty were defined as undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, research associates, community partners, and project managers. In the study, 78.5% of faculty, and 77.6% of non-faculty completed the survey (see Appendix Fig. 1 for more details on response rate and Appendix Table 1 for terms and definitions).

Demographic data

Over half of the 204 team members, 160 (78.2%), completed the survey. Out of 160 respondents, 84% of women and 73% of men completed the survey. Table 1 provides demographic data by team number. Team size ranged from a low of 6 and a high of 30 members and the average number of team members was 15. The university had seven colleges, and all teams had representation from three to seven colleges.

Hypotheses testing

Test results of the five study hypotheses are presented below.

Hypothesis 1 : Women faculty will have a higher indegree than men faculty within the mentoring and student committee networks, and men faculty members will have a higher indegree than women faculty members in the advice and leadership networks.

The first hypothesis was designed to investigate if women were perceived to be doing more service work and emotional labor (mentoring and student committee networks), and men were perceived as being leaders (leader and advice networks) (Guarino and Borden, 2017 ; Misra et al., 2011 ; Urry, 2015 ).

Figure 1 compares the average indegree values of men and women on each team in four social network diagrams (mentoring, student committees, leader, and advice). The data in Fig. 1 do not support the hypothesis that more team members went to women faculty for mentoring and for serving on student committees. Further, the data did not support that more team members went to men faculty for advice or reported viewing them as leaders.

These are plotted against one another, where the size of the dot reflects the number of team members that completed the survey. When the number of respondents is low (a small dot), the scaled indegree is expected to be more variable, whereas when the number of respondents is high (a large dot), the scaled indegree is expected to be less variable and more representative of the whole team’s perceptions. Each graph reports a different social network question (mentor, student committee, advice, and leader).

The Fig. 1 mentoring network does, however, illustrate that teams in the study either engaged or did not engage in mentoring. On teams where women had a high mentoring indegree, men also had a high indegree in the mentoring network. This indicates that mentoring was team-specific rather than gender-specific. This aligns with other studies about team processes that found team norms (like mentoring) impact the behaviors and processes of teams (Duhigg, 2016 ; Winter et al., 2012 ).

Hypothesis 2 : Men at all career stages are more likely to be considered a leader on the team than women, measured by having a higher average scaled indegree in the leadership network (Table 2 ).

Literature in business, political science, and sociology report that men are more likely to be perceived as leaders (Baugh and Graen, 1997 ; Bunderson, 2003 ; Craig and Sherif, 1986 ; DiTomaso et al., 2007 ; Humbert and Guenther, 2017 ; Joshi, 2014 ). Based on this, we hypothesized that these perceptions would also be present in scientific teams (Table 2 , Fig. 2 ). In the study, both men faculty and men non-faculty were more likely to be reported as a leader on the team; however, this finding was not statistically significant based on a 95% confidence interval (CI) (Table 2 ).

The values for men and women for each of the faculty types are plotted against one another. Faculty were more likely to be considered leaders than non-faculty, but there were no significant differences between reporting men or women as leaders on scientific teams.

Figure 2 illustrates the scaled indegree for women and men faculty and non-faculty, which shows faculty are more likely to be considered leaders than non-faculty. Nevertheless, there were no significant differences in whether team members reported men or women as leaders on scientific teams.

Hypothesis 3 : Based on socialized gendered perceptions various networks will be correlated as follows:

The third hypothesis focused on whether gendered perceptions resulted in certain network diagrams being correlated. Previous studies have found that men are more likely to be perceived as leaders (Baugh and Graen, 1997 ; Bunderson, 2003 ; Butler, 1988 ; Craig and Sherif, 1986 ; DiTomaso et al., 2007 ; Humbert and Guenther, 2017 ; Joshi, 2014 ) and women are more likely to be perceived as mentors or caretakers (Guarino and Borden, 2017 ; Misra et al., 2011 ; Urry, 2015 ). These perceptions are sedimented in the language used to describe men and women (Sprague and Massoni, 2005 ).

We see the advice, leader, and mentor networks were highly correlated but only weakly correlated with the student committee network.

Based on this literature, we hypothesized that the leadership and advice networks would be correlated because both leading and giving advice suggest a greater power differential. Second, the mentoring network would not be correlated with leadership or advice networks because mentoring is more closely aligned with caregiving activities, which are considered more feminine. Third, the mentor and student committee networks would be correlated because these acts are associated with caretaking. Here, we tested if the networks related to leadership were correlated and if networks related to mentorship and service work such as serving on student committees were correlated.

Figure 3 illustrates the correlations for four of the network diagrams (mentoring, student committee, advice, and leadership) and reports the significance. The first gendered perception, that the leadership and advice networks would be correlated, was validated by the data. In the study, the leadership and advice networks were correlated (0.83). However, the hypothesis that the mentoring network would not be correlated with leadership (0.82) and advice (0.84) was not supported. These network diagrams were correlated, indicating team members who reported other team members as being leaders also reported that they received advice and mentoring from them. Finally, the hypothesis that mentoring and student committee diagrams would be correlated was also not validated by the data (0.32). One factor that could be contributing to these results comes from studies that show perceived organizational support, as well as perceived leader support, correlate with creativity and satisfaction in the workplace (Handley et al., 2015 ; Moss-Racusin et al., 2012 ; Smith et al., 2015 ). On the teams, members that are perceived as leaders are likely to provide support to others on the team. Notably, these studies did not explicitly examine gender in their findings.

A growing body of literature seeks to understand the connection between interpersonal relationships and knowledge innovation (Reference Blinded). We investigate this by considering how three types of interactions collaborative, social, and professional are intertwined on scientific teams. The purpose of this hypothesis was to closely examine the collaboration patterns of men and women and the connection between interpersonal relationships and knowledge creation. To create the measures in this hypothesis, social network survey questions were combined. For example, the measure social is a combination of: I hang out with [this person] for fun and [this person] is a friend (see the Analysis section for descriptions of all the measures).

To test what proportion of team members collaborate, given that they are also social with these individuals, we identified the team members that the person was social with and then calculated what proportion of those members they were also collaborating with. The results for this measure are given in Table 3 as proportion collaboration given social . Other items in Table 3 were developed in a similar manner.

Although our results indicate no statistical differences between men and women, we found that both men and women have intertwined relationships. If a team member is in one network (e.g., collaboration), it is likely that the person is also in another one of their networks (e.g., social). Furthermore, the overall proportion of men who have intertwined relationships in their collaboration, social, and professional support networks were higher in all proportions except proportion social given professional support (Table 3 ).

Numerous studies have attempted to tease apart gendered approaches to different collaboration styles and whether this has any impact on scientific collaborations (Bozeman et al., 2013 ; Madlock-Brown and Eichmann, 2016 ; Misra et al., 2017 ; Zeng et al., 2016 ). To build on this body of literature, this hypothesis tests the impact of senior women’s leadership, if any, on the collaborations of senior women and their impact on the network.

Figure 4 illustrates the scaled average indegree on the whole team when there are women in senior positions. A high average indegree for the team indicates that more team members and interacting and socializing on the team. The average scaled indegree on teams with a senior woman was 0.28 and without a senior woman was 0.20 ( t -test p  = 0.44; Cohen’s D effect size 0.51). The second graph in Fig. 4 illustrates the scaled average indegree on non-faculty when there are women in a senior positions. The average scaled indegree on teams with a senior woman was 0.27 and without a senior woman was 0.16 ( t -test p  = 0.42; Cohen’s D effect size 0.55). Thus, there was no evidence to conclude that senior women influenced the social interactions on the team.

These average scaled indegree measures were then separated based on whether there was a senior woman leader on the team, and the average across all teams was marked by a black horizontal bar. Based on these data, there appears to be no systematic difference in the social interactions of teams with a woman in a senior position and teams without a woman in a senior position. Average scaled indegree of non-faculty on teams without a senior woman = 0.16. Average scaled indegree of non-faculty on teams with a senior woman = 0.27. ( t -test) p -value = 0.42.

This study explored the impact of gender diversity on 12 scientific teams by analyzing team development and process data. It investigated two primary research questions: What is the role of women on scientific teams? and How do women impact team interactions? We initially believed that the primary reason previous research had been unable to adequately explain the role of women on scientific teams and how women impact team interactions were in part due to the lack of qualitative and mixed methods studies. We based our initial hypothesis on the assumption that scientific teams reproduce existing patterns of inequality (Butler, 1988 ; West and Zimmerman, 1987 ). However, it was through the development of the five hypotheses for this study and the subsequent analysis of relational data, that we learned that our assumption was in large part not supported.

Numerous studies have found evidence of systematic discrimination and bias in awarding grants (Ginther et al., 2011 ), acceptance of publications (Lerback et al., 2020 ; Salerno et al., 2019 ), language to describe women (Ross et al., 2017 ), promotion decisions (Régner et al., 2019 ), rewards (Mitchneck et al., 2016 ), and access to resources for research (Misra et al., 2017 ) in addition to other obstacles and forms of marginalization that are invisible and unacknowledged (Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007 ; Urry, 2015 ). Why did our data not replicate these findings? We conclude with the following possible explanations.

Preliminary studies in the SciTS literature have found that team science principles may simultaneously support the advancement of women in scientific fields; and complementarily, the inclusion of women on scientific teams may increase the success of these teams (McKean, 2016 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ). Further, including women and underrepresented populations on scientific teams has the potential to “serve as a strong entry point into scientific studies for women” (Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007 , p. 72). Similarly, in sociology, Soler-Gallart ( 2017 ) found positive benefits for the whole team when scientists engaged in dialogic relations and interaction with the intention of overcoming gender barriers and discrimination. Could team science advance women in their scientific careers? If high-functioning scientific teams disrupt rather than reproduce existing hierarchies and gendered patterns of interactions, it increases the possibility that team science is a tool not only for accelerating the creation of knowledge but for the advancement of a more empowered, just, and equitable profession.

Literature has documented how including historically underrepresented identities in the ingroup changes attitudes and behaviors (Soler-Gallart, 2017 ). Allport et al. ( 1954 ) found that when members of an ingroup were in close contact and built connections with members of an outgroup, prejudice decreased. Initially, the theory about ingroups and outgroups was devised to describe race and ethnic relations; however, recent studies have generalized the findings to other topics including gender bias and discrimination (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006 ). Today, numerous studies have documented that intergroup contact and connections can improve intergroup attitudes (Allport et al., 1954 ; Brewer, 2007 ; Dovidio et al., 2012 ; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006 ). Is it possible that scientific teams create ingroups that include rather than exclude women?

The teams in this study were not created nor did they develop in isolation. These teams had access to team development resources like SciTS literature, team science training, and access to administrative expertise and support. The promotion and tenure package of the selected university for this study allowed faculty to include interdisciplinary and team accomplishments. Structures were in place to fund, train, build, and reward these teams. Many of these resources, interventions and structures were designed and led by a group of nine women and one man. The women, especially, emphasized diversity, equity, and inclusion from team formation to building and rewarding successes. In addition, many of the sessions were customized to meet the needs of individual teams. Did these facilitators create an ingroup ? Although we did not test the impact of these interventions and structures, other studies have previously hypothesized that modifying existing and often outmoded structures will positively impact outcomes for women (Gibbons et al., 1994 ; Hansson, 1999 ; Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007 ). Another study found that when team members participate in dialog relations and interactions instead of using prestige to gain power they were more willing to rethink concepts when presented with new information (Soler-Gallart, 2017 ). Specifically, in terms of women in science, Rolison ( 2000 , 2004 ) developed a hypothesis recommending explicitly applying Title IX principles to support women in academia. She posited that providing equal funding opportunities and resources for women would result in equal opportunities for success. Another study attributed the key to their team’s success was the inclusion of women, the community, and other diverse perspectives from the community (Soler-Gallart, 2017 ). Our findings suggest that the handful of women on our teams may have joined the ingroup in academia albeit if only for a short time.

It is important to note that we do not believe our results accurately reflect the university of study as a whole or academia in general. Team observations and resulting field notes documented numerous accounts of gender inequality and inequity where women were disempowered and had limited opportunities to contribute to the team. Moreover, we are confident that women on these teams have had individual experiences that would contradict our findings. A lack of evidence does not indicate that there is equality. Nevertheless, these results do suggest that scientific teams, developed with intention, may provide greater opportunities for women to amplify their contributions to science (McKean, 2016 ; Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ).

Limitations

Previous studies on gender and scientific teams have used bibliometric data to understand patterns of collaboration. Other studies on teams have created teams in the lab using students and other volunteers. Although this study is unique and contributes to the literature, as the data are based on real-world scientific teams, we identified six limitations.

First, several teams had apprehension about participating in SciTS research, and one team left the program after year one resulting in limited data from those teams. Second, teams may have experienced the so-called Hawthorne effect (K. Baxter et al., 2015 ) and performed differently because they were part of a research study, and a researcher regularly attended team meetings. All participant observations related to the positionality of the researcher were well-documented in field notes (P. Baxter and Jack, 2008 ; Greenwood, 1993 ; Marvasti, 2004 ).

Third, we defined senior women in a manner that would be inclusive to women with and without formal titles. The senior woman designation was given based on both formal titles and field notes. Some of the teams in our study had women who were the PI or in a designated leadership position with formal titles, and other teams had women on the leadership team. It is possible that the women on these teams were seen as leaders because of their position on the team, but that their leadership came without titles, awards, and recognition that might have been associated with those titles.

Fourth, it is possible that study participants had varying definitions of mentor , advice , and leader . We anticipated different interpretations in our study plan and as a result combined data in hypothesis four to detect and account for potential differences in definitions. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that lived experiences, in general, give individuals different perspectives. Literature in political science has found that when people imagine a leader , many of the traits are more masculine (e.g., wearing a suit, being tall and bigger) (Butler, 1988 ). Fifth, we did not measure the success of the teams in this study; thus, we were unable to translate how different interaction patterns translated into team performance. Ongoing funding was, however, contingent on performance as measured by pre-determined metrics including numbers of grants, publications, invention patents, and other markers of success.

Finally, a limitation of all social network studies is that data are collected at a single point in time. Thus, temporal changes in team interactions cannot be accounted for in our sample. For example, we cannot discern whether social relationships or scientific collaborations came first. We only know that they were both happening at the time the survey was administered. Further, at the time the survey was completed, it is possible that a person had not yet established a relationship, or they had forgotten about a previous relationship.

Conclusion, recommendations, and future research

We offer three key recommendations for future research. First, scientific results that are statistically insignificant are rarely shared in the literature. Therefore, it is critical that all efforts to expand research be published to broaden and accelerate the understanding of the role of women in scientific teams (Bammer et al., 2020 ; Oliver and Boaz, 2019 ).

Second, the landscape of science is changing rapidly as a result of private and federal funders requiring the inclusion of the science of team science experts as PIs in grant applications. We recommend that researchers expand their focus and examine how scientific teams change the culture of science. Research questions might include: How do support diverse teams translate to culture changes in science and the academy? Do scientific interdisciplinary teams provide more access for historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups? Finally, to create a comprehensive understanding of elements that contribute to expertise in scientific teams, we recommend that research be conducted with a theoretical focus on team development and processes. This would include studies that explore science facilitation, learning-by-doing, and other tacit forms of expertise that lead to integration and implementation of knowledge (rather than a focus on recruitment and demographics).

Third, existing studies define gender as a binary (man/woman). This short-sighted perspective is no longer relevant in society. Gender is not a biological concept, but a social construct, “It involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’” (West and Zimmerman, 1987 , p. 125). Gender is thus created by the social organization of our everyday lives and the way we interact with one another. People often see this difference as natural , and society is structured as a response to these differences in terms of men and women. Because of this, researchers like us continue to expend time and resources asking research questions rooted in binary gender. Future research should broaden definitions of diversity and gender including non-binary definitions of gender, expand how we measure inclusivity, explore how power imbalances block expertise, and study how a balance of power promotes expertise.

In conclusion, the lack of evidence for gender impacting team roles and behaviors in our study aligns with other SciTS studies that found team composition is not the silver bullet that automatically leads to knowledge creation and innovation (Duhigg, 2016 ; Oliver and Boaz, 2019 ). Numerous SciTS studies have documented the importance of processes over team composition and relationships to build successful teams (Boix Mansilla et al., 2016 ; Gaughan and Bozeman, 2016 ; Hall et al., 2018 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ). Perhaps the reason scientific teams produce more citations and have a greater impact than siloed investigators (Wuchty et al., 2007 ) is that they are leveraging the available expertise through the authentic integration of all members.

In the future, when scientists ask, “What proportion of women is ideal on a team?” consider responding with “It is not about the number of women, but rather how women on teams are integrated and empowered.”

Data availability

Data are available upon request to protect the privacy of our study participants. Parts of the larger data set have been made publicly available via the following links: https://doi.org/10.25675/10217/214187 and https://hdl.handle.net/10217/194364 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Jeni Cross, the Department of Sociology, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS) at Colorado State University for helpful discussions and preliminary data collection. We also thank Professor Sue VandeWoude, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Colorado State University, for helpful discussions and support. The research reported in this publication was supported by Colorado State University’s Office of the Vice President for Research Catalyst for Innovative Partnerships Program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Office of the Vice President for Research. Additional funding and support were provided by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program (NSF EF-0723676 and NSF EF-1413925).

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Love, H.B., Stephens, A., Fosdick, B.K. et al. The impact of gender diversity on scientific research teams: a need to broaden and accelerate future research. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 386 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01389-w

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Mobility Institution: University of Utrecht

WP 6: The role of transnational literatures in the decolonisation of understanding of gender within the European academe

Objectives: Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including pedagogical and textual content analyses, curricula case studies, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators, students and transnational intellectuals in cross-European contexts, DC6 will investigate the ways in which transnational literatures (including text, novels, poetry, play texts, digital literary media) have influenced processes of pedagogical decolonisation within the teaching of Women’s and Gender Studies. The research asks to what extent transnational intellectuals and literatures that challenge thinking about European gender identities have been deployed to develop, extend and decolonise theoretical frameworks for rethinking politics of identity within interdisciplinary gender studies.

Doctoral Candidate 7

Host Institution: University of Granada

Mobility Institution: University of Lodz

WP 7: Transnational literatures in the making: dialogues with film, social media, streaming platforms, performative arts and new literary genres

Objectives: DC7 will be researching on the ways in which transnational narratives (and  experiences) resonate, interpelate or enter into dialogue with other discursive forms of expression such as film, performative arts, social media initiatives, streaming platforms, electronic literature or slam literature. This involves translations across literatures and these different media as well as across different national contexts. Such processes are partly enabled by the broad accessibility of different technologies of communication (including film, social media or streaming platforms) as well as new literary genres and literary experiments (electronic literature, slam literature). These socio-cultural transformations facilitate transnational circulation of literary narratives, or of the content of literature, often creatively reworking them in the process.

Doctoral Candidate 8

Host Institution: University of Lodz

WP 8: Intermedial diffusions: creative interfaces of transnational women's literature and the arts

Objectives: The individual research project will focus on the inter- and transmedial diffusions of the experiences and narratives conveyed by the selected examples of transnational women’s literature and how these transformations are shaped by the shifts of national/cultural/social contexts. The special attention will be paid to the interfaces of literature and the arts. Taking a new materialist approach, the DC9 will focus on the complex intra-action between the form and content, exploring how the change of the medium affects the content of the narrative and vice versa—how the narrative co-constitutes the operations of the medium. The research will focus on how—through trans- and intermediality—the selected narratives of transnational women’s literature reach out to and engage broader audiences, and how they are reshaped once placed in new situations of communications and new national locations. This will contribute to developing a more thorough reflection on European identities and how they are negotiated on everyday basis in and across different national contexts.

Doctoral Candidate 9

Mobility Institution: University of Lodz

Objectives: DC9 will be researching on points of entry and pathways of transnational literature in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. A space where languages and literatures of numerous small nations traditionally coexisted and mixed in rich variety, CEE is an ideal laboratory to examine transnational encounters, transculturalism, questions of identity and border-crossing. The cultural specificities and symbolic significance of CEE as a specific cultural toponym in Europe have been widely addressed from the 1970s on. However, this scholarship is traditionally leaving out majority of women-identifies writers, being focused on canonical male authors. At the same time, the cultural position and the role of CEE in post-socialist times, and in particular in times of EU enlargement, with shifting geographic and symbolic borders, requires transnational perspective in addressing critically literary production in the region.

Doctoral Candidate 10

Host Institution: University of York

Mobility Institution: University of Bologna

Objectives: DC10 (externally funded, recruited by partner YORK) will have three main objectives: 1. To build on Walkowitz’s notion of the “born-translated” novel and Preciado’s blending of gender and sexuality studies with migrant/multilingual literary studies in order to interrogate and reimagine the definition of translingual, border-crossing writing not merely as an aesthetic effect in transnational literatures but as a genre in its own right; 2. To deepen understandings of how multilingual and migrant writing shapes and is shaped by nuanced intersections of gender, language, culture, race, class, sexuality, and disability; 3. To experiment with practice-led research methods, using translation and various forms of creative practice (e.g. creative writing, performance, mixed-media artforms), alongside social science methods (e.g. interviews, focus groups), in order to develop innovative interdisciplinary methods for approaching border-crossing artworks that challenge and question existing conventions in literary scholarship. Externally funded ESR10 will select a diverse range of primary texts and mixed-media artworks that cross borders not only between languages and cultures but also between genres, genders, and form. They will be supported by YORK’s interdisciplinary expertise, networks, and facilities for the study and practice of social science and artistic research methods. Furthermore, the Department of English & Related Literature will provide networks and training in translation, creative writing, and the creative industries.

Doctoral Candidate 11

Host Institution: Coventry University

Mobility Institution: University of Utrecht

Objectives: Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist methods and methodologies, including pedagogical and textual content analyses, curricula case studies, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators, students and transnational intellectuals in cross-European contexts, externally funded DC11 will investigate the ways in which transnational literatures (including text, novels, poetry, play texts, digital literary media) have influenced processes of pedagogical decolonisation within the teaching of Women’s and Gender Studies. The research asks to what extent transnational intellectuals and literatures that challenge thinking about European gender identities have been deployed to develop, extend and decolonise theoretical frameworks for rethinking politics of identity within interdisciplinary gender studies.

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Centre for Gender Studies

Student research projects.

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Our taught and research postgraduates engage in a variety of fascinating projects under supportive expert supervision. Below you can find summaries of research projects carried out by students in Gender Studies.

When a woman has an unplanned pregnancy and seeks advice from a Church-run centre, how likely is she to receive impartial advice on her choices? This was the question that Gender Studies postgraduate Zillah Holford set out to answer in her dissertation.

Zillah focused her project on CareConfidential, an organisation which provides information on behalf of over 150 church-run crisis pregnancy centres around the UK. As well as distributing leaflets, CareConfidential also promotes itself online, and it was these sources that became the primary research materials for the dissertation.

In analysing the various materials, the project looked at the range of rhetoric and discourses in order to determine the extent of any anti-abortion stance. Having used qualitative content analysis and thematic coding to study the text, a number of discursive themes emerged that would enable Zillah to gauge what agenda, if any, was shaping the information being given to pregnant women.

The work identified ten themes. These were: taking time to think; emphasis on continuing the pregnancy; medical misinformation; emphasis on choice; claims to impartiality; conscience/instinct/’deeper feelings’; fulfillment of motherhood; normative gender discourses; positive consequences; and negative consequences.

Her findings were unequivocal and identified a serious problem for women seeking impartial advice. She concluded that CareConfidential operate from an anti-abortion political stance, and that their information materials are informed by this ideology.

The pro-breastfeeding lobby – so-called  ‘lactivists’ – is a movement that is rooted in neoliberal thinking and economics. But what part does race play in the movement, and how does its ideology translate across social and cultural structures? Trish, a Gender Studies postgraduate, examined these territories in her recent research project.

Her source material was geographically diverse, including e-interviews with seven black mothers from the United Kingdom, the United States and South Africa. She also studied international blogs and parenting groups to gain a clearer picture of the different sides of the breastfeeding debate and understand how it differs in various countries and cultures.

This research involved deconstructing the symbolic role played by breastfeeding in the promotion of ‘good’ motherhood as the preserve of white, middle-class women. Trish also looked at how black women’s experiences are simultaneously included and excluded, celebrated and appropriated.

These finding formed the basis of a report that shines a new light on a subject that has been around as long as womankind, yet still has the power to excite passionate debate.

Gender Studies postgraduate Emily set out to explore the differing ways that men and women are portrayed in true crime stories on television. Specifically, she studied the relationship between gender and crime in the language of the scriptwriter.

Her source material was two series that examined the work of often notorious criminals from both sexes. Emily compared the six-episode series  Martina Cole’s Lady Killers  (2008), which focused purely on female murderers, to the six episodes of ITV’s on-going series  Real Crime , which re-tells a number of crimes involving men.

The methods Emily employed in studying the language from both series included discourse analysis and aspects of semiotic analysis.

She found that the language used quite convincingly upheld the traditional assumptions about gender and crime. This was particularly true in terms of attributing crime to innate badness and it clearly shaped the way male and female offenders were described and depicted.

Recent media coverage has highlighted the seamless migration of ‘lad culture’ – typified by misogyny and sexual banter – into online communities. Izzie Young, a Gender Studies postgraduate, has completed a thesis examining this phenomenon and focused particularly on the construction of sexual violence found on Facebook banter pages,  Uni Lad  and  The Lad Bible .

Izzie started by considering second-wave feminist approaches to pornography and theorisations of 1990s lad culture in the context of the burgeoning new media communities. She found that these debates still had a great deal of relevance with reference to today’s online environment – even though the context of the behaviour has changed, the behaviour itself has not.

Using focus groups and visual data analysis, her primary piece of research found that seeing banter sites as ‘communities of representation’ is a useful tool for understanding how sexual violence is conceptualised both online through ‘humour’ and in real life. It also reveals that lad culture has embraced digital technology and is thriving online.

Izzie was able to conclude that moving beyond deterministic second-wave discussions of the spheres of representation and action is crucial for successfully engaging with this topic.

Gender in the Economy

Women play diverse and critical roles in the economies of both developing and developed nations. Yet, they often remain severely constrained from realizing their full personal and economic potential as a result of insufficient access to formal financial services, work, and education, disempowering social norms, and gender-biased laws and institutions. New theoretical and empirical research describing these various constraints and evaluating promising interventions to remove them or empower women to overcome them is emerging. However, the research among economists on these topics is often siloed in different sub-fields of economics and there are few venues for explicitly anchoring research discussions on the topics of women and gender issues more generally. To promote research on the role of gender in both developing and developed economies, NBER, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has formed a Study Group on Gender in the Economy. This initiative will bring together researchers from different fields of economics who are working on these topics to share and discuss current research findings. By connecting the gender issues of today in the developed world to their historical evolution and to their counterparts in the developing world, the Study Group aims to understand the evolution of gender differences across varying “states of the world” and to identify promising directions for future research.

Investigators

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is the past director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy Program. An economic historian and labor economist, her research interests include the evolution of gender differences in labor force and earnings, as well as technological change, education, and the earnings distribution.

Jessica A. Goldberg is an associate professor of economics at the University of Maryland. She is a development economist whose research interests include rural labor markets, gender disparities in financial inclusion, and the role of social networks in economic decisions.

Claudia Olivetti is the George J. Records 1956 Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the evolving role of women in the labor market, as well as intergenerational mobility, marriage institutions, and the effects of the Baby Boom.

Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant #INV-003527

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Why sex and gender matter in implementation research

Cara tannenbaum.

1 Insitute of Gender and Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Ottawa, Canada

2 Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

Lorraine Greaves

3 British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health, Vancouver, Canada

Ian D. Graham

4 University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Associated Data

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article.

There has been a recent swell in activity by health research funding organizations and science journal editors to increase uptake of sex and gender considerations in study design, conduct and reporting in order to ensure that research results apply to everyone. However, examination of the implementation research literature reveals that attention to sex and gender has not yet infiltrated research methods in this field.

The rationale for routinely considering sex and gender in implementation research is multifold. Sex and gender are important in decision-making, communication, stakeholder engagement and preferences for the uptake of interventions. Gender roles, gender identity, gender relations, and institutionalized gender influence the way in which an implementation strategy works, for whom, under what circumstances and why. There is emerging evidence that programme theories may operate differently within and across sexes, genders and other intersectional characteristics under various circumstances. Furthermore, without proper study, implementation strategies may inadvertently exploit or ignore, rather than transform thinking about sex and gender-related factors. Techniques are described for measuring and analyzing sex and gender in implementation research using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The present paper describes the application of methods for integrating sex and gender in implementation research. Consistently asking critical questions about sex and gender will likely lead to the discovery of positive outcomes, as well as unintended consequences. The result has potential to strengthen both the practice and science of implementation, improve health outcomes and reduce gender inequities.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0247-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Efforts to integrate sex and gender throughout all phases of the health research cycle have been rising sharply over the past two decades [ 1 – 4 ]. Since 2010, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has been requiring researchers to indicate whether their research protocol accounts for sex or gender, using the term “sex” to refer to the biological attributes that distinguish male from female, and the term “gender” to refer to men and women’s socially constructed roles, identities and behaviors [ 5 , 6 ]. As of 2016, the U.S. National Institutes of Health Research asks applicants to explain how they plan to factor consideration of sex as a biological variable into their research design and analysis [ 7 , 8 ]. The Gender Advisory Group to the European Framework Program for Research and Innovation also mandates the Gender Dimension across all sectors [ 9 ]. Journal editors are encouraged to increase accountability around sex and gender reporting requirements, by using the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines [ 10 , 11 ]. These events beg the question: how have research methods in implementation science addressed sex and gender? For the purpose of this article, we will use the term implementation research and practice (IRP) to include knowledge translation, implementation research and practice.

The opening argument for this debate article is that to date, despite the evidence on the impact of sex and gender on health, research methods in the field of implementation have neglected sex and gender considerations. An analysis of selected literature in IRP supports this proposition. For example, a review of the tables of contents and indexes of three popular implementation science texts [ 12 – 14 ] reveals that none devote a chapter to the role of sex and gender in implementation science. Only one includes gender in the index [ 14 ], which refers to a chapter in the text with a few lines describing how many sexually transmitted infection interventions targeting racial/ethnic minorities are gender specific and how the strategies to reach men and women may differ [ 15 ].

Searching the top 10 articles of 2015 as reported by Implementation Science (see Additional file 1 : Appendix 1) for the words sex or gender shows that only one makes a minor mention of gender as it relates to controlling for ‘clinician gender’ in a modeling exercise [ 16 ]. Sex and gender also do not appear to play a prominent role in implementation theories. For example, in Nilsen’s review [ 17 ] of implementation theories, models and frameworks, only 2 make minor references to gender [ 18 , 19 ]. One simply includes ‘gender’ as one of the barriers to optimal clinical practice under the category “health care professional/physician barriers” [ 18 ] and the other includes a footnote about a study they were citing, that “a fourth factor, gender of participants, was also related to program outcomes but was not included in their subsequent analysis” [ 19 ]. Furthermore, neither of the germinal papers on the Theoretical Domains Framework [ 20 , 21 ], a widely used and influential framework [ 22 ] that guides assessment of barriers to implementation, makes any reference to sex or gender. There is a domain in the framework that focuses on ‘social/professional role and identity’, which could capture elements of sex and gender, but usually tends to be limited to assessing professional roles and almost never identity, let alone sex or gender identity.

Turning to the knowledge synthesis literature on implementation, the Cochrane Collaboration’s Methods Equity group [ 23 ] is active in increasing awareness of the need and methods for sex and gender analysis in systematic reviews [ 23 – 25 ]. Both the Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) and Consumers and Communication review groups have official guidance in their resources for authors on equity [ 26 , 27 ]. A recent assessment of a sample of systematic reviews from these two groups however, reveals limited consideration of sex and gender in the written report. For example, of 12 EPOC and seven Consumer and Communication reviews published between July 2014 and May 2015, none addressed sex or gender in the analysis or implications sections of the report (Personal Communication, Jennifer Petkovic, Peter Tugwell and Vivian Welch on behalf of the Campbell and Cochrane Equity Methods Group, April 13, 2016). It is possible that the review authors did consider sex and gender in their analyses and determined it was unimportant. However, they failed to report this.

Little research has been undertaken or reported to inform how sex and gender impact IRP, as evidenced by this analysis of key texts, well-used conceptual models, and Cochrane reviews on implementation strategies. The objective of this paper is to describe the rationale for why and how sex and gender should be considered in IRP.

What is sex? What is gender?

A first step for understanding how to integrate sex and gender in IRP involves operationalizing the two terms, and recognizing different components of gender. The term sex refers to a biological construct, whereby an individual is defined as being male or female according to genetics, anatomy and physiology [ 6 , 7 , 11 , 28 – 32 ]. Researchers should use the term sex when describing the number of male or female patients or committee members, or when stratifying outcomes by male versus female participants or health care providers. It is more appropriate to say what the distribution by sex of a sample or target audience is, than to use the term ‘gender distribution.’ This is because gender is a multifaceted and fluid construct, influenced in a temporal manner by social and cultural contexts and environments to create gender norms [ 6 , 7 , 11 , 28 , 30 – 35 ]. Gender norms influence commonly accepted ways of how people behave, how they perceive themselves and each other, how they act and interact, and the distribution of power and resources in society [ 6 , 28 , 31 – 35 ]. Gender can be structured by, and operating within ethnicity, indigenous status, social status, sexuality, geography, socioeconomic status, education, age, disability/ability, migration status, and religion, requiring an intersectional approach to implementing practices, programs and policies [ 36 , 37 ]. The acronym “PROGRESS” can be used to remember these variables: place of residence, race/ethnicity/culture/language, occupation, gender/sex, religion, education, socioeconomic status, and social capital [ 38 ]. Researchers often understand gender as a function of gender roles (e.g. child care, housework), gender identity (e.g. personality traits such as being sensitive to the needs of others or having leadership abilities), gender relations (e.g. social support), and institutionalized gender (e.g. career opportunities, personal income, educational background) [ 6 , 28 , 34 ]. Gender as a broad term can also refer to the expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people [ 39 , 40 ]. For this reason, definitions of sex and gender are evolving as science changes, and it remains challenging to easily separate the biological from the social. Sex and gender are often interrelated, interactive and potentially inseparable [ 6 , 11 ]. Given the epistemology of knowledge, and the social nature of implementation and behavior change, the effect of gender and other identity factors, either alone or in combination, can serve as barriers or enablers to the outcome or impact of IRP interventions.

Measuring and understanding sex and gender

Collecting and analyzing data on sex in IRP is relatively simple if using typical male and female categories. Sex can be self-reported, designated by an examination of external genitalia, or genetically determined based on an XX, XY or intersex genotype [ 11 ]. Data on sex-related factors can include measuring sex hormones, body and organ size, metabolism, or fat tissue distribution [ 41 ]. Gender is more complex, and can be operationalized along four different constructs: gender roles, gender identity, gender relations and institutionalized gender [ 6 , 28 , 31 , 32 ]. Table  1 defines these four constructs, gives examples of key questions that can be asked of each in IRP, and lists measures and methods for use in IRP research [ 6 , 28 , 31 , 32 , 42 – 44 ].

Relevance of four gender constructs to implementation research and practice

Traditionally, individuals are asked to categorize their sex as male or female and many assumptions, often based in gender and not biology, are made on the basis of their responses. Researchers are now rethinking this approach to be more inclusive of gender identity and expression [ 39 ]. A two-step approach to measuring sex and gender identity could first ask individuals to indicate their sex assigned at birth (male/female), and then ask the same individuals how they currently self-identify, which could include male, female, trans male/trans man, trans female/trans woman, gender queer/gender non-conforming; and provide space to self identify as another option not provided [ 40 ]. Similarly, participants could also be given the option to disclose sexual orientation and whether they consider themselves part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) community.

The scales in Table  1 list measures that can be used to quantify different dimensions of gender. Researchers can also create gender scales using gender-related variables of relevance to their particular research topic [ 45 , 46 ]. Pelletier et al. created a composite gender score using 7 characteristics: 1) status on primary earner; 2) personal income; 3) number of hours per week spent doing housework; 4) status of primary person responsible for doing housework; 5) level of stress at home; 6) masculine traits; and 7) feminine traits. They were able to demonstrate that gender, independent of sex, predicts poor outcome after acute coronary syndrome, pointing to new areas of intervention [ 44 ].

Qualitative methods are also useful for the collection of data on specific dimensions of gender. Case studies, ethnography, narrative and descriptive qualitative approaches can provide evidence and contextualized insight across a range of participants’ personal characteristics, including those of sex and gender. Qualitative methods can also be used to explore concepts of institutionalized gender, and to gain a more in-depth understanding of gender as a barrier or enabler to the use of implementation interventions, the uptake of the evidence-informed clinical interventions or program and the outcomes of implementation efforts. A number of texts, casebooks, examples and online courses are available that provide guidance on how to conduct sex and gender science using commonly employed quantitative and qualitative methods [ 6 , 32 , 42 , 43 ].

The case for considering sex and gender in implementation research methods

Emerging evidence suggests that sex and gender are important in decision-making, stakeholder engagement, communication and preferences for the uptake of interventions. Furthermore, when gender norms, identities and relations are ignored, unintended consequences may occur. The following five scenarios give examples of when and why sex and gender should be measured and considered in implementation research:

• When the implementation of an intervention requires decision-making on the part of individuals or organizations . Decision-making is a critical component of behavior change interventions, and plays a key role in the uptake of new organizational practices and programs [ 47 ]. Research from the fields of business and management offer insights for IRP on important sex and gender factors related to decision-making [ 48 – 50 ]. Qualitative research conducted by Deloitte Consulting with 18 large business organizations suggests that female executives have a tendency to be more attuned to micro-level signaling during meetings, and may favour discovery options and iterative thinking during decision-making processes [ 48 ]. Male executives tend to end a conversation once they connect with a good idea or solution. Their female counterparts are inclined to be more inquisitive, wanting to hear everyone’s thoughts before deciding, and taking more time to find the ideal solution. Different leadership traits among male and female leaders can therefore influence the outcome of decision-making processes [ 49 , 50 ].
• When sex and gender dynamics may play a role in stakeholder engagement and conflict resolution . A survey queried reasoning methods among 624 corporate board directors, of whom 75 % were male and 25 % female [ 51 ]. Female directors scored significantly higher scores on the complex moral reasoning dimension, which implies attending more to relationships and to the challenge of balancing multiple stakeholders’ interests. Females may also engage in more collaboration and consensus building, not only to make sound decisions but also to elicit common support for a course of action [ 49 , 50 ]. The outcome of an implementation intervention may therefore depend on the sex and gender dynamics in each particular context.
• When communication strategies are being tested, as sex and gender may be differentially responsive to the choice of language used, the strength of persuasion of the communication strategy, and the way promotional information is processed . This is why sex and gender form the basis for market segmentation in the fields of marketing and consumer behaviour, where subtle changes in language and emotional appeal can have a differential effect on men and women’s attitudes towards the brand advertised and purchase intentions [ 52 ]. The way messages and interventions are primed or packaged to reflect gender norms or stereotypes may also influence the outcomes of health promotion interventions. For instance, priming individuals to the perception that women eat healthier foods than men leads both male and female study participants to prefer healthy foods, whereas priming masculinity results in unhealthy food preferences [ 53 ]. When the packaging and healthiness of the food are gender congruent (i.e., feminine packaging for a healthy food, masculine packaging for an unhealthy food) both male and female participants rate the product as more attractive, report that they would be more likely to purchase it, and even rate it as tasting better compared to when the product is stereotype incongruent.
• When negative or harmful gender stereotypes may impede the uptake and outcomes of an IRP initiative [ 54 ]. A realist review of the implementation of school-based interventions to prevent domestic abuse for children and young people reported that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth felt excluded from the programmes, as the content did not address gender identity or sexual orientation in high-risk populations [ 55 ]. Similarly, data suggest that masculine norms around emotional control and self-reliance are associated with recurrent non-suicidal self-injury [ 56 ]. Stigma related to healthcare seeking for male depression and suicide [ 57 , 58 ], may explain why women are more likely to benefit from psychosocial treatment for the prevention of suicide and suicidal ideation compared to men [ 59 ]. Some studies purport that gender bias in prescription patterns among health care providers results in more women receiving treatment with antidepressants for mental health [ 60 ] and pain symptoms, but only among female clinicians [ 61 ]. Men, on the other hand, may be preferentially managed with orthopaedic surgery to manage knee arthritis [ 62 ].
• When gendered power relations may inadvertently skew the uptake of information focused on women’s health needs, such as maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health, or family planning [ 63 ]. This occurs in cultures and settings where male partners and head of households play a large role in female’s health-seeking behaviour due to their authority and decision-making role. For example, the introduction of health programs enhanced by mobile phone technologies overall fosters women’s empowerment in low-income countries [ 64 ]. However, in some cases these programs exacerbated gender relations and gender inequalities, such as when women were pressured to give the phones provided by the program to their husband if he did not already own a phone, or when conflicts about phone use led to cases of spousal abuse.

The World Health Organization outlines a spectrum of gender-responsive programs, illustrating the progression from the exploitative use of gender stereotypes in IRP messaging, through to accommodation and ultimate transformation to gender equity (Fig.  1 ) [ 65 , 66 ]. Making active choices reflecting content, messaging and decision-making processes during the implementation of an intervention can have a critical impact on gender equity for women and men. Gender transformative approaches are preferred as they anticipate unintended barriers and consequences and address the causes of gender-based health inequities where they exist [ 67 ]. For example, during implementation of a tobacco control program, investigators can decide to use motivational recruitment techniques that appeal to a person’s health and self-respect, as opposed to messaging that invokes and reinforces stereotypical gendered norms of sexual attractiveness, beauty claims or images based on masculinity or femininity [ 63 ]. Recent guidance based on qualitative research suggests de-linking messages for men and for women when promoting tobacco reduction during pregnancy and post partum, since the uptake of the intervention can be hindered by negative couple dynamics if the partners have different smoking behaviours or attitudes about smoking during this period [ 68 – 70 ]. Another transformative approach to encourage uptake of smoking cessation interventions would be to focus on a wider range of non-stereotypical gendered roles that include fathering for men and work for women as potential motivators.

A continuum of approaches for integrating sex and gender. Reproduced with permission from: Lorraine Greaves, Ann Pederson, Nancy Poole (Eds). Making It Better: Gender Transformative Health Promotion. Canadian Scholar’s Press/Women’s Press. 2014. Available at http://promotinghealthinwomen.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Continuum-of-Approaches_colour.pdf Accessed March 20, 2016

Sex and gender can be therefore be pivotal at multiple points along the IRP process, from the content and messaging surrounding the intervention, to decision making around the uptake and unintended consequences of an intervention. Asking sex and gender questions can also elucidate enablers and barriers to the adoption of complex behavioral interventions. For example, examining the outcome of implementing a multidisciplinary cardiac rehabilitation program merits asking whether women or men have less time to devote to recovery and prevention activities due to gender-based expectations regarding their responsibilities at home. The potential advantages of including sex and gender in the study of other complex behavioral interventions (e.g., hand hygiene, reducing clinician's opioid prescribing, reducing falls in hospital, increasing vaccination rates, and obesity prevention) require further investigation. Measuring the way sex and gender influences these interventions may help elucidate potential mechanisms and contexts behind the success or failure of various IRP efforts, as shown in the examples above on tobacco cessation, healthy eating, depression and suicide, pain, heart disease and domestic violence.

Some research questions to drive the selection of methods

Researchers can start by asking a series of questions about how sex and gender can have an impact on their implementation initiative in order to determine the best way to measure and analyze the effect of sex and gender. First, how might sex or gender affect decision-making and stakeholder engagement, or facilitate or impede the uptake of evidence-informed practice, programs, policies? Second, how might sex based characteristics or prevailing gender norms or gender roles serve as barriers or enablers to the uptake of evidence-informed practices, programs, policies? Third, when and how should the communication strategy, wording or messaging be tailored across sex, gender or other identity characteristics? Fourth, when using participatory/collaborative or integrated knowledge translation research approaches, could the sex and gender of the researchers and knowledge users matter, and if so, how? Similarly, how might gender relations as a function of dyads or interpersonal dynamics within an organization, community, workplace or institution influence the outcome of the intervention? And finally, should the research protocol consider examining whether there are unintended impacts of implementation that exacerbate or diminish sex, gender or other diversity-related inequities? Table  2 lists a series of questions for researchers to consider when designing their IRP research. Additional opportunities for integrating sex and gender in IRP as relates to models of health systems research have been reviewed in detail elsewhere [ 33 ].

Some sex and gender research questions for researchers studying implementation

Another way to study issues of sex and gender in IRP resides in the realist approach which attempts to answer the question, “What works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why?” [ 47 ] This is accomplished through the identification and examination of underlying generative mechanisms or program theories associated with the implementation intervention or program, the conditions or contexts under which the mechanisms operate, and the pattern of outcomes produced. Realist evaluators may wish to examine sex and gender through the lens of this Context-Mechanism-Outcomes configuration for the evaluation of new initiatives, programs and scale-up [ 71 , 72 ].

Through this lens, context can be defined as the particular sub-groups for whom the outcomes were successful, the gender relations between the stakeholders, the sex and/or gender of the individuals who implemented the intervention, and the institutional, socio-economic, cultural and political conditions. Mechanism refers to the explanation of how a particular program’s resources work to change the reasoning and responses of participants to bring about the adoption of the clinical intervention or program that results in both intended and unintended outcomes. Outcomes are the impacts of the intervention. Some questions of how sex and gender considerations can align with the Context-Mechanism-Outcomes configuration are: How do gender roles, gender identity, gender relations, and institutionalized gender influence the way in which an implementation strategy works, for whom, under what circumstances and why? Or, how do program theories operate/work within and across sexes, genders and other diversity characteristics, in what circumstances and why? Finally, research results should be disaggregated and reported by sex or gender groups [ 11 ]. It is important to report whether there are similar effects or differences.

When critically appraising the publications of implementation research, reviewers should increasingly ask whether the reports consider sex and gender during a study’s life cycle, and if so, how? Table  3 provides a beginning list of questions that can be asked of implementation research to help the reader assess whether sex and gender have been adequately considered, and the extent to which this may have influenced the study findings and conclusions.

Questions to ask when appraising an implementation research or practice initiative for inclusion of sex and gender considerations

This paper argues that sex and gender should always be considered in implementation research. Considering sex and gender should be an essential component of IRP. Failing to integrate sex and gender may neglect an important determinant of knowledge use, reducing the effectiveness of implementation interventions, inadvertently reinforcing sex neutral claims and negative gender stereotypes, and possibly creating or increasing gender and health inequities in care and health outcomes. Only by consistently investigating sex and gender in a critical and reflective manner that addresses underlying gender inequities, will the field of IRP reach its full potential for meeting the requirements of scientific rigour, excellence and maximal impact.

Acknowledgments

We express gratitude to Jo Rycroft-Malone, Professor of Implementation & Health Services Research, Bangor University, United Kingdom, for providing direction to get out of the “realist swamp.” We also thank Krystle van Hoof, Assistant Director of the CIHR Institute of Gender and Health for her thoughtful comments, and Justin Presseau, Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute for insightful discussions about sex and gender in implementation research and the Theoretical Domains Framework. IDG is a recipient of Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Foundation Grant Scheme, Inaugural competition, FDN #143237.

Institute of Gender and Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Availability of data and materials

Authors’ contributions.

CT, LG and IDG conceived and drafted the article. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Consent for publication

All authors consented.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Additional file.

Appendix 1. List of the top implementation science papers published in 2015. (DOCX 19 kb)

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Women's and Gender Studies Research

Research categories 

Projects 

Researchers 

Vision / mission statement

We are group of feminist researchers using different approaches, from critical interdisciplinary historical investigation, to philosophical inquiry, to practice based creative research, to investigate local, national and international problems of gender and sexuality. 

Approach to research methodology

As a diverse group of researchers our methodologies are wide ranging and include philosophical perspectives engaging with the philosophy of sexual difference, phenomenology and de/anticolonial politics and theory.

In addition to critical interdisciplinary historical and philosophical approaches we have a strong track record of academic activism, engaging with local campaigns for change, in particular in pursuit of LGBTIQ inclusion and to improve access to abortion care.

We also have a strong track record of critical engagement in the field and practice of gender and international development, in many countries located throughout Asia, Africa and the Pacific, most recently Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, using a collaborative and participatory action learning and action research approach to social change.

Research categories

Histories and politics of reproduction in Australia, especially abortion

Histories of queer politics

‘The child’

Feminist cities 

Philosophy of the city 

New municipalism

Disability studies

Development studies

Sexual and reproductive politics

European social philosophy

French feminist philosophy

Philosophy of sexual difference

Discipline:

Women's and Gender Studies

Investigators:

Associate Professor Barbara Baird

This research brings historical approaches to understanding the politics of sexuality and reproduction in Australia.

The ways that abortion is represented in public discourse and, recently, the ways in which abortion services are provided, are a focus.

Claims to citizenship by queer folks, including lesbian mothers and those who campaigned for marriage equality, are similarly a focus.

The category of ‘the child’, and the ways it is used to pursue political agendas, is an abiding interest.

Across all these issues, the place of race and national identity politics is present in understanding how gender and sexuality are constructed.

The research has been centrally useful in creating change, most recently in achieving the decriminalisation of abortion in South Australia.

• ARC DP170100502: Gender and Sexual Politics: Changing citizenship in Australia since 1969 (2017-2022)

Sexual Citizenship

Dr Laura Roberts

This research seeks to bring a new philosophical lens to understanding the problem of gender oppression through an analysis of the transformation of the city of Barcelona into a feminist city.

Analysing how the city of Barcelona has undergone this complex process of transformation requires a novel conceptual framework and this research thus aims to weave multiple threads into an interdisciplinary approach that garners insights from feminist politics, feminist cities, feminist philosophy and philosophy of the city.

Ultimately, this project develops a new approach to understand the transformation of the city from both an institutional perspective and an existential perspective, asking inhabitants how they feel living in a feminist city.

• CHASS ECR Research Grant (2021)  

Ms Van Thi Nguyen, Ms Katharine Annear, Ms Joanne Chua, Ms Cara Ellickson, Ms Munkhtsetseg Erdenebaatar, Ms Minh Huyen Thi Ngo, Mr Diego Del Valle Cortizas,  Dr Anu Mundkur 

Drawing on feminist disability theory, women with disabilities (WWD) from the Global South and Global North and their allies, collaborate to create and perform fashion shows to identify, share, unmask and subvert the reification of able-bodied beauty in global fashion.

Queer crip theoretical perspectives on “compulsory able-bodiedness”, a phrase originating from Robert Mcruer (2002), shape the ways that this participatory action research (PAR) and Communications for Development (C4D) project addresses dehumanising and disempowering social norms that perpetuate higher rates of violence against WWD.

The framework involves different cohorts of WWD collaborating, to purposefully lead in challenging the harmful social norms that impact their lives.

Contributions offer valuable new cross cultural insights into the possibilities for WWD to transform understandings of beauty in their different locations and within the normative global field of fashion and society more broadly.

Video: I am beautiful. You too!

This project investigates the provision of abortion services in Australia since 1990. Most humanities and social science research into abortion focuses on law, or politics, or media representation, or personal experience. This project forges new ground by investigating the system and everyday politics of the provision of abortion care, including the failure of the public health system to provide this common and necessary health care service.

In the post-decriminalisation era in Australia we need to focus on improving access to abortion care and providing culturally appropriate services. This project is based in interviews with around forty advocates and providers as well as documentary research.

The book Abortion Care is Health Care will be released by Melbourne University Publishing in October 2023. 

Funding was provided by the former Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences at Flinders University.

Philosophy, Women's and Gender Studies

Dr Laura Roberts, Associate Professor Athena Colman (Brock University, Canada)

This project brings together the leading feminist philosophers of our times in an edited collection celebrating the 50 th anniversary of the publication of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman .

This text is arguably worthy of being placed amongst the key works that constitute the most important philosophical contributions published in the late twentieth century; undoubtedly, it is one of the most significant texts of feminist philosophy to appear in the later half of the past century.

Our collection will bring together important Irigaray scholars and the range of contributors in this volume illustrate the geographical and generational differences in feminist philosophy.

It includes new work from some of the most influential feminist philosophers of the last 50 years, including Rosi Braidotti and Adriana Cavarero alongside scholars who have translated Irigaray’s texts (Gail Schwab) and written important monographs on Irigaray’s work (Rachel Jones, Tina Chanter, Alison Stone, Penelope Deutscher, Michelle Boulous Walker, Mary Rawlinson, Laura Roberts) as well as mid-career scholars who are taking up ideas in Speculum in conversations with questions of race, trans studies, feminist politics and methodology, and whose voices will be crucial in shaping Irigaray’s influence in the years to come.

Meet our Language, Literature, Culture and Society researchers

At Flinders, our researchers at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences include experienced experts from many different areas. Shaping our ever-changing world, our practice-based research allows us to stay at the forefront of modern education.

Research Section Head:

Associate Professor Erin Sebo

Language, Literature, Culture & Society

Sturt Rd, Bedford Park South Australia 5042

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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.

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Undergraduate Research in Gender and Women's Studies

Research is an important component of a Pomona College education, across all disciplines and majors. Here are recent summer undergraduate research projects conducted by students in Gender and Women's Studies.

Preferences for and Barriers to Gender Affirming Surgeries in Transgender and Non-binary Individuals

Bita Tristani-Firouzi ’21; Advisor: Kyla Tompkins

The trans/non-binary community continues to be an underserved population in medicine, and our understanding of their interests, disinterests, and barriers to transition-related healthcare is quite limited, especially among the diverse gender identities within the trans/non-binary umbrella. An anonymous, online survey was applied across all 50 states and advertised through social media, healthcare organization websites and flyers. Transgender and non-binary identifying persons 18 years and older were analyzed. 887 trans/non-binary respondents, averaging age 34 and predominantly Caucasian (84%) completed the survey. Interest in gender affirming procedures varied significantly across gender identities, with trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth reporting much higher interest in top surgery, and trans women and non-binary people assigned male at birth reporting higher interest in bottom surgery and facial surgery. Barriers differed by procedure, with the greatest barriers to top surgery being the cost and lack of resources for recovery, and the greatest barriers to bottom surgery being fear of complications and cost. The principal barrier to facial procedures was cost. Of the participants who indicated no interest in top and bottom surgery, 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 respectively stated not needing it for their transition. Non-binary individuals, on average, listed not needing the procedure for their transition at a higher frequency than trans men or trans women.

Institutional Memory Activist Archive: Race, Class, and Gender Activism at Pomona College

Gray Butler ’20; Advisor: Valorie Thomas

The work of marginalized students on campus surrounding activism remains unrecognized throughout Pomona College’s history. The failure to keep institutional memory not only erases the labor produced by marginalized students (POC, women, first-generation low income etc.) but largely proves to be a significant challenge in ongoing student activism. This project seeks to track the lineage of activism of marginalized students along axes of race, class and gender to document and highlight student work, bring attention to the systematic ways in which Pomona (and the academy) perpetuates inequity, and to theorize alternative ways of organizing around an ethos of activist durability, and radical acceptance of the limitations of the academy.

An alumni activist survey was issued out to collect information about previous student activist experiences from the past 30 years. From these surveys alumni interviews were conducted. The researcher also primarily went through the Claremont College Archives and a feminist student paper: The Review (1988-2004).

Research found recurring themes in activist work including: previous student documents  compiling instances of Pomona’s treatment of marginalized students with themes of lack of cultural sensitivity, insufficient support for faculty and students of color, an culture of misogyny and lack of safety regarding sexual assault, and the founding of multiple programs as a direct result of student activism.

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• The Cass review: an...

The Cass review: an opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine

• Related content
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• Kamran Abbasi , editor in chief
• kabbasi{at}bmj.com
• Follow Kamran on Twitter @KamranAbbasi

At the heart of Hilary Cass’s review of gender identity services in the NHS is a concern for the welfare of “children and young people” (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q820 ). 1 Her stated ambition is to ensure that those experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care. This will be disputed, of course, by people and lobbying groups angered by her recommendations, but it is a theme running through the review. Cass, a past president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, seeks to provide better care for children and adolescents on one of the defining issues of our age. Her conclusion is alarming for anybody who genuinely cares for child welfare: gender medicine is “built on shaky foundations” (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q814 ). 2

That verdict is supported by a series of review papers published in Archives of Disease in Childhood , a journal published by BMJ and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2023-326669 doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2023-326670 doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2023-326499 doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2023-326500 ). 3 4 5 6 The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.

For example, of more than 100 studies examining the role of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender transition only two were of passable quality. To be clear, intervention studies—particularly of drug and surgical interventions—should include an appropriate control group, ideally be randomised, ensure concealment of treatment allocation (although open label studies are sometimes acceptable), and be designed to evaluate relevant outcomes with adequate follow-up.

One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions. Yet this inconclusive and unacceptable evidence base was used to inform influential clinical guidelines, such as those of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which themselves were cascaded into the development of subsequent guidelines internationally (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q794 ). 7

The Cass review attempted to work with the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) and the NHS adult gender services to “fill some of the gaps in follow-up data for the approximately 9000 young people who have been through GIDS to develop a stronger evidence base.” However, despite encouragement from NHS England, “the necessary cooperation was not forthcoming.” Professionals withholding data from a national inquiry seems hard to imagine, but it is what happened.

A spiralling interventionist approach, in the context of an evidence void, amounted to overmedicalising care for vulnerable young people. A too narrow focus on gender dysphoria, says Cass, neglected other presenting features and failed to provide a holistic model of care. Gender care became superspecialised when a more general, multidisciplinary approach was required. In a broader sense, this failure is indicative of a societal failure in child and adolescent health (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q802 doi: 10.1136/bmj-2022-073448 ). 8 9 The review’s recommendations, which include confining prescription of puberty blockers and hormonal treatments to a research setting (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q660 ), now place the NHS firmly in line with emerging practice internationally, such as in Scandinavia (doi: 10.1136/bmj.p553 ). 10 11

Cass proposes a future model of regional multidisciplinary centres that provide better access and, importantly, standardised care for gender dysphoria, including a smoother transition between adolescent and adult services. Staff will need training. All children and young people embarking on a care pathway will be included in research to begin to rectify the problems with the evidence base, with long term outcomes being an important area of focus. An already stretched workforce will need to extend itself further (doi: 10.1136/bmj.q795 doi: 10.1136/bmj-2024-079474 ). 12 13 In the meantime, some children and young people will turn to the private sector or online providers to meet their needs. The dangers in this moment of service transition are apparent.

But it’s also a moment of opportunity. Families, carers, advocates, and clinicians—acting in the best interests of children and adolescents—face a clear choice whether to allow the Cass review to deepen division or use it as a driver of better care. The message from the evidence reviews in Archives of Disease in Childhood is as unequivocal as it could be. Cass’s review is independent and listened to people with lived experience. Without doubt, the advocacy and clinical practice for medical treatment of gender dysphoria had moved ahead of the evidence—a recipe for harm.

People who are gender non-conforming experience stigmatisation, marginalisation, and harassment in every society. They are vulnerable, particularly during childhood and adolescence. The best way to support them, however, is not with advocacy and activism based on substandard evidence. The Cass review is an opportunity to pause, recalibrate, and place evidence informed care at the heart of gender medicine. It is an opportunity not to be missed for the sake of the health of children and young people. It is an opportunity for unity.

• Mitchell A ,
• Langton T ,
• Heathcote C ,
• Hewitt CE ,
• Hardiman L ,
• Wilkinson E
• Dixon-Woods M ,
• Summers C ,

Pursuing Undergraduate Research in Gender Studies

Congratulations to three Gender Studies students who were selected for the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program this year! The URFP provides $3,000 in scholarship and a mentoring structure to support students pursuing independent research or creative inquiry. After working on their projects in the winter and spring quarters, student fellows typically present their work during the Undergraduate Research Week in May.

Tracy Hurtado is a double major in Gender Studies and Chicanx and Central American studies and a transfer student from Santa Monica College. Drawing from her work experience in the fashion industry, Tracy’s URFP project is about how race, class, and gender play a role in creating popular fashion trends on TikTok. She is interested in how certain looks and styles—through clothing, hair, makeup, and jewelry—become either marked up as “high end” or devalued as “cheap.” Tracy plans to engage with Chicanx feminist theories to make sense of working-class Black and Brown Latina aesthetics.

Georgia Lavery Van Parijs is a second-year student double majoring in English and Gender Studies. From Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Georgia is co-founder and president of the Western Equestrian club at UCLA and works as the legislative chair of the policy committee for IGNITE , an advocacy organization on campus that works to build women’s political leadership. Her URFP project focuses on the ways in which abortion was portrayed and discussed during the late 19th and early 20th century, a period following the nationwide abortion ban in 1910. Keeping in mind the contemporary attacks on reproductive justice, Georgia is interested in conducting historical research to see how the ban in 1910 affected representations of cultural attitudes toward abortion and women’s activism.

Yaying Wu is a sophomore majoring in sociology, with interests in Gender Studies, education, and digital humanities. She is from Shenzhen, China, and plans to draw from her own experiences as an international student and language skills to conduct research on transnational education migration. Yaying’s URFP project raises questions about gendered expectations and body image, focusing on the experiences of Chinese international students attending American private high schools. She will be conducting interviews with high school students to find out about the cultural shifts and pressures they face regarding body weight, beauty standard, and health, issues that become especially heightened around their return trips to visit family in China.

All three students this year are mentored by Professor Ju Hui Judy Han , who is currently the Vice Chair of Undergraduate Affairs in Gender Studies.

The URFP application is due in the Fall and consists of three components: research proposal, personal statement, and confirmation from the applicant’s faculty mentor. Students interested in applying for the URFP are strongly encouraged to reach out to faculty early on—even as early as the summer—and seek mentorship from faculty who can offer expert advice on research design and methodology that best suit their project.

For more details and help with undergraduate research, please visit the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program and the Undergraduate Research Center – Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Please stay tuned for Gender Studies URFP student panel discussions and workshops as well.

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Research Projects

The Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) promotes research, teaching and public engagement on key issues of the Middle East in a historically and culturally grounded manner. Its coverage includes all time periods—from antiquity to contemporary geopolitics—and an expansive geographical imagination in which the Middle East is both a region with changing boundaries and a conceptual entity, part of global discourses. Scholars are encouraged to explore their different research projects in a shared endeavor of better understanding the Middle East.

Gender Studies in the Middle East and Beyond

This research project,  led by  Nadje Al-Ali ,   Robert Family Professor of International Studies, and professor of anthropology and Middle East studies,   is based on the recognition that a gendered intersectional lens is central, not marginal, to a deeper analysis and understanding of political mobilizations, social developments and cultural expressions in the Middle East. A gendered lens also allows for a comparative perspective and collaboration with other regional centers and initiatives at Brown University. The project involves panel discussions, lectures and book talks, as well as relevant research.

Racialization and Racism in the Middle East and its Diasporas

Within Middle East Studies, we are intimately familiar with grinding generational struggles for dignity and freedom of colonized, occupied, disenfranchised and oppressed people in the Middle East. Yet the history of slavery and racism within the region has remained understudied, and not sufficiently engaged with. This initiative, co-organized and led by professors  Nadje Al-Ali  and  Beshara Doumani ,  and supported by  Africana Studies , is committed to to initiating internal conversations and dialogue within Brown and Middle East studies more broadly and to organizing activities which engage with the global issues of structural racism and exploitation.

Gender and Body Politics: Arts in the Middle East and its Diasporas

In conversation with artists from the Middle East and North Africa as well as its diasporas, the Gender and Body Politics: Arts in the Middle East and its Diasporas  series examines intersecting inequalities and body politics expressed, represented and transgressed in both visual and performance art. Against the backdrop of war and conflict, the rise of authoritarian regimes, displacement and diaspora mobilization, Islamophobia, ongoing orientalist depictions, and challenges linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, this series explores the ways in which artists are informed by and/or contribute to anti-racist, transnational feminist, and queer praxis.   The Brown University Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) and the Columbia University Middle East Institute (MEI) joint  series feature artists online and hosted in-person events. Exhibitions and performances complement the series in locations around New York City and Providence.

Kurdish Studies Project

Kurdish studies have historically been sidelined within Middle East studies or reduced to the study of Kurdish nationalism. While there has been a proliferation of Kurdish studies across the US and Europe in recent years, there has been only limited engagement with Kurdish society in its complexity. The aim of this project led by  Nadje Al-Ali , Robert Family Professor of International Studies, is to support and contribute to critical and original Kurdish studies that combine theoretically cutting-edge and empirically grounded work while highlighting creative approaches (films, art, literature) to the study of Kurds and Kurdish societies. Kurdish Studies Events

Arts and Social Change

The arts have played a pivotal role in shaping and transforming Middle Eastern and Muslim societies, past and present. Through annual workshops, curated exhibits and performances, as well visiting professorships and lectures, this research initiative cultivates a network of scholars passionate about the relationship between the arts and social agency. The aim is to support, innovate, work, and shape research agendas in the fields of Islamic art and architecture, Middle Eastern cinema and photography, fine arts and visual culture, and music and dance.  

Digital Islamic Humanities (archived)

The Digital Islamic Humanities Project is a research initiative devoted to supporting data-driven scholarship on the history, literature, and cultures of the Islamic world. Over the past few decades, humanistic inquiry has been problematized and invigorated by technological advances and the emergence of what is referred to as the digital humanities. Across multiple disciplines, from history to literature, religious studies to philosophy, archaeology to music, scholars are tapping the extraordinary power of digital technologies to preserve, curate, analyze, visualize, and reconstruct their research objects. Through the sponsorship of annual gatherings, workshops, symposia, and other kinds of research projects, this initiative aims to support the state of the art in digital scholarship pertaining to Islamic & Middle East Studies. 

Digital Islamic Humanities Website

Displacement (archived)

Displacement is formative of power relations of inclusion and exclusion. This research initiative pushes at the seams of the humanities, social sciences, and the natural and physical sciences by exploring long-term drivers of displacement. The wager here is that focused interdisciplinary conversation about historical, ecological, and subjective dimensions of displacement as an enduring and global phenomenon, can lay the seeds for imagining alternative futures.

MELLON SAWYER SEMINAR ON Displacement: 2016-17 Website

DISPLACEMENT SERIES 

Engaged Scholarship (archived)

Engaged Scholarship explores the politics and ethics of knowledge production in zones of conflict. The aim is to generate critical conversation among scholars from across the disciplines and area studies around the question of what it means to put intellectual work in the service of the social good, broadly defined. 

Engaged Scholarship Website

Thesis Helpers

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131 Gender Research Topics To Attain Top Grades

Are you looking for a gender topic to use for your research project, research proposal, thesis, or dissertation? You are definitely at the right place. We have 131 diverse gender research topics that will lead you to a point of research to get to the bottom of a certain phenomenon.

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What Is Gender?

Gender is portrayed by the socially constructed characteristics found in males and females. Gender defines the behaviors, norms, and gender roles of males and females. However, it differs in certain societies. However, gender can lead to specific social and economic inequalities in society.

The other popularly confusing phenomenon is sex which refers to the unique biological and psychological characteristics of males, females, and intersex persons. Hugely, gender influences people’s experiences and access to different social amenities.

If gender issues interest you, you can consider doing gender development and gender studies courses or units in college. You will get a better understanding of the relationships between one’s gender and society.

The Different Parts Of A Thesis

A thesis has three major parts which include the introduction, body, and last part.

• Introductory Part The thesis introductory party should entail the cover page, description page, table of contents, list of figures, and list of tables. This may differ based on the kind of thesis that you are doing.
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• The last part This part should contain a list of references and appendices.

Gender Research Topics

Are you searching for ideal topics on gender? You can consider using any of these for your research paper, project, or assignment. You can’t miss an ideal one to use for your paper:

• General impacts of globalization on experiences around gender.
• Dynamics found in gender development.
• Effects of discrimination based on gender at jobs and careers.
• Promotion of gender equality in the world in the 21 st
• The known social construction of gender roles.
• Discuss whether gender is natural or acquired from the surrounding.
• Is gender a role, biological sex, or culturally acquired?
• How does gender impact social media interactions?
• Evaluate the changing gender roles in families.
• How are gender roles portrayed in cartoons?
• Effects of gender biases in the workplace.

Topics About Gender

Do different topics about gender interest you? Then consider any of these for your research project, research paper, proposal, and much more:

• The best modes to use to teach students about gender equality.
• Evaluate women’s empowerment in society.
• Common challenges faced by women in the workplace.
• Classification of gender dysphoria.
• Evaluate sex, gender, and inequalities
• Evaluate gender stereotypes and misunderstandings.
• Importance of mass media in solving gender issues.
• How does society portray gender and sexuality?
• Influence of gender stereotypes in individuals.

Gender Topics

Equality should be achieved in schools, workplaces, and social places. We are social beings and need to find a way to boost equality in society to prevent anyone from feeling left out:

• Gender disparity in science.
• Evolution of discrimination in society in the previous centuries.
• Similarities between racism and gender inequality.
• Social roles men and women.
• Gender roles in the current society.
• Why is discrimination dominant in certain places?
• How has LGBT evolved?
• The rights of single mothers in society?
• Gender role definition.
• The advantages of feminism in the growth of society.

Gender-Related Topics

Here are any gender-related topics which you can use for your thesis, dissertation, proposal, or project. If you have an interest in the field, what are you waiting for?

• The relation between culture and body self-image.
• Forms of gender violence in society.
• Gender role in medicine and science.
• Role of women in the progress of the world economy.
• The possibility of reaching gender equality in modern society.
• The kind of stereotypical depictions of women in the media.
• Role of women on Earth.
• How does religion diminish male roles in society?
• Division of labor for different genders in the workplace.
• Does gender influence income inequality?

Gender Studies Research Topics

Gender studies courses and the unit have gained popularity in different universities. The world is growing with each passing day, and it is important to understand how different genders interact in different institutions:

• The reality of the gender pay gap in the current society.
• Relation between culture and gender stereotypes.
• The root of gender stereotypes.
• Gender stereotypes are found on TV.
• How does gender inequality affect kids’ upbringing?
• Gender barriers faced by women in educational establishments.
• Causes of gender-based violence in the world.
• Family issues are caused by the gender disparity globally.
• The attitudes towards gays and lesbians.
• The Importance of maternal and paternal leaves for the newborn baby.

Gender Inequality Research Paper Topics

The world should provide a safe space for everyone. Therefore, you can use these gender inequality research paper topics to dig deeper into the kind of inequalities people go through:

• Gender concepts integrated into Artificial Intelligence.
• Gender diversity roles in scientific discovery.
• Major causes of gender imbalance.
• Relation between sports, women, and media institutions.
• The advantages and disadvantages of being a feminist.
• Importance of parents’ investment in girls’ education.
• Factors that cause inequality in the workplace.
• How gender misconceptions affect behavior.
• Steps that can be taken by parents to achieve gender parity.

Sociology Research Topics On Gender

Sociology entails the study of social interactions. If that interests you then these sociology research topics on gender will do the trick:

• The genderized occupations in society.
• Gender stereotypes in different regions.
• How are men and women treated differently in law?
• The known gender roles in the family.
• Women’s rights history in different countries.
• Advantages and disadvantages of gender identification in society.
• Mental perception of gender in society.
• Legalization of LGBT in families.
• How does gender studies impact self-esteem?
• The origin and dangers of feminism.

Gender Topics For Research

Gender equality, and achievement will play a huge role in improving productivity in the workplace, school, and social places. Advocating for gender equality for both men and women is crucial:

• Why are girls more likely to fall victim to sexual exploitation?
• Key obstacles that prevent girls from accessing quality education.
• Methods that can be used to promote equal opportunities for women and men in society.
• Impact of gender diversity in scientific innovations.
• Common gender-neutral management practices.
• The contrast of the wage gap between both genders.
• Evaluate gender roles in society.
• Can men fight for their rights as feminists do?
• Evaluate gender discrimination and promotion over time.
• Can education help solve inequality issues?

Gender Issues Topics For Research Paper

What resources do you use for research? You can search on the internet, and use scholarly articles, documentaries, books, and PDFs to get the information that you need:

• Evaluate work-home conflict as a result of gender inequality.
• Factors influencing inequality in developing countries.
• Best way to address gender-based issues at the workplace.
• Relation between gender and leadership in education.
• Bullying issues in education based on gender.
• A social perspective on gender issues and sexuality.
• Best modes of addressing gender equality.
• Relation between globalization, liberalization, and gender equality.
• Major gender issues in international relations.
• How does gender influence the recruitment of individuals in the workplace?

Best Gender Research Paper Topics

Which gender issues have you encountered in society? These are some other topics that can bring you into the limelight. Attaining gender equality in society is important:

• Scarcity of water and effect on gender inequality.
• Unequal division of economic growth in society.
• Factors that lead to gender inequality in the workplace.
• Gender inequality in retirement and employment.
• Relation between poverty and gender.
• Gender inequalities that lead to women’s rights movements.
• Gender stereotypes issue and contribute to gender inequality.
• Effects of gender inequality in economic development.
• Dire consequences of gender inequality.
• The importance of women fighting for gender equality.

Gender Research Paper Topics

You can use any of these gender research paper topics to make your proposal, project, thesis, or dissertation, which will help to make your paper really good. But if this whole writing process is difficult for you, you can find dissertation writers for hire .

• Manifestation of gender inequality in society.
• From your perspective is it possible to fully achieve gender equality?
• Future outcomes of the present gender inequality.
• How does gender blindness impact gender inequality?
• Economic aftermaths of gender inequality.
• Relation between gender equality and politics.
• Evaluate gender inequality from a psychological perspective.
• Best modes to tackle gender inequality at home.
• How is gender inequality portrayed in sports?
• Should women and men perform specific roles?

Women And Gender Studies Research Topics

When it comes to gender issues, women are the most affected. Therefore, there is a need to balance the issue so that both men and women can share the same rights:

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

Research Topics On Gender Inequality

If you are planning to do a research paper on gender. These are the perfect topics to start with. You can find data for different topics easily on the internet:

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

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Evaluating Hookup Culture on Campus: A Lesbian Separatist Perspective

• Megan Ruskey Rutgers University

Hookup culture on the college campus simultaneously offers young women a venue for sexual liberation, while reproducing gender inequities observed throughout much of society. Thus, women are subjected to power imbalances, sexual dissatisfaction, and restrictions in their own bodily autonomy in the pursuit of casual sex. Given this bind, I set out to evaluate hookup culture from the framework expressed through lesbian separatist practice. Specifically, I analyze The Furies Collective, a lesbian separatist group operating in Washington D.C. from the years 1970-1972. In these two years, the Furies developed a self-titled newspaper, educational networks, and a compelling set of feminist principles to guide their activism. In this project, I draw insight from both a personal interview with Furies Collective founder Charlotte Bunch, as well as primary and academic sources. This research finds that while hookup culture does reflect various societal and physical inequities for women, it also provides opportunities for homosocial bonding, as demonstrated in lesbian separatism, that work to make this culture more satisfactory for women. Therefore, in order to benefit from the liberating aspects of hookup culture, women can capitalize on the separatist spaces associated with the hookup environment, like the sorority and pre-game, to fortify connections with one another as a means of protection in hookup spaces.

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Gender medicine ‘built on shaky foundations’, Cass review finds

Analysis finds most research underpinning clinical guidelines, hormone treatments and puberty blockers to be low quality

• Review of gender services has major implications for mental health services

The head of the world’s largest review into children’s care has said that gender medicine is “built on shaky foundations”.

Dr Hilary Cass, the paediatrician commissioned to conduct a review of the services provided by the NHS to children and young people questioning their gender identity, said that while doctors tended to be cautious in implementing new findings in emerging areas of medicine, “quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children”.

Cass commissioned the University of York to conduct a series of analyses as part of her review.

Two papers examined the quality and development of current guidelines and recommendations for managing gender dysphoria in children and young people. Most of the 23 clinical guidelines reviewed were not independent or evidence based, the researchers found.

A third paper on puberty blockers found that of 50 studies, only one was of high quality.

Similarly, of 53 studies included in a fourth paper on the use of hormone treatment, only one was of sufficiently high quality, with little or only inconsistent evidence on key outcomes.

Here are the main findings of the reviews:

Clinical guidelines

Increasing numbers of children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria are being referred to specialist gender services. There are various guidelines outlining approaches to the clinical care of these children and adolescents.

In the first two papers, the York researchers examined the quality and development of published guidelines or clinical guidance containing recommendations for managing gender dysphoria in children and young people up to the age of 18.

They studied a total of 23 guidelines published in different countries between 1998 and 2022. All but two were published after 2010.

Most of them lacked “an independent and evidence-based approach and information about how recommendations were developed”, the researchers said.

Few guidelines were informed by a systematic review of empirical evidence and they lack transparency about how their recommendations were developed. Only two reported consulting directly with children and young people during their development, the York academics found.

“Healthcare services and professionals should take into account the poor quality and interrelated nature of published guidance to support the management of children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence,” the researchers wrote.

Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) , Cass said that while medicine was usually based on the pillars of integrating the best available research evidence with clinical expertise, and patient values and preferences, she “found that in gender medicine those pillars are built on shaky foundations”.

She said the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH) had been “highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York’s appraisal to lack developmental rigour and transparency”.

In the foreword to her report, Cass said while doctors tended to be cautious in implementing new findings “quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children”.

In one example, she said a single Dutch medical study, “suggesting puberty blockers may improve psychological wellbeing for a narrowly defined group of children with gender incongruence”, had formed the basis for their use to “spread at pace to other countries”. Subsequently, there was a “greater readiness to start masculinising/feminising hormones in mid-teens”.

She added: “Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches to holistic assessment, which has meant that this group of young people have been exceptionalised compared to other young people with similarly complex presentations. They deserve very much better.”

Both papers repeatedly pointed to a key problem in this area of medicine: a dearth of good data.

She said: “Filling this knowledge gap would be of great help to the young people wanting to make informed choices about their treatment.”

Cass said the NHS should put in place a “full programme of research” looking at the characteristics, interventions and outcomes of every young person presenting to gender services, with consent routinely sought for enrolment in a research study that followed them into adulthood.

Gender medicine was “an area of remarkably weak evidence”, her review found, with study results also “exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint”.

Alongside a puberty blocker trial, which could be in place by December, there should be research into psychosocial interventions and the use of the masculinising and feminising hormones testosterone and oestrogen, the review found.

Hormone treatment

Many trans people who seek medical intervention in their transition opt to take hormones to masculinise or feminise their body, an approach that has been used in transgender adults for decades.

“It is a well-established practice that has transformed the lives of many transgender people,” the Cass review notes, adding that while these drugs are not without long-term problems and side-effects, for many they are dramatically outweighed by the benefits.

For birth-registered females, the approach means taking testosterone, which brings about changes including the growth of facial hair and a deepening of the voice, while for birth-registered males, it involves taking hormones including oestrogen to promote changes including the growth of breasts and an increase in body fat. Some of these changes may be irreversible.

However, in recent years a growing proportion of adolescents have begun taking these cross-sex, or gender-affirming, hormones, with the vast majority who are prescribed puberty blockers subsequently moving on to such medication.

This growing take-up among young people has led to questions over the impact of these hormones in areas ranging from mental health to sexual functioning and fertility.

Now researchers at the University of York have carried out a review of the evidence, comprising an analysis of 53 previously published studies, in an attempt to set out what is known – and what is not – about the risks, benefits and possible side-effects of such hormones on young people.

All but one study, which looked at side-effects, were rated of moderate or low quality, with the researchers finding limited evidence for the impact of such hormones on trans adolescents with respect to outcomes, including gender dysphoria and body satisfaction.

The researchers noted inconsistent findings around the impact of such hormones on growth, height, bone health and cardiometabolic effects, such as BMI and cholesterol markers. In addition, they found no study assessed fertility in birth-registered females, and only one looked at fertility in birth-registered males.

“These findings add to other systematic reviews in concluding there is insufficient and/or inconsistent evidence about the risks and benefits of hormone interventions in this population,” the authors write.

However, the review did find some evidence that masculinising or feminising hormones might help with psychological health in young trans people. An analysis of five studies in the area suggested hormone treatment may improve depression, anxiety and other aspects of mental health in adolescents after 12 months of treatment, with three of four studies reporting an improvement around suicidality and/or self-harm (one reported no change).

But unpicking the precise role of such hormones is difficult. “Most studies included adolescents who received puberty suppression, making it difficult to determine the effects of hormones alone,” the authors write, adding that robust research on psychological health with long-term follow-up was needed.

The Cass review has recommended NHS England should review the current policy on masculinising or feminising hormones, advising that while there should be the option to provide such drugs from age 16, extreme caution was recommended, and there should be a clear clinical rationale for not waiting until an individual reached 18.

Puberty blockers

Treatments to suppress puberty in adolescents became available through routine clinical practice in the UK a decade ago.

While the drugs have long been used to treat precocious puberty – when children start puberty at an extremely young age – they have only been used off-label in children with gender dysphoria or incongruence since the late 1990s. The rationale for giving puberty blockers, which originated in the Netherlands, was to buy thinking time for young people and improve their ability to smooth their transition in later life.

Data from gender clinics reported in the Cass review showed the vast majority of people who started puberty suppression went on to have masculinising or feminising hormones, suggesting that puberty blockers did not buy people time to think.

To understand the broader effects of puberty blockers, researchers at the University of York identified 50 papers that reported on the effects of the drugs in adolescents with gender dysphoria or incongruence. According to their systematic review, only one of these studies was high quality, with a further 25 papers regarded as moderate quality. The remaining 24 were deemed too weak to be included in the analysis.

Many of the reports looked at how well puberty was suppressed and the treatment’s side-effects, but fewer looked at whether the drugs had their intended benefits.

Of two studies that investigated gender dysphoria and body satisfaction, neither found a change after receiving puberty blockers. The York team found “very limited” evidence that puberty blockers improved mental health.

Overall, the researchers said “no conclusions” could be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development, though there was some evidence bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.

Based on the York work, the Cass review finds that puberty blockers offer no obvious benefit in helping transgender males to help their transition in later life, particularly if the drugs do not lead to an increase in height in adult life. For transgender females, the benefits of stopping irreversible changes such as a deeper voice and facial hair have to be weighed up against the need for penile growth should the person opt for vaginoplasty, the creation of a vagina and vulva.

In March, NHS England announced that children with gender dysphoria would no longer receive puberty blockers as routine practice. Instead, their use will be confined to a trial that the Cass review says should form part of a broader research programme into the effects of masculinising and feminising hormones.

• Transgender
• Young people

More on this story

No case for closing Scotland’s only NHS gender services clinic, says first minister

Veteran trans campaigner: ‘Cass review has potential for positive change’

Cass review must be used as ‘watershed moment’ for NHS gender services, says Streeting

‘This isn’t how good scientific debate happens’: academics on culture of fear in gender medicine research

Five thousand children with gender-related distress awaiting NHS care in England

Ban on children’s puberty blockers to be enforced in private sector in England

What Cass review says about surge in children seeking gender services

Adult transgender clinics in England face inquiry into patient care

‘Children are being used as a football’: Hilary Cass on her review of gender identity services

Thousands of children unsure of gender identity ‘let down by NHS’, report finds

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Gender stereotypes in the family

15 May 2024, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm

Join this event to hear Valentina Tonei discuss whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their children's abilities.

This event is free.

Event Information

Availability.

We study whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their children's abilities. Exploiting systematic differences in parental beliefs about a child's skills and blindly graded standardized test scores, we find that parents overestimate boys' skills more so than girls' in mathematics (a male-stereotyped subject), whereas there are no gender differences for reading.

Consistent with an information friction hypothesis, we use exogenous variation in parents' interview dates to document that the parental gender bias disappears for parents who are interviewed after receiving information on their child’s test scores. We further show that parental gender bias to the detriment of girls contributes to explaining the widening of the gender gap in mathematical skills later in childhood, supporting the hypothesis that exposure to gender biases negatively influences girls’ ability to achieve their full potential.

This event is part of the Quantitative Social Science seminar series: Quantitative Social Science (QSS) and the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) co-host a weekly seminar series, where invited speakers present work relevant to the research interests of the group. It will be particularly useful for those interested in gender stereotype, family economics, applied micro econometrics, social policy,

Useful links

• QSS and CLS Seminar series
• UCL Social Research Institute
• Centre for Longitudinal Studies
• Quantitative Social Science  

About the Speaker

Valentina tonei.

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at University of Southampton

Valentina Tonei is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the School of Economic, Social and Political Science (ESPS) of the University of Southampton (UK), Department of Economics. She is also the Chair of the ESPS Athena Swan Committee and a member of the Royal Economic Society Women's Committee. Previously, Valentina was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York (UK). Her primary research fields are Health Economics, Family Economics and Applied Micro Econometrics.

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College of Humanities

Main navigation, u humanities professor receives neh grant to memorialize children incarcerated at the waialeʻe industrial school for boys in hawai’i.

The grant is part of an initiative to fund projects on the history of Federal Indian Boarding Schools.

T he National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Maile Arvin , associate professor of history and gender studies at the University of Utah – in collaboration with the North Shore Community Land Trust in Hawai’i – $29,445 to support a community-based oral history research and story-mapping project of the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys. As part of a larger effort to fund projects that expand the reach and impact of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative , NEH has awarded more than $400,000 to 14 Tribal Nations and organizations.

Opened in 1903 and located on the North Shore of O’ahu, the Waialeʻe Industrial School was part of a larger government-run system of institutions that incarcerated children and adults in the Territory of Hawai’i. The same white settlers who overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 became the leaders of the new Territorial government in 1900. Yet white people remained a small minority in Hawaiʻi, and thus the government enacted a number of measures to repress Native Hawaiian language, culture, religion and political loyalty to the former Kingdom government. The Industrial School at Waialeʻe remained open at the site until 1950.

According to Arvin, a Native Hawaiian, youth would be sentenced to these types of institutions for minor criminal offenses such as truancy, petty theft, or more general “waywardness” or “incorrigibleness.” However, rather than just being sites where “bad kids” were sent, these institutions effectively criminalized Native Hawaiian forms of kinship and child raising. For example, children who were hānai-ed (a Hawaiian form of open adoption) to a grandparent or other relative were sometimes seen by the government as “abandoned” by their biological parents, and subject to institutionalization.

The goal of Arvin’s project is to remember and memorialize these children in culturally meaningful ways, which can help to address the intergenerational impacts this history continues to have. With the support of the NEH grant, Arvin plans to create educational resources related to the history of the school, create a walking tour of the land and a digital story map that can provide further historical information and photos, which will be housed on the project’s website, naleipoinaole.com .

“Overall, we want to offer space and time for the communities impacted most by the history of these schools to process, grieve, and heal,” said Arvin. “That healing will be a long-term, collective process, but we know that bringing more people to these sites and allowing them to walk, talk, and learn on the land will feed us all in many ways, and help us ensure that the children kept at the industrial schools are not forgotten.”

Photo of what is left of the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys in Hawai’i 

The grant will support Eliana Massey, an undergraduate research assistant to Arvin, in traveling to Hawaiʻi to work on this project over the summer. With research funding support from the U (specifically a VPR Seed Grant through the College of Social and Cultural Transformation, and the Office of Undergraduate Research’s Summer Program for Undergraduate Research), Massey, along with another undergraduate research assistant, Callie Avondet, joined Arvin for a week last summer to do archival research and community engagement on this topic. The NEH grant will allow Massey, who is also Native Hawaiian, to spend more time working with North Shore Community Land Trust in person this summer.

"While I was in Oahu, I helped identify and scan primary source materials in archives, visited the locations of former institutions, and met with members of our community advisory board,” said Massey, who is studying museum studies and philosophy of science at the U. “I am grateful I’ve been able continue this important research since our field work research trip. This trip was especially memorable for me because I am Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and it was my first-time visiting Hawaiʻi and seeing some of the places I’ve heard my family members mention."

The special NEH Chair’s grants support federally recognized Tribes, nonprofit Tribal entities, and state organizations that work with Tribal communities in 11 states on an array of education, research, and public programs that shed light on the legacy of the system of 408 Federal Indian boarding schools operating in the United States between 1819 and 1969. 

“NEH is pleased to award these grants to fourteen Tribal Nations and organizations to enlist their help in recovering and telling the history of Federal Indian boarding schools and the students who passed through them,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) in the NEH press release . “These grants will help document this often painful past, shed light on the far-reaching consequences of Federal Indian boarding school policies on Native communities, and provide opportunities for communities to discuss and heal from their legacy.”  

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Jana Cunningham, University of Utah College of Humanities [email protected] | 801-213-0866

Published April 11, 2024

Read our research on: Gun Policy | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

Changing partisan coalitions in a politically divided nation, party identification among registered voters, 1994-2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to explore partisan identification among U.S. registered voters across major demographic groups and how voters’ partisan affiliation has shifted over time. It also explores the changing composition of voters overall and the partisan coalitions.

For this analysis, we used annual totals of data from Pew Research Center telephone surveys (1994-2018) and online surveys (2019-2023) among registered voters. All telephone survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how people respond to surveys on the telephone compared with online surveys (refer to Appendix A for details).

All online survey data is from the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel . The surveys were conducted in both English and Spanish. Each survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, age, education, race and ethnicity and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology , as well as how Pew Research Center measures many of the demographic categories used in this report .

The contours of the 2024 political landscape are the result of long-standing patterns of partisanship, combined with the profound demographic changes that have reshaped the United States over the past three decades.

Many of the factors long associated with voters’ partisanship remain firmly in place. For decades, gender, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation have been important dividing lines in politics. This continues to be the case today.

Yet there also have been profound changes – in some cases as a result of demographic change, in others because of dramatic shifts in the partisan allegiances of key groups.

The combined effects of change and continuity have left the country’s two major parties at virtual parity: About half of registered voters (49%) identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 48% identify as Republicans or lean Republican.

In recent decades, neither party has had a sizable advantage, but the Democratic Party has lost the edge it maintained from 2017 to 2021. (Explore this further in Chapter 1 . )

Pew Research Center’s comprehensive analysis of party identification among registered voters – based on hundreds of thousands of interviews conducted over the past three decades – tracks the changes in the country and the parties since 1994. Among the major findings:

The partisan coalitions are increasingly different. Both parties are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past. However, this has had a far greater impact on the composition of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.

The share of voters who are Hispanic has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s; the share who are Asian has increased sixfold over the same period. Today, 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial, compared with 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners. However, the Democratic Party’s advantages among Black and Hispanic voters, in particular, have narrowed somewhat in recent years. (Explore this further in Chapter 8 .)

Education and partisanship: The share of voters with a four-year bachelor’s degree keeps increasing, reaching 40% in 2023. And the gap in partisanship between voters with and without a college degree continues to grow, especially among White voters. More than six-in-ten White voters who do not have a four-year degree (63%) associate with the Republican Party, which is up substantially over the past 15 years. White college graduates are closely divided; this was not the case in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they mostly aligned with the GOP. (Explore this further in Chapter 2 .)

Beyond the gender gap: By a modest margin, women voters continue to align with the Democratic Party (by 51% to 44%), while nearly the reverse is true among men (52% align with the Republican Party, 46% with the Democratic Party). The gender gap is about as wide among married men and women. The gap is wider among men and women who have never married; while both groups are majority Democratic, 37% of never-married men identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP, compared with 24% of never-married women. (Explore this further in Chapter 3 .)

A divide between old and young: Today, each younger age cohort is somewhat more Democratic-oriented than the one before it. The youngest voters (those ages 18 to 24) align with the Democrats by nearly two-to-one (66% to 34% Republican or lean GOP); majorities of older voters (those in their mid-60s and older) identify as Republicans or lean Republican. While there have been wide age divides in American politics over the last two decades, this wasn’t always the case; in the 1990s there were only very modest age differences in partisanship. (Explore this further in Chapter 4 .)

Education and family income: Voters without a college degree differ substantially by income in their party affiliation. Those with middle, upper-middle and upper family incomes tend to align with the GOP. A majority with lower and lower-middle incomes identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. There are no meaningful differences in partisanship among voters with at least a four-year bachelor’s degree; across income categories, majorities of college graduate voters align with the Democratic Party. (Explore this further in Chapter 6 .)

Rural voters move toward the GOP, while the suburbs remain divided: In 2008, when Barack Obama sought his first term as president, voters in rural counties were evenly split in their partisan loyalties. Today, Republicans hold a 25 percentage point advantage among rural residents (60% to 35%). There has been less change among voters in urban counties, who are mostly Democratic by a nearly identical margin (60% to 37%). The suburbs – perennially a political battleground – remain about evenly divided. (Explore this further in Chapter 7 . )

Growing differences among religious groups: Mirroring movement in the population overall, the share of voters who are religiously unaffiliated has grown dramatically over the past 15 years. These voters, who have long aligned with the Democratic Party, have become even more Democratic over time: Today 70% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. In contrast, Republicans have made gains among several groups of religiously affiliated voters, particularly White Catholics and White evangelical Protestants. White evangelical Protestants now align with the Republican Party by about a 70-point margin (85% to 14%). (Explore this further in Chapter 5 .)

What this report tells us – and what it doesn’t

In most cases, the partisan allegiances of voters do not change a great deal from year to year. Yet as this study shows, the long-term shifts in party identification are substantial and say a great deal about how the country – and its political parties – have changed since the 1990s.

The steadily growing alignment between demographics and partisanship reveals an important aspect of steadily growing partisan polarization. Republicans and Democrats do not just hold different beliefs and opinions about major issues , they are much more different racially, ethnically, geographically and in educational attainment than they used to be.

Yet over this period, there have been only modest shifts in overall partisan identification. Voters remain evenly divided, even as the two parties have grown further apart. The continuing close division in partisan identification among voters is consistent with the relatively narrow margins in the popular votes in most national elections over the past three decades.

Partisan identification provides a broad portrait of voters’ affinities and loyalties. But while it is indicative of voters’ preferences, it does not perfectly predict how people intend to vote in elections, or whether they will vote. In the coming months, Pew Research Center will release reports analyzing voters’ preferences in the presidential election, their engagement with the election and the factors behind candidate support.

Next year, we will release a detailed study of the 2024 election, based on validated voters from the Center’s American Trends Panel. It will examine the demographic composition and vote choices of the 2024 electorate and will provide comparisons to the 2020 and 2016 validated voter studies.

The partisan identification study is based on annual totals from surveys conducted on the Center’s American Trends Panel from 2019 to 2023 and telephone surveys conducted from 1994 to 2018. The survey data was adjusted to account for differences in how the surveys were conducted. For more information, refer to Appendix A .

Previous Pew Research Center analyses of voters’ party identification relied on telephone survey data. This report, for the first time, combines data collected in telephone surveys with data from online surveys conducted on the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

Directly comparing answers from online and telephone surveys is complex because there are differences in how questions are asked of respondents and in how respondents answer those questions. Together these differences are known as “mode effects.”

As a result of mode effects, it was necessary to adjust telephone trends for leaned party identification in order to allow for direct comparisons over time.

In this report, telephone survey data from 1994 to 2018 is adjusted to align it with online survey responses. In 2014, Pew Research Center randomly assigned respondents to answer a survey by telephone or online. The party identification data from this survey was used to calculate an adjustment for differences between survey mode, which is applied to all telephone survey data in this report.

Please refer to Appendix A for more details.

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Report Materials

Table of contents, behind biden’s 2020 victory, a voter data resource: detailed demographic tables about verified voters in 2016, 2018, what the 2020 electorate looks like by party, race and ethnicity, age, education and religion, interactive map: the changing racial and ethnic makeup of the u.s. electorate, in changing u.s. electorate, race and education remain stark dividing lines, most popular.

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

Office of the Vice President for Research

Martín-estudillo named new director of obermann center for advanced studies.

Luis Martín-Estudillo , professor and collegiate scholar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will serve as the next director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (OCAS). His appointment will begin July 1. 

“We are very excited that Professor Martín-Estudillo has agreed to lead the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies into its next chapter,” said Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president for research. “He brings a wealth of international connections, fresh ideas, and a proven track record of collaboration across units and disciplines here at Iowa and beyond. The search committee was deeply impressed with his vision for the center, and the campus feedback we solicited confirmed and amplified our excitement for new possibilities for OCAS.”

For more than four decades, the  OCAS has served as an interdisciplinary hub for artists, scholars, and researchers who bridge campus with the larger world. 

Situated on Church Street on the north end of campus, the center provides offices for six fellows-in-residence each semester, as well as funding for a major annual humanities conference, small group collaborations, and faculty book completion workshops, along with many other programs. The center is also a nexus for university-community activities, including lectures, workshops, and performances.

“I’m tremendously excited to lead a productive, inspiring center—one that is open to our whole community of researchers, scholars and artists at every stage of their studies and careers and attracts the presence of enriching national and international guests. I envision a global, interdisciplinary research center with a humanistic ethos,” said Martín-Estudillo.

Martín-Estudillo specializes in modern and contemporary Spanish cultural and intellectual history and criticism. He has also published broadly on early modern topics and visual culture. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as  Goya, Hispanic Review, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Ínsula, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Pasajes: Revista de Pensamiento Contemporáneo  and  Romance Quarterly . He is the Executive Editor of the Hispanic Issues  book series and of the journal Hispanic Issues Online .

A recipient of three awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Martín-Estudillo has also won several awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, including the Collegiate Teaching Award, the Dean's Scholar Award, the Collegiate Scholar Award. 

His recently authored and edited books include:  Filosofía y tiempo final  (2011),  The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture  (2018)  Despertarse de Europa. Arte, literatura, euroescepticismo  (2019) and  Goya and the Mystery of Reading , for which he won the  2023 Goldberg Prize .

Martín-Estudillo will replace Teresa Mangum, professor in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and English, who is retiring after serving as the OCAS director since 2010. 

The OCAS is a unit of the Office of the Vice President for Research.