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• Published: 28 April 2020

The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation

• J. Chubb   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9716-820X 1 &
• G. E. Derrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5386-8653 2  

Palgrave Communications volume  6 , Article number:  72 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 19 May 2020

This article has been updated

Using an analysis of two independent, qualitative interview data sets: the first containing semi-structured interviews with mid-senior academics from across a range of disciplines at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK, collected between 2011 and 2013 ( n  = 51); and the second including pre- ( n  = 62), and post-evaluation ( n  = 57) interviews with UK REF2014 Main Panel A evaluators, this paper provides some of the first empirical work and the grounded uncovering of implicit (and in some cases explicit) gendered associations around impact generation and, by extension, its evaluation. In this paper, we explore the nature of gendered associations towards non-academic impact (Impact) generation and evaluation. The results suggest an underlying yet emergent gendered perception of Impact and its activities that is worthy of further research and exploration as the importance of valuing the ways in which research has an influence ‘beyond academia’ increases globally. In particular, it identifies how researchers perceive that there are some personality traits that are better orientated towards achieving Impact; how these may in fact be gendered. It also identifies how gender may play a role in the prioritisation of ‘hard’ Impacts (and research) that can be counted, in contrast to ‘soft’ Impacts (and research) that are far less quantifiable, reminiscent of deeper entrenched views about the value of different ‘modes’ of research. These orientations also translate to the evaluation of Impact, where panellists exhibit these tendencies prior to its evaluation and describe the organisation of panel work with respect to gender diversity.

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Introduction.

The management and measurement of the non-academic impact Footnote 1 (Impact) of research is a consistent theme within the higher education (HE) research environment in the UK, reflective of a drive from government for greater visibility of the benefits of research for the public, policy and commercial sectors (Chubb, 2017 ). This is this mirrored on a global scale, particularly in Australia, where, at the ‘vanguard’ (Upton et al., 2014 , p. 352) of these developments, methods were first devised (but were subsequently abandoned) to measure research impact (Chubb, 2017 ; Hazelkorn and Gibson, 2019 ). What is broadly known in both contexts as an ‘Impact Agenda’—the move to forecast and assess the ways in which investment in academic research delivers measurable socio-economic benefit—initially sparked broad debate and in some instances controversy, among the academic community (and beyond) upon its inception (Chubb, 2017 ). Since then, the debate has continued to evolve and the ways in which impact can be better conceptualised and implemented in the UK, including its role in evaluation (Stern, 2016 ), and more recently in grant applications (UKRI, 2020 ) is robustly debated. Notwithstanding attempts to better the culture of equality and diversity in research, (Stern, 2016 ; Nature, 2019 ) in the broader sense, and despite the implementation of the Impact agenda being studied extensively, there has been very little critical engagement with theories of gender and how this translates specifically to more downstream gendered inequities in HE such as through an impact agenda.

The emergence of Impact brought with it many connotations, many of which were largely negative; freedom was questioned, and autonomy was seen to be at threat because of an audit surveillance culture in HE (Lorenz, 2012 ). Resistance was largely characterised by problematising the agenda as symptomatic of the marketisation of knowledge threatening traditional academic norms and ideals (Merton, 1942 ; Williams, 2002 ) and has led to concern about how the Impact agenda is conceived, implemented and evaluated. This concern extends to perceptions of gendered assumptions about certain kinds of knowledge and related activities of which there is already a corpus of work, i.e., in the case of gender and forms of public engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ). This paper explores what it terms as ‘the Impact a-gender’ (Chubb, 2017 ) where gendered notions of non-academic, societal impact and how it is generated feed into its evaluation. It does not wed itself to any feminist tradition specifically, however, draws on Carey et al. ( 2018 ) to examine, acknowledge and therefore amend how the range of policies within HE and how implicit power dynamics in policymaking produce gender inequalities. Instead, an impact fluidity is encouraged and supported. For this paper, this means examining how the impact a-gender feeds into expectations and the reward of non-academic impact. If left unchecked, the propagation of the impact a-gender, it is argued, has the potential to guard against a greater proportion of women generating and influencing the use of research evidence in public policy decision-making.

Scholars continue to reflect on ‘science as a gendered endeavour’ (Amâncio, 2005 ). The extensive corpus of historical literature on gender in science and its originators (Merton, 1942 ; Keller et al., 1978 ; Kuhn, 1962 ), note the ‘pervasiveness’ of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘objective and the scientific’. Indeed, Amancio affirmed in more recent times that ‘modern science was born as an exclusively masculine activity’ ( 2005 ). The Impact agenda raises yet more obstacles indicative of this pervasiveness, which is documented by the ‘Matthew’/‘Matilda’ effect in Science (Merton, 1942 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Perceptions of gender bias (which Kretschmer and Kretschmer, 2013 hypothesise as myths in evaluative cultures) persist with respect to how gender effects publishing, pay and reward and other evaluative issues in HE (Ward and Grant, 1996 ). Some have argued that scientists and institutions perpetuate such issues (Amâncio, 2005 ). Irrespective of their origin, perceptions of gendered Impact impede evaluative cultures within HE and, more broadly, the quest for equality in excellence in research impact beyond academia.

To borrow from Van Den Brink and Benschop ( 2012 ), gender is conceptualised as an integral part of organisational practices, situated within a social construction of feminism (Lorber, 2005 ; Poggio, 2006 ). This article uses the notion of gender differences and inequality to refer to the ‘ hierarchical distinction in which either women and femininity and men and masculinity are valued over the other ’ (p. 73), though this is not precluding of individual preferences. Indeed, there is an emerging body of work focused on gendered associations not only about ‘types’ of research and/or ‘areas and topics’ (Thelwall et al., 2019 ), but also about what is referred to as non-academic impact. This is with particular reference to audit cultures in HE such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is the UK’s system of assessing the quality of research (Morley, 2003 ; Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ; Weinstein et al., 2019 ). While scholars have long attended to researching gender differences in relation to the marketisation of HE (Ahmed, 2006 ; Bank, 2011 ; Clegg, 2008 ; Gromkowska-Melosik, 2014 ; Leathwood et al., 2008 ), and the gendering of Impact activities such as outreach and public engagement (Ward and Grant, 1996 ), there is less understanding of how far academic perceptions of Impact are gendered. Further, how these gendered tensions influence panel culture in the evaluation of impact beyond academia is also not well understood. As a recent discussion in the Lancet read ‘ the causes of gender disparities are complex and include both distal and proximal factors ’. (Lundine et al., 2019 , p. 742).

This paper examines the ways in which researchers and research evaluators implicitly perceive gender as related to excellence in Impact both in its generation and in its evaluation. Using an analysis of two existing data sets; the pre-evaluation interviews of evaluators in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework and interviews with mid-senior career academics from across the range of disciplines with experience of building impact into funding applications and/ or its evaluation in two research-intensive universities in the UK and Australia between 2011 and 2013, this paper explores the implicitly gendered references expressed by our participants relating to the generation of non-academic, impact which emerged inductively through analysis. Both data sets comprise researcher perceptions of impact prior to being subjected to any formalised assessment of research Impact, thus allowing for the identification of unconscious gendered orientations that emerged from participant’s emotional and more abstract views about Impact. It notes how researchers use loaded terminology around ‘hard’, and ‘soft’ when conceptualising Impact that is reminiscent of long-standing associations between epistemological domains of research and notions of masculinity/femininity. It refers to ‘hard’ impact as those that are associated with meaning economic/ tangible and efficiently/ quantifiably evaluated, and ‘soft’ as denoting social, abstract, potentially qualitative or less easily and inefficiently evaluated. By extending this analysis to the gendered notions expressed by REF2014 panellists (expert reviewers whose responsibility it is to review the quality of the retrospective impact articulated in case studies for the purposes of research evaluation) towards the evaluation of Impact, this paper highlights how instead of challenging these tendencies, shared constructions of Impact and gendered productivity in academia act to amplify and embed these gendered notions within the evaluation outcomes and practice. It explores how vulnerable seemingly independent assessments of Impact are to these widespread gendered- associations between Impact, engagement and success. Specifically, perceptions of the excellence and judgements of feasibility relating to attribution, and causality within the narrative of the Impact case study become gendered.

The article is structured as follows. First, it reviews the gender-orientations towards notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ excellence in forms of scholarly distinction and explores how this relates to the REF Impact evaluation criteria, and the under-representation of women in the academic workforce. Specifically, it hypothesises the role of how gendered notions of excellence that construct academic identities contribute to a system that side-lines women in academia. This is despite associating the generation of Impact as a feminised skill. We label this as the ‘Impact a-gender’. The article then outlines the methodology and how the two, independent databases were combined and convergent themes developed. The results are then presented from academics in the UK and Australia and then from REF2014 panellists. This describes how the Impact a-gender currently operates through academic cultural orientations around Impact generation, and in its evaluation through peer-review panels by members of this same academic culture. The article concludes with a recommendation that the Impact a-gender be explored more thoroughly as a necessary step towards guiding against gender- bias in the academic evaluation, and reward system.

Literature review

Notions of impact excellence as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’.

Scholars have long attempted to consider the commonalities and differences across certain kinds of knowledge (Becher, 1989 , 1994 ; Biglan, 1973a ) and attempts to categorise, divide and harmonise the disciplines have been made (Biglan, 1973a , 1973b ; Becher, 1994 ; Caplan, 1979 ; Schommer–Aikins et al., 2003 ). Much of this was advanced with a typology of the disciplines from (Trowler, 2001 ), which categorised the disciplines as ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. Both anecdotally and in the literature, ‘soft’ science is associated with working more with people and less with ‘things’ (Cassell, 2002 ; Thelwall et al., 2019 ). These dichotomies often lead to a hierarchy of types of Impact and oppose valuation of activities based on their gendered connotations.

Biglan’s system of classifying disciplines into groups based on similarities and differences denotes particular behaviours or characteristics, which then form part of clusters or groups—‘pure’, ‘applied’, ‘soft’, ‘hard’ etc. Simpson ( 2017 ) argues that Biglan’s classification persists as one of the most commonly referred to models of the disciplines despite the prominence of some others (Pantin, 1968 ; Kuhn, 1962 ; Smart et al., 2000 ). Biglan ( 1973b ) classified the disciplines across three dimensions; hard and soft, pure and applied, life and non-life (whether the research is concerned with living things/organisms) . This ‘taxonomy of the disciplines’ states that ‘pure-hard’ domains tend toward the life and earth sciences,’pure-soft’ the social sciences and humanities, and ‘applied hard’ focus on engineering and physical science with ‘soft-applied’ tending toward professional practice such as nursing, medicine and education. Biglan’s classification looked at levels of social connectedness and specifically found that applied scholars Footnote 2 were more socially connected, more interested and involved in service activities, and more likely to publish in the form of technical reports than their counterparts in the pure (hard) areas of study. This resonates with how Impact brings renewed currency and academic prominence to applied researchers (Chubb, 2017 ). Historically, scholars inhabiting the ‘hard’ disciplines had a greater preference for research; whereas, scholars representing soft disciplines had a greater preference for teaching (Biglan, 1973b ). Further, Biglan ( 1973b ) also found that hard science scholars sought out greater collaborative efforts among colleagues when teaching as opposed to their soft science counterparts.

There are also long-standing gendered associations and connotations with notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ (Storer, 1967 ). Typically used to refer to skills, but also used heavily with respect to the disciplines and knowledge domains, gendered assumptions and the mere use of ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ to describe knowledge production carries with it assumptions, which are often noted in the literature; ‘ we think of physics as hard and of political science as soft ’, Storer explains, adding how ‘hard seems to imply tough, brittle, impenetrable and strong, while soft on the other hand calls to mind the qualities of weakness, gentleness and malleability’ (p. 76). As described, hard science is typically associated with the natural sciences and quantitative paradigms whereas normative perceptions of feminine ‘soft’ skills or ‘soft’ science are often equated with qualitative social science. Scholars continue to debate dichotomised paradigms or ‘types’ of research or knowledge (Gibbons, 1999 ), which is emblematic of an undercurrent of epistemological hierarchy of the value of different kinds of knowledge. Such debates date back to the heated back and forth between scholars Snow (Snow, 2012 ) and literary critic Leavis who argued for their own ‘cultures’ of knowledge. Notwithstanding, these binary distinctions do few favours when gender is then ascribed to either knowledge domain or related activity (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). This is particularly pertinent in light of the current drive for more interdisciplinary research in the science system where there is also a focus on fairness, equality and diversity in the science system.

Academic performance and the Impact a-gender

Audit culture in academia impacts unfairly on women (Morley, 2003 ), and is seen as contributory to the wide gender disparities in academia, including the under-representation of women as professors (Ellemers et al., 2004 ), in leadership positions (Carnes et al., 2015 ), in receiving research acknowledgements (Larivière et al., 2013 ; Sugimoto et al., 2015 ), or being disproportionately concentrated in non-research-intensive universities (Santos and Dang Van Phu, 2019 ). Whereas gender discrimination also manifests in other ways such as during peer review (Lee and Noh, 2013 ), promotion (Paulus et al., 2016 ), and teaching evaluations (Kogan et al., 2010 ), the proliferation of an audit culture links gender disparities in HE to processes that emphasise ‘quantitative’ analysis methods, statistics, measurement, the creation of ‘experts’, and the production of ‘hard evidence’. The assumption here is that academic performance and the metrics used to value, and evaluate it, are heavily gendered in a way that benefits men over women, reflecting current disparities within the HE workforce. Indeed, Morely (2003) suggests that the way in which teaching quality is female dominated and research quality is male dominated, leads to a morality of quality resulting in the larger proportion of women being responsible for student-focused services within HE. In addition, the notion of ‘excellence’ within these audit cultures implicitly reflect images of masculinity such as rationality, measurement, objectivity, control and competitiveness (Burkinshaw, 2015 ).

The association of feminine and masculine traits in academia (Holt and Ellis, 1998 ), and ‘gendering its forms of knowledge production’ (Clegg, 2008 ), is not new. In these typologies, women are largely expected to be soft-spoken, nurturing and understanding (Bellas, 1999 ) yet often invisible and supportive in their ‘institutional housekeeping’ roles (Bird et al., 2004 ). Men, on the other hand are often associated with being competitive, ambitious and independent (Baker, 2008 ). When an individual’s behaviour is perceived to transcend these gendered norms, then this has detrimental effects on how others evaluate their competence, although some traits displayed outside of these typologies go somewhat ‘under the radar’. Nonetheless, studies show that women who display leadership qualities (competitiveness, ambition and decisiveness) are characterised more negatively than men (Rausch, 1989 ; Heilman et al., 1995 ; Rossiter, 1993 ). Incongruity between perceptions of ‘likeability’ and ‘competence’ and its relationship to gender bias is present in evaluations in academia, where success is dependent on the perceptions of others and compounded within an audit culture (Yarrow and Davis, 2018). This has been seen in peer review, reports for men and women applicants, where women were disadvantaged by the same characteristics that were seen as a strength on proposals by men (Severin et al., 2019 ); as well as in teaching evaluations where women receive higher evaluations if they are perceived as ‘nurturing’ and ‘supportive’ (Kogan et al., 2010 ). This results in various potential forms of prejudice in academia: Where traits normally associated with masculinity are more highly valued than those associated with femininity (direct) or when behaviour that is generally perceived to be ‘masculine’ is enacted by a woman and then perceived less favourably (indirect/ unconscious). That is not to mention direct sexism, rather than ‘through’ traits; a direct prejudice.

Gendered associations of Impact are not only oversimplified but also incredibly problematic for an inclusive, meaningful Impact agenda and research culture. Currently, in the UK, the main funding body for research in the UK, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) uses a broad Impact definition: ‘ the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy ’ (UKRI website, 2019 ). The most recent REF, REF2014, Impact was defined as ‘ …an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia ’. In Australia, the Australian Research Council (ARC) proposed that researchers should ‘embed’ Impact into the research process from the outset. Both Australia and the UK have been engaged in policy borrowing around the evaluation of societal impact and share many similarities in approaches to generating and evaluating it. Indeed, Impact has been deliberately conceptualised by decision-makers, funders and governments as broad in order to increase the appearance of being inclusivity, to represent a broad range of disciplines, as well as to reflect the ‘diverse ways’ that potential beneficiaries of academic research can be reached ‘beyond academia’. The adoption of societal impact as a formalised criterion in the evaluation of research excellence was initially perceived to be potentially beneficial for women, due to its emphasis on concepts such as ‘public engagement’; ‘duty’ and non-academic ‘cooperation/collaboration’ (Yarrow and Davies, 2018 ). In addition, the adoption of narrative case studies to demonstrate Impact, rather than adopting a complete metrics-focused exercise, can also be seen as an opportunity for women to demonstrate excellence in the areas where they are over-represented, such as teaching, cultural enrichment, public engagement (Andrews et al., 2005 ), informing public policy and improving public services (Schatteman, 2014 ; Wheatle and BrckaLorenz, 2015). However, despite this, studies highlight how for the REF2014, only 25% of Impact Case Studies for business and management studies were from women (Davies et al., 2020 ).

With respect to Impact evaluation, previous research shows that there is a direct link between notions of academic culture, and how research (as a product of that culture) is valued and evaluated (Leathwood and Reid, 2008 ; p. 120). Geertz ( 1983 ) argues that academic membership is a ‘cultural frame that defines a great part of one’s life’ influences belief systems around how academic work is orientated. This also includes gendered associations implicit in the academic reward system, which in turn influences how academics believe success is to be evaluated, and in what form that success emerges. This has implications in how academic associations of the organisation of research work and the ongoing constructions of professional identity relative to gender, feeds into how these same academics operate as evaluators within a peer review system evaluation. In this case, instead of operating to challenge these tendencies, shared constructions of gendered academic work are amplified to the extent that they unconsciously influence perceptions of excellence and the judgements of feasibility as pertaining to the attribution and causality of the narrative argument. As such, in an evaluation of Impact with its ambiguous definition (Derrick, 2018 ), and the lack of external indicators to signal success independent of cultural constructions inherent in the panel membership, effects are assumed to be more acute. In this way, this paper argues that the Impact a-gender can act to further disadvantage women.

The research combines two existing research data sets in order to explore implicit notions of gender associated with the generation and evaluation of research Impact beyond academia. Below the two data sets and the steps involved in analysing and integrating findings are described along with our theoretical positioning within the feminist literature Where verbatim quotation is used, we have labelled the participants according to each study highlighting their role and gender. Further, the evaluator interviews specify the disciplinary panel and subpanel to which they belonged, as well as their evaluation responsibilities such as: ‘Outputs only’; ‘Outputs and Impact’; and ‘Impacts only’.

Analysis of qualitative data sets

This research involved the analysis and combination of two independently collected, qualitative interview databases. The characteristics and specifics of both databases are outlined below.

Interviews with mid-senior academics in the UK and Australia

Fifty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2013 with mid-senior academics at two research-intensive universities in Australia and the UK. The interviews were 30–60 min long and participants were sourced via the research offices at both sites. Participants were contacted via email and invited to participate in a study concerning resistance towards the Impact agenda in the UK and Australia and were specifically asked for their perceptions of its relationship with freedom, value and epistemic responsibility and variations across discipline, career stage and national context. Mostly focused on ex ante impact, some interviewees also described their experiences of Impact in the UK and Australia, in relation to its formal assessment as part of the Excellence Innovation Australia (EIA) for Australia and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.

Participants comprised mid to senior career academics with experience of winning funding from across the range of disciplines broadly representative of the arts and humanities, social sciences, physical science, maths and engineering and the life and earth sciences. For the purposes of this paper, although participant demographic information was collected, the relationship between the gender of the participants, their roles, disciplines/career stage was not explicitly explored instead, such conditions were emergent in the subsequent inductive coding during thematic analysis. A reflexive log was collected in order to challenge and draw attention to assumptions and underlying biases, which may affect the author, inclusive of their own gender identity. Further information on this is provided in Chubb ( 2017 ).

Pre- and post-evaluation interviews with REF2014 evaluators

REF2014 in the UK represented the world’s first formalised evaluation of ex-post impact, comprising of 20% of the overall evaluation. This framework served as a unique experimental environment with which to explore baseline tendencies towards impact as a concept and evaluative object (Derrick, 2018 ).

Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted with willing participants: sixty-two panellists were interviewed from the UK’s REF2014 Main Panel A prior to the evaluation taking place; and a fifty-seven of these were re-interviewed post-evaluation. Main Panel A covers six Sub-panels: (1) Clinical Medicine; (2) Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care; (3) Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy; (4) Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; (5) Biological Sciences; and (6) Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Sciences. Again, the relationship between the gender of the participants and their discipline is not the focus for the purposes of this paper.

Database combination and identification of common emergent themes

The inclusion of data sets using both Australian and UK researchers was pertinent to this study as both sites were at the cusp of implementing the evaluation of Impact formally. These researcher interviews, as well as the evaluator interviews were conducted prior to any formalised Impact evaluation took place, but when both contexts required ex ante impact in terms of certain funding allocation, meaning an analysis of these baseline perceptions between databases was possible. Further, the inclusion of the post-evaluation interviews with panellists in the UK allowed an exploration of how these gendered perceptions identified in the interviews with researchers and panellists prior to the evaluation, influenced panel behaviour during the evaluation of Impact.

Initially, both data sets were analysed using similar, inductive, grounded-theory-informed approaches inclusive of a discourse and thematic analysis of the language used by participants when describing impact, which allowed for the drawing out of metaphor (Zinken et al., 2008 ). This allowed data combination and analysis of the two databases to be conducted in line with the recommendations for data-synthesis as outlined in Weed ( 2005 ) as a form of interpretation. This approach guarded against the quantification of qualitative findings for the purposes of synthesis, and instead focused on an initial dialogic approach between the two authors (Chubb and Derrick), followed by a re-analysis of qualitative data sets (Heaton, 1998 ) in line with the outcomes of the initial author-dialogue as a method of circumventing many of the drawbacks associated with qualitative data-synthesis. Convergent themes from each, independently analysed data set were discussed between authors, before the construction of new themes that were an iterative analysis of the combined data set. Drawing on the feminist tradition the authors did not apply feminist standpoint theory, instead a fully inductive approach was used to unearth rich empirical data. An interpretative and inductive approach to coding the data using NVIVO software in both instances was used and a reflexive log maintained. The availability of both full, coded, qualitative data sets, as well as the large sample size of each, allowed this data-synthesis to happen.

Researcher’s perceptions of Impact as either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’

Both UK and Australian academic researchers (researchers) perceive a guideline of gendered productivity (Davies et al., 2017 ; Sax et al., 2002 ; Astin, 1978 ; Ward and Grant, 1996 ). This is where men or women are being dissuaded (by their inner narratives, their institutions or by colleagues) from engaging in Impact either in preference to other (more masculine) notions of academic productivity, or towards softer (for women) because they consider themselves and are considered by others to be ‘good at it’. Participants often gendered the language of Impact and introduced notions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. On the one hand, this rehearses and resurfaces long-standing views about the ‘Matthew Effect’ because often softer Impacts were seen as being of less value by participants, but also indicates that the word impact itself carries its own connotations, which are then weighed down further by more entrenched gender associations.

Our research shows that when describing Impact, it was not necessarily the masculinity or femininity of the researcher that was emphasised by participants, rather researchers made gendered presumptions around the type of Impact, or the activity used to generate it as either masculine or feminine. Some participants referred to their own research or others’ research as either ‘hard’ or as ‘soft and woolly’. Those who self-professed that their research was ‘soft’ or woolly’ felt that their research was less likely to qualify as having ‘hard’ impact in REF terms Footnote 3 ; instead, they claimed their research would impact socially, as opposed to economically; ‘ stuff that’s on a flaky edge — it’s very much about social engagement ’ (Languages, Australia, Professor, Male) . One researcher described Impact as ‘a nasty Treasury idea,’ comparing it to: a tsunami, crashing over everything which will knock out stuff that is precious ’ . (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) . This imagery associates the concept of impact with force and weight (or hardness as mentioned earlier) particularly in disciplines where the effect of their research may be far more nuanced and subtle. One Australian research used force to depict the impact of teaching and claimed Impact was like a footprint, and teaching was ‘ a pretty heavy imprint ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Participants characterised ‘force and weight’ as masculine, suggesting that some connotations of Impact and the associated activities may be gendered. The word ‘Impact’ was inherently perceived by many researchers as problematic, bound with linguistic connotations and those imposed by the official definitions, which in many cases are perceived as negative or maybe even gendered (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ The etymology of a word like impact is interesting. I’ve always seen what I do as being a more subtle incremental engagement, relevance, a contribution ’. (Theatre, Film and TV, UK, Professor, Male) .

Researchers associated the word ‘impact’ with hard-ness, weight and force; ‘ anything that sorts of hits you ’ (Languages, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . One researcher suggested that Impact ‘ sounds kind of aggressive — the poor consumer! ’ (History, Australia, Professor, Female) . Talking about her own research in the performing arts, one Australian researcher commented: ‘ It’s such a pain in the arse because the Arts don’t fit the model. But in a way they do if you look at the impact as being something quite soft ’ (Music, Australia, Professor, Female) . Likewise, a similar comparison was seen by a female researcher from the mechanical engineering discipline: ‘ My impact case study wasn’t submitted mainly because I’m dealing with that slightly on the woolly side of things ’ (Mechanical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Largely, gender related comments hailed from the ‘hard’ science and from arts and humanities researchers. Social scientists commented less, and indeed, one levelled that Impact was perhaps less a matter of gender, and more a matter of ability (Chubb, 2017 ): ‘ It’s about being articulate! Both guys and women who are very articulate and communicate well are outward looking on all of these things ’ ( Engineering Education, Australia, Professor, Female).

Gendered notions of performativity were also very pronounced by evaluators who were assessing the outputs only, suggesting how these panel cultures are orientated around notions of gender and scientific outputs as ‘hard’ if represented by numbers. The focus on numbers was perceived by the following panellist as ‘ a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types ’ within the panel that relate to findings about the association of certain traits—risk aversion, competitiveness, for example, with a masculinised market logic in HE;

And I like that a lot because I think that there is a real strong tendency particularly amongst the Alpha male types of always looking at the numbers, like the numbers and everything. And I just did feel that steer that we got from the panel chairs, both of them were men by the way, but they were very clear, the impact factors and citations and the rank order of a journal is this is information that can be useful, but it’s not your immediate first stop. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

However, a metric-dominant approach was not the result of a male-dominated panel environment and instead, to the panels credit, evaluators were encouraged not to use one-metric as the only deciding factor between star-rating of quality. However, this is not to suggest that metrics did not play a dominant role. In fact, in order to resolve arguments, evaluators were encouraged to ‘ reflect on these other metrics ’ (Panel 3, Outputs only, Male) in order to rectify arguments where the assessment of quality was in conflict. This use of ‘other metrics’ was preferential to a resolution of differences that are based on more ‘soft’ arguments that are based on understanding where differences in opinion might lie in the interpretation of the manuscript’s quality. Instead, the deciding factor in resolving arguments would be the responsibility, primarily, of a ‘hard’ concept of quality as dictated by a numerical value;

Read the paper, judge the quality, judge the originality, the rigour, the impact — if you have to because you’re in dispute with another assessor, then reflect on these other metrics. So I don’t think metrics are that helpful actually if and until you’ve got a real issue to be able to make a decision. But I worry very much that metrics are just such a simple way of making the process much easier, and I’m worried about that because I think there’s a bit of game playing going on with impact factors and that kind of thing. (Panel 3, Outputs Only, Male)

Table 1 outlines the emergent themes, which, through inductive coding participants broadly categorised domains of research, their qualities and associations, types of activities and the gendered assumption generally made by participants when describing that activity. The table is intended only to provide an indicative overview of the overall tendencies of participants toward certain narratives as is not exhaustive, as well as a guide to interpret the perceptions of Impact illustrated in the below results.

Table one describes the dichotomous views that seemed to emerge from the research but it’s important to note that researchers associated Impact as related to gender in subtle, and in some cases overt ways. The data suggests that some male participants felt that female academics might be better at Impact, suggesting that female academics might find it liberating, linked it to a sense of duty or public service, implying that it was second nature. In addition, some male participants associated types of Impact domains as female-orientated activity and the reverse was the case with female and male-orientated ‘types’ of Impact. For example, at one extreme, a few male researchers seemed to perceive public engagement as something, which females would be particularly good at, generalising that they are not competitive ‘ women are better at this! They are less competitive! ’ (Environment, UK, Professor, Male) . Indeed, one male researcher suggested that competitiveness actually helps academics have an impact and does not impede it:

I get a huge buzz from trying to communicate those to a wider audience and winning arguments and seeing them used. It’s not the use that motivates me it’s the process of winning, I’m competitive! (Economics, UK, Professor, Male)

Analysis also revealed evidence that some researchers has gendered perceptions of Impact activities just as evaluators did. Here, women were more likely to promote the importance of engaging in Impact activities, whereas men were focused on producing indicators with hard, quantitative indicators of success. Some researchers implied that public engagement was not something entirely associated with the kinds of Impact needed to advance one’s career and for a few male researchers, this was accordingly associated with female academics. Certain female researchers in the sciences and the arts suggested similarly that there was a strong commitment among women to carry out public engagement, but that this was not necessarily shared by their male counterparts who, they perceived, undervalued this kind of work:

I think the few of us women in the faculty will grapple with that a lot about the relevance of what we’re doing and the usefulness, but for the vast majority of people it’s not there… [She implies that]…I think there is a huge gender thing there that every woman that you talk to on campus would consider that the role of the university is along the latter statement (*to communicate to the public). The vast majority of men would not consider that’s a role of the university. There’s a strong gender thing. (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

Notwithstanding, it is important to distinguish between engagement and Impact. This research shows that participants perceive Impact activities to be gendered. There was a sense from one arts female researcher that women might be more interested in getting out there and communicating their work but that crucially, it is not the be-all and end- all of doing research: ‘ Women feel that there’s something more liberating, I can empathise with that, but that couldn’t be the whole job ’. Music, Australia, Professor, Female Footnote 4 . When this researcher, who was very much orientated towards Impact, asked if there were enough interviewees, she added ‘ mind you, you’ve probably spoken to enough men in lab coats ’. This could imply that inward-facing roles are associated with male-orientated activity and outward facing roles as perceived as more female orientated. Such sentiments perhaps relate to a binary delineation of women as more caring, subjective, applied and of men as harder, scientific and theoretical/ rational. This links to a broader characterisation of HE as marketised and potentially, more ‘male’ or at least masculinised—where increasing competitiveness, marketisation and performativity can be seen as linked to an increasingly macho way of doing business (Blackmore, 2002 ; Deem, 1998 ; Grummell et al., 2009 ; Reay, n.d. ). The data is also suggestive of the attitude that communication is a ‘soft’ skill and the interpersonal is seen as a less masculine trait. ‘ This is a huge generalisation but I still say that the profession is so dominated by men, undergraduates are so dominated by men and most of those boys will come into engineering because they’re much more comfortable dealing with a computer than with people ’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . Again, this suggests women are more likely to pursue those scientific subjects, which will make a difference or contribute to society (such as nursing or environmental research, certainly those subjects that would be perceived as less ‘hard’ science domains).

There was also a sense that Impact activity, namely in this case public engagement and community work, was associated with women more than men by some participants (Amâncio, 2005 ). However, public engagement and certain social impact domains appeared to have a lower status and intellectual worth in the eyes of some participants. Some inferred that social and ‘soft’ impacts are seen as associated. With discipline. For instance, research concerning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) subjects with females. They in turn may be held in low esteem. Some of the accounts suggest that soft impacts are perceived by women as not ‘counting’ as Impact:

‘ At least two out of the four of us who are female are doing community service and that doesn’t count, we get zero credit, actually I would say it gets negative credit because it takes time away from everything else ’. (Education Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female)

This was intimated again by another female UK computer scientist who claimed that since her work was on the ‘woolly side’ of things, and her impacts were predominantly in the social and public domain, she would not be taken seriously enough to qualify as a REF Impact case study, despite having won an award for her work:

‘ I don’t think it helps that if I were a male professor doing the same work I might be taken more seriously. It’s interesting, why recently? Because I’ve never felt that I’ve not been taken seriously because I’m a woman, but something happened recently and I thought, oh, you’re not taking me seriously because I’m a woman. So I think it’s a part ’. (Computer Science, UK, Professor, Female)

Researchers also connect the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ associations with Impact described earlier to male and female traits. The relationship between Impact and gender is not well understood and it is not clear how much these issues are directly relatable to Impact or more symptomatic of the broader picture in HE. In order to get a broader picture, it is important to examine how these gendered notions of Impact translate into its evaluation. Some participants suggested that gender is a factor in the securing of grant money—certainly this comment reveals a local speculation that ‘the big boys’ get the grants, in Australia, at least: ‘ ARC grants? I’ve had a few but nothing like the big boys that get one after the other ,’ (Chemical Engineering, Australia, Professor, Female) . This is not dissimilar to the ‘alpha male’ comments from the evaluators described below who note a tendency for male evaluators to rely on ‘hard’ numbers whose views are further examined in the following section.

Gendered excellence in Impact evaluation

In the pre-evaluation interviews, panellists were asked about what they perceived to be ‘excellent’ research and ‘excellent’ Impact. Within this context, are mirrored conceptualisations of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ as was seen with the interviews with researchers described above. These conceptualisations were captured prior to the evaluation began. They can therefore be interpreted as the raw, baseline assumptions of Impact that are free from the effects of the panel group, showed that there were differences in how evaluators perceived Impact, and that these perceptions were gendered.

Although all researchers conceptualised Impact as a linear process for the purposes of the REF2014 exercise (Derrick, 2018 ), there was a tendency for female evaluators to be open to considering the complexity of Impact, even in a best-case scenario. This included a consideration that Impact as dictated within the narrative might have different indicators of value to different evaluators; ‘ I just think that that whole framing means that there is a form of normative standard of perfect impact ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Female) . This evaluator, in particular, went further to state how that their impression of Impact would be constructed from the comparators available during the evaluation;

‘ Given that I’m presenting impact as a good story, it would be like you saying to me; ‘Can you describe to me a perfect Shakespearean play?’…. well now of course, I can’t. You can give me lots of plays but they all have different kinds of interesting features. Different people would say that their favourite play was different. To me, if you’re taking interpretivist view, constructivist view, there is no perfect normative standard. It’s just not possible ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female)

Female evaluators were also more sensitive to other complex factors influencing the evaluation of Impact, including time lag; ‘ …So it takes a long time for things like that to be accepted…it took hundreds of studies before it was generally accepted as real ’ (Panel 1, Outputs and Impacts, Female ); as well as the indirect way that research influences policy as a form of Impact;

‘ I don’t think that anything would get four stars without even blinking. I think that is impossible to answer because you have to look at the whole evidence in this has gone on, and how that does link to the impact that is being claimed, and then you would then have to look at how that impact, exactly how that research has impacted on the ways of the world, in terms of change or in terms of society or whatever. I don’t think you can see this would easily get four stars because of the overall process is being looked at, as well as the actual outcome ’ . (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Although these typologies were not absolute, there was a lack of complexity in the nuances around Impact. There was also heavily gendered language around Impacts as measurable, or not, that mirrored the association of Impact as being either ‘hard’, and therefore measurable, or ‘soft, and therefore more nuanced in value. In this way, male evaluators expressed Impact as a causal, linear event that occurred ‘ in a very short time ’ (P2, Outputs and Impact, Male) and involved a single ‘ star ’ (P3, Impacts only, Male) or ‘ impact champion ’ (Main Panel, Outputs and Impacts, Male) that drove it from start (research), to finish (Impact). These associations about Impact being ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ made by evaluators, mirror the responses from researchers in the above sections. In the example below, the evaluator used words such as ‘ strong ’ and ‘ big way ’ to describe Impact success, as well as emphasises causality in the argument;

‘ …if it has affected a lot of people or affected policy in a strong way or created change in a big way, and it can be clearly linked back to the research, and it’s made a difference ’. (Panel 2, Outputs and Impact, Male)

These perhaps show disciplinary differences as much as gendered differences. Further, there was a stronger tendency for male evaluators to strive towards conceptualisations of excellence in Impact as measurable or ‘ it’s something that is decisive and actionable ’ (Panel 6, Impacts, Male) . One male evaluator explained his conceptualised version of Impact excellence as ‘ straightforward ’ and therefore ‘ obviously four-star ’ due to the presence of metrics with which to measure Impact. This was a perception more commonly associated with male evaluators;

‘ …if somebody has been able to devise a — let’s say pancreatic cancer — which is a molecular cancer, which hasn’t made any progress in the last 40 years, and where the mortality is close to 100% after diagnosis, if someone devised a treatment where now suddenly, after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, 90 percent of the people are now still alive 5 years later, where the mortality rate is almost 0%, who are alive after 5 years. That, of course, would be a dramatic, transformative impact ’. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Male)

In addition, his tendency to seek various numeric indicators for measuring, and therefore assessing Impact (predominantly economic impact), as well as compressing its realisation to a small period of time ( ‘ suddenly ’ ) in a causal fashion, was more commonly expressed in male evaluators. This tendency automatically indicates the association of impacts as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ and divided along gendered norms, but also expresses Impact in monetary terms;

‘ Something that went into a patient or the company has pronounced with…has spun out and been taken up by a commercial entity or a clinical entity ’ (Panel 3, Outputs and Impacts, Male) , as well as impacts that are marketised; ‘ A new antimicrobial drug to market ’. (Panel 6, Outputs and Impact, Male) .

There was also the perception that female academics would be better at engagement (Johnson et al., 2014 ; Crettaz Von Roten, 2011 ) due to its link with notions of ‘ duty ’ (as a mother), ‘ engagement ’ and ‘ public service ’ are reflected in how female evaluators were also more open to the idea that excellent Impact is achieved through productive, ongoing partnerships with non-academic stakeholders. Here, the reflections of ‘duty’ from the evaluators was also mirrored by in interviews with researchers. Indeed, the researchers merged perceptions of parenthood, an academic career and societal impact generation. One female researcher drew on her role as a mother as supportive of her ability to participate in Impact generation, ‘ I have kids that age so… ’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) . Indeed, parenthood emerged from researchers of both genders in relation to the Impact agenda. Two male participants spoke positively about the need to transfer knowledge of all kinds to society referencing their role as parents: ‘ I’m all for that. I want my kids to have a rich culture when they go to school ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E2) , and ‘ My children are the extension of my biological life and my students are an extension of my thoughts ’ (Engineering, Australia, Professor, Male, E1) . One UK female biologist commented that she indeed enjoys delivering public engagement and outreach and implies a reference to having a family as enabling her ability to do so: ‘ It’s partly being involved with the really well-established outreach work ,’ (Biology, UK, Senior Lecturer, Female) .

For the evaluators, the idea that ‘public service’ as second nature for female academics, was reflected in how female evaluators perceived the long, arduous and serendipitous nature of Impact generation, as well as their commitment to assessing the value of Impact as a ‘pathway’ rather than in line with impact as a ‘product’. Indeed, this was highlighted by one male evaluator who suggested that the measurement and assessment of Impact ‘ …needs to be done by economists ’ and that

‘ you [need] to put in some quantification one everything…[that] puts a negative value on being sick and a positive large value on living longer. So, yeah, the greatest impact would be something that saves us money and generates income for the country but something broad and improves quality of life ’. (Panel 2, Impacts, Male)

Since evaluators tend to exercise cognitive bias in evaluative situations (Langfeldt, 2006 ), these preconceived ideas about Impact, its generation and the types of people responsible for its success are also likely to permeate the evaluative deliberations around Impact during the peer review process. What is uncertain is the extent that these messages are dominant within the panel discourse, and therefore the extent that they influence the formation of a consensus within the group, and the ‘dominant definition’ of Impact (Derrick, 2018 ) that emerges as a result.

Notions of gender from the evaluators post-evaluation

Similar notions of gender-roles in academia pertaining to notions of scientific productivity were echoed by academics who were charged with its evaluation as part of the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Interviews with evaluators revealed not only that the panel working-methods and characteristics about what constituted a ‘good’ evaluator were implicitly along gendered norms, but also that the assumed credit assumptions of performativity were also based on gender.

In assessments of the Impact criterion, an assessment that is not as amenable to quantitative representation requiring panels to conceptualise a very complex process, with unstandardised measures of significance and reach, there was still a gendered perception of Impact being ‘women’s work’ in academia. This perception was based on the tendency towards conceptualising Impact as ‘slightly grubby’ and ‘not very pure’, which echoes previously reported pre-REF2014 tensions that Impact is a task that an academic does when they cannot do real research (de Jong et al., 2015 );

But I would say that something like research impact is — it seems something slightly grubby. It’s not seen as not — by the academics, as not very pure. To some of them, it seems women’s work. Talking to the public, do you see what I mean? (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, gendered roles also relate to how the panel worked with the assessment of Impact. Previous research has outlined how the equality and diversity assessment of panels for REF2014 were not conducted until after panellists were appointed (Derrick, 2018 ), leading to a lack of equal-representation of women on most panels. Some of the female panellists reflected that this resulted not only in a hyper-awareness of one’s own identity and value as a woman on the panel, but also implicitly associating the role that a female panellist would play in generating the evaluation. One panellist below, reflected that she was the only female in a male-dominated panel, and that the only other females in the room were the panel secretariat. The panellist goes further to explain how this resulted in a gendered-division of labour surrounding the assessment of Impact;

I mean, there’s a gender thing as well which isn’t directing what you’re talking about what you’re researching, but I was the only woman on the original appointed panel. The only other women were the secretariat. In some ways I do — there was initially a very gendered division of perspective where the women were all the ones aggregate the quantitative research, or typing it all up or talking about impact whereas the men were the ones who represented the big agenda, big trials. (Main Panel, Outputs and Impact, Female)

In addition, evaluators expressed opinions about what constituted a good and a bad panel member. From this, the evaluation showed that traits such as the ability to work as a ‘team’ and to build on definitions and methods of assessment for Impact through deliberation and ‘feedback’ were perceived along gendered lines. In this regard, women perceived themselves as valuable if they were ‘happy to listen to discussions’, and not ‘too dogmatic about their opinion’. Here, women were valued if they played a supportive, supplementary role in line with Bellas ( 1999 ), which was in clear distinction to men who contributed as creative thinkers and forgers of new ideas. As one panellist described;

A good panel member is an Irish female. A good panel member was someone who was happy to — someone who is happy to listen to discussions; to not be too dogmatic about their opinion, but can listen and learn, because impact is something we are all learning from scratch. Somebody who wasn’t too outspoken, was a team player. (Panel 3, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Likewise, another female evaluator reflected on the reasons for her inclusion as a panel member was due to her ‘generalist perspective’ as opposed to a perspective that is over prescribed. This was suggestive of how an overly specialist perspective would run counter to the reasons that she was included as a panellist which was, in her opinion, due to her value as an ethnic and gender ‘token’ to the panel;

‘ I think it’s also being able to provide some perspective, some general perspective. I’m quite a generalist actually, I’m not a specialist……So I’m very generalist. And I think they’re also well aware of the ethnic and gender composition of that and lots of reasons why I’m asked on panels. (Panel 1, Outputs and Impact, Female)

Women perceived their value on the panel as supportive, as someone who is prepared to work on the team, and listen to other views towards as a generalist, and constructionist, rather than as an enforced of dogmatic views and raw, hard notions of Impact that were represented through quantitative indicators only. As such, how the panel operated reflects general studies of how work can be organised along gender lines, as well as specific to workload and power in the academy. The similarity between the gendered associations towards conceptualising Impact from the researchers and evaluators, combined with how the panel organises its work along gendered lines, suggests how panel culture echoes the implicit tendencies within the wider research community. The implications of this tendency in relation to the evaluation of non-academic Impact is discussed below.

Discussion: an Impact a-gender?

This study shows how researchers and evaluators in two, independent data sets echoed a gendered orientation towards Impact, and how this implies an Impact a-gender. That gendered notions of Impact emerged as a significant theme from two independent data sets speaks to the importance of the issue. It also illustrates the need for policymakers and funding organisations to acknowledge its potential effects as part of their efforts towards embedding a more inclusive research culture around the generation and evaluation of research impact beyond academia.

Specifically, this paper has identified gendered language around the generation of, and evaluation of Impact by researchers in Australia and the UK, as well as by evaluators by the UK’s most recent Research Excellence Framework in 2014. For the UK and Australia, the prominence of Impact, as well as the policy borrowing between each country (Chubb, 2017 ) means that a reliable comparison of pre-evaluation perceptions of researchers and evaluators can be made. In both data sets presumptions of Impact as either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ by both researchers and evaluators were found to be gendered. Whereas it is not surprising that panel culture reflects the dominant trends within the wider academic culture, this paper raises the question of how the implicit operation of gender bias surrounding notions of scientific productivity and its measurement, invade and therefore unduly influence the evaluation of those notions during peer-review processes. This negates the motivation behind a broad Impact definition and evaluation as inclusive since unconscious bias towards women can still operate if left unchecked and unmanaged.

Gendered notions of excellence were also related to the ability to be ‘competitive’, and that once Impact became a formalised, countable and therefore competitive criterion, it also become masculine where previously it existed as a feminised concept related to female academic-ness. As a feminised concept, Impact once referred to notions of excellence requiring communication such as public engagement, or stakeholder coordination—the ‘softer’ impacts. However, this association only remains ‘soft’ insofar as Impact remains unmeasurable, or more nuanced in definition. This is especially pertinent for the evaluation of societal impact where already conceived ideas of engagement and ‘ women’s work ’ influence how evaluators assess the feasibility of impact narratives for the purposes of its assessment. This paper also raises the question that notions of gender in relation to Impact persist irrespective of the identities assumed for the purposes of its evaluation (i.e., as a peer reviewer). This is not to say that academic culture in the UK and Australia, where Impact is increasingly being formalised into rewards systems, is not changing. More that there is a tendency in some evaluations for the burden of evidence to be applied differently to genders due to tensions surrounding what women are ‘good’ at doing: engagement, versus what ‘men’ are good at doing regarding Impact. In this scenario, quantitative indicators of big, high-level impacts are to be attributable to male traits, rather than female. This has already been noted in student evaluations of teaching (Kogan et al., 2010 ) and of academic leadership performance where the focus on the evaluation is on how others interpret performance based on already held gendered views about competence based on behaviours (Williams et al., 2014 ; Holt and Ellis, 1998 ). As such, when researchers transcend these gendered identities that are specific to societal impact, there is a danger of an Impact-a-gender bias arising in the assessment and forecasting of Impact. This paper extends this understanding and outlines how this may also be the case for assessments of societal impact.

By examining perceptions, as well as using an inductive analysis, this study was able to unearth unconsciously employed gendered notions that would not have been prominent or possible to pick up if we asked the interviewees about gender directly. This was particularly the case for the re-analysis of the post-evaluation interviews. However, future studies might consider incorporating a disciplinary-specific perspective as although the evaluators were from the medical/biomedical disciplines, researchers were from a range of disciplines. This would identify any discipline-specific risk towards an Impact a-gender. Nonetheless, further work that characterises the impact a-gender, as well as explores its wider implications for gender inequities within HE is currently underway.

How research evidence is labelled as excellent and therefore trustworthy, is heavily dictated by an evaluation process that is perceived as impartial and fair. However, if evaluations are compounded by gender bias, this confounds assessments of excellence with gendered expectation of non-academic impact. Consequently, gendered expectations of excellence for non-academic impact has the potential to: unconsciously dissuade women from pursuing more masculinised types of impact; act as a barrier to how female researchers mobilise their research evidence; as well as limit the recognition female researchers gain as excellent and therefore trustworthy sources of evidence.

The aim of this paper was not to criticise the panellists and researchers for expressing gendered perspectives, nor to present evidence about how researchers are unduly influenced by gender bias. The results shown do not support either of these views. However, the aim of this paper was to acknowledge how gender bias in research Impact generation can lead to a panel culture dominated by academics that translate the implicit and explicit biases within academia that influence its evaluation. This paper raises an important question regarding what we term the ‘Impact a-gender’, which outlines a mechanism in which gender bias feeds into the generation and evaluation of a research criterion, which is not traditionally associated with a hard, metrics-masculinised output from research. Along with other techniques used to combat unconscious bias in research evaluation, simply by identifying, and naming the issue, this paper intends to combat its ill effects through a community-wide discussions as a mechanism for developing tools to mitigate its wider effect if left unchecked or merely accepted as ‘acceptable’. In addition, it is suggested that government and funding organisations explicitly refer to the impact a-gender as part of their wider EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) agendas towards minimising the influence of unconscious bias in research impact and evaluation.

Data availability

Data is available upon request subject to ethical considerations such as consent so as not to compromise the individual privacy of our participants.

Change history

19 may 2020.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

For the purposes of this paper, when the text refers to non-academic, societal impact, or the term ‘Impact’ we are referring to the change and effect as defined by REF2014/2021 and the larger conceptualisation of impact that is generated through knowledge exchange and engagement. In this way, the paper refers to a broad conceptualisation of research impact that occurs beyond academia. This allows a distinction between Impact as central to this article’s contribution, as opposed to academic impact, and general word ‘impact’.

Impact scholars or those who are ‘good at impact’ are often equated with applied researchers.

One might interpret this as meaning ‘economic impact’.

This is described in the next section as ‘women’s work’ by one evaluator.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leaders Programme (ES/K008897/2). We would also like to acknowledge their peers for offering their views on the paper in advance of publication and in doing so thank Dr. Richard Watermeyer, University of Bath, Professor Paul Wakeling, University of York and Dr. Gabrielle Samuel, Kings College London.

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Chubb, J., Derrick, G.E. The impact a-gender: gendered orientations towards research Impact and its evaluation. Palgrave Commun 6 , 72 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0438-z

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Sex and attitudinal gender: A critical review and decomposition principle

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Research is concerned about sex and gender effects, often addressed interchangeably. This paper reviews the distinct conceptualization and usage of these constructs with a focus on the multiple psychological components of gender. Extending social role theory concerns about how gender internalizes into individual psychology, an organizing framework is provided pointing to attitudinal gender as an overarching psychological construct including gender affect, gender cognition and gender behaviour. In a review about usage of sex and gender in individual differences research, limited conceptual distinction and inconsistent operationalizations are observed, with a shift of approach particularly in social sciences from sex to wide-ranging “gender differences” conceptualizations. We call for greater distinction between biological sex and attitudinal gender components in research reporting and design. A decomposition principle and research diagram is provided to help implement theoretical questions and empirical tests more accurately. Propositions can be followed by researchers, reviewers and practitioners to progress in the analysis and assessment of sex and gender effects.

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This work was inspired by collaboration with Prof. Alice H. Eagly; the author is very thankful for her very valuable contributions and feedback during the design and writing process. I also thank Anne Laure Humbert and María J. Pando for their enthusiastic appreciation of a previous version of this paper, as well as Christopher Begeny, Michelle K. Ryan and Teresa Sasiain for interesting discussions.

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Research Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

* E-mail: [email protected]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor: Elisa Ughetto, Politecnico di Torino, ITALY

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data collection

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

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

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

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

Text processing and keyword extraction

Text preprocessing aims at structuring text into a form that can be analyzed by statistical models. In the present section, we describe the preprocessing steps we applied to paper titles and abstracts, which, as explained below, partially follow a standard text preprocessing pipeline [ 45 ]. These activities have been performed using the R package udpipe [ 46 ].

The first step is n-gram extraction (i.e., a sequence of words from a given text sample) to identify which n-grams are important in the analysis, since domain-specific lexicons are often composed by bi-grams and tri-grams [ 47 ]. Multi-word extraction is usually implemented with statistics and linguistic rules, thus using the statistical properties of n-grams or machine learning approaches [ 48 ]. However, for the present paper, we used Scopus metadata in order to have a more effective and efficient n-grams collection approach [ 49 ]. We used the keywords of each paper in order to tag n-grams with their associated keywords automatically. Using this greedy approach, it was possible to collect all the keywords listed by the authors of the papers. From this list, we extracted only keywords composed by two, three and four words, we removed all the acronyms and rare keywords (i.e., appearing in less than 1% of papers), and we clustered keywords showing a high orthographic similarity–measured using a Levenshtein distance [ 50 ] lower than 2, considering these groups of keywords as representing same concepts, but expressed with different spelling. After tagging the n-grams in the abstracts, we followed a common data preparation pipeline that consists of the following steps: (i) tokenization, that splits the text into tokens (i.e., single words and previously tagged multi-words); (ii) removal of stop-words (i.e. those words that add little meaning to the text, usually being very common and short functional words–such as “and”, “or”, or “of”); (iii) parts-of-speech tagging, that is providing information concerning the morphological role of a word and its morphosyntactic context (e.g., if the token is a determiner, the next token is a noun or an adjective with very high confidence, [ 51 ]); and (iv) lemmatization, which consists in substituting each word with its dictionary form (or lemma). The output of the latter step allows grouping together the inflected forms of a word. For example, the verbs “am”, “are”, and “is” have the shared lemma “be”, or the nouns “cat” and “cats” both share the lemma “cat”. We preferred lemmatization over stemming [ 52 ] in order to obtain more interpretable results.

In addition, we identified a further set of keywords (with respect to those listed in the “keywords” field) by applying a series of automatic words unification and removal steps, as suggested in past research [ 53 , 54 ]. We removed: sparse terms (i.e., occurring in less than 0.1% of all documents), common terms (i.e., occurring in more than 10% of all documents) and retained only nouns and adjectives. It is relevant to notice that no document was lost due to these steps. We then used the TF-IDF function [ 55 ] to produce a new list of keywords. We additionally tested other approaches for the identification and clustering of keywords–such as TextRank [ 56 ] or Latent Dirichlet Allocation [ 57 ]–without obtaining more informative results.

Classification of research topics

To guide the literature analysis, two experts met regularly to examine the sample of collected papers and to identify the main topics and trends in gender research. Initially, they conducted brainstorming sessions on the topics they expected to find, due to their knowledge of the literature. This led to an initial list of topics. Subsequently, the experts worked independently, also supported by the keywords in paper titles and abstracts extracted with the procedure described above.

Considering all this information, each expert identified and clustered relevant keywords into topics. At the end of the process, the two assignments were compared and exhibited a 92% agreement. Another meeting was held to discuss discordant cases and reach a consensus. This resulted in a list of 27 topics, briefly introduced in Table 2 and subsequently detailed in the following sections.

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

Evaluation of semantic importance

Working on the lemmatized corpus of the 15,465 papers included in our sample, we proceeded with the evaluation of semantic importance trends for each topic and with the analysis of their connections and prevalent textual associations. To this aim, we used the Semantic Brand Score indicator [ 36 ], calculated through the SBS BI webapp [ 37 ] that also produced a brand image report for each topic. For this study we relied on the computing resources of the ENEA/CRESCO infrastructure [ 58 ].

The Semantic Brand Score (SBS) is a measure of semantic importance that combines methods of social network analysis and text mining. It is usually applied for the analysis of (big) textual data to evaluate the importance of one or more brands, names, words, or sets of keywords [ 36 ]. Indeed, the concept of “brand” is intended in a flexible way and goes beyond products or commercial brands. In this study, we evaluate the SBS time-trends of the keywords defining the research topics discussed in the previous section. Semantic importance comprises the three dimensions of topic prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Prevalence measures how frequently a research topic is used in the discourse. The more a topic is mentioned by scientific articles, the more the research community will be aware of it, with possible increase of future studies; this construct is partly related to that of brand awareness [ 59 ]. This effect is even stronger, considering that we are analyzing the title, abstract and keywords of the papers, i.e. the parts that have the highest visibility. A very important characteristic of the SBS is that it considers the relationships among words in a text. Topic importance is not just a matter of how frequently a topic is mentioned, but also of the associations a topic has in the text. Specifically, texts are transformed into networks of co-occurring words, and relationships are studied through social network analysis [ 60 ]. This step is necessary to calculate the other two dimensions of our semantic importance indicator. Accordingly, a social network of words is generated for each time period considered in the analysis–i.e., a graph made of n nodes (words) and E edges weighted by co-occurrence frequency, with W being the set of edge weights. The keywords representing each topic were clustered into single nodes.

The construct of diversity relates to that of brand image [ 59 ], in the sense that it considers the richness and distinctiveness of textual (topic) associations. Considering the above-mentioned networks, we calculated diversity using the distinctiveness centrality metric–as in the formula presented by Fronzetti Colladon and Naldi [ 61 ].

Lastly, connectivity was measured as the weighted betweenness centrality [ 62 , 63 ] of each research topic node. We used the formula presented by Wasserman and Faust [ 60 ]. The dimension of connectivity represents the “brokerage power” of each research topic–i.e., how much it can serve as a bridge to connect other terms (and ultimately topics) in the discourse [ 36 ].

The SBS is the final composite indicator obtained by summing the standardized scores of prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Standardization was carried out considering all the words in the corpus, for each specific timeframe.

This methodology, applied to a large and heterogeneous body of text, enables to automatically identify two important sets of information that add value to the literature review. Firstly, the relevance of each topic in literature is measured through a composite indicator of semantic importance, rather than simply looking at word frequencies. This provides a much richer picture of the topics that are at the center of the discourse, as well as of the topics that are emerging in the literature. Secondly, it enables to examine the extent of the semantic relationship between topics, looking at how tightly their discourses are linked. In a field such as gender equality, where many topics are closely linked to each other and present overlaps in issues and solutions, this methodology offers a novel perspective with respect to traditional literature reviews. In addition, it ensures reproducibility over time and the possibility to semi-automatically update the analysis, as new papers become available.

Overview of main topics

In terms of descriptive textual statistics, our corpus is made of 15,465 text documents, consisting of a total of 2,685,893 lemmatized tokens (words) and 32,279 types. As a result, the type-token ratio is 1.2%. The number of hapaxes is 12,141, with a hapax-token ratio of 37.61%.

Fig 1 shows the list of 27 topics by decreasing SBS. The most researched topic is compensation , exceeding all others in prevalence, diversity, and connectivity. This means it is not only mentioned more often than other topics, but it is also connected to a greater number of other topics and is central to the discourse on gender equality. The next four topics are, in order of SBS, role , education , decision-making , and career progression . These topics, except for education , all concern women in the workforce. Between these first five topics and the following ones there is a clear drop in SBS scores. In particular, the topics that follow have a lower connectivity than the first five. They are hiring , performance , behavior , organization , and human capital . Again, except for behavior and human capital , the other three topics are purely related to women in the workforce. After another drop-off, the following topics deal prevalently with women in society. This trend highlights that research on gender in business journals has so far mainly paid attention to the conditions that women experience in business contexts, while also devoting some attention to women in society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compensation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decision-making.

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

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

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

Career progression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization.

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

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

Human capital.

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

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

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

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

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

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

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

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

Research gaps and conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting information

S1 text. keywords used for paper selection..

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

Acknowledgments

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

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• > Journals
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• > Volume 45 Issue 5
• > Sex, gender and gender identity: a re-evaluation of...

Article contents

Homosexuality and conversion therapy, beyond sexual orientation, conversion therapy relating to gender, definitions of sex, gender and gender identity, children and adolescents, suicide, self-harm and current controversies, clinical implications, feminist concerns, conclusions, sex, gender and gender identity: a re-evaluation of the evidence.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

• Supplementary materials
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In the past decade there has been a rapid increase in gender diversity, particularly in children and young people, with referrals to specialist gender clinics rising. In this article, the evolving terminology around transgender health is considered and the role of psychiatry is explored now that this condition is no longer classified as a mental illness. The concept of conversion therapy with reference to alternative gender identities is examined critically and with reference to psychiatry's historical relationship with conversion therapy for homosexuality. The authors consider the uncertainties that clinicians face when dealing with something that is no longer a disorder nor a mental condition and yet for which medical interventions are frequently sought and in which mental health comorbidities are common.

In 2018 the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) issued a position statement to promote good care when dealing with transgender and gender-diverse people that relates to ‘conversion therapy’. 1 In this article we reappraise the phenomenology of gender identity, contrast ‘treatments’ for homosexuality with those for gender non-conformity, analyse the relationship between gender dysphoria and mental disorders with particular reference to the younger cohort of transgender patients, and ask how psychiatrists can address distress related to gender while upholding the central tenet of ‘first do no harm’.

Male homosexuality was outlawed in the UK in 1865 until the Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised sexual acts between men. During that time, homosexuality was shameful, stigmatised and conceptualised as a mental disorder. Psychiatry was instrumental in its treatment, which continued even after the legal change. Reference King 2

Attempts to ‘cure’ same-sex desire included psychotherapy, hormone treatment and various behavioural interventions. These interventions are now considered ‘conversion’ or ‘reparative’ therapy. Reference Haldeman 3 One high-profile failure for such ‘treatments’ was Alan Turing. After being found guilty of gross indecency in 1951, he was prescribed oestrogen, which rendered him impotent and caused gynaecomastia. He died by suicide in 1954. Reference Hodges 4

Conversion therapies lost popularity as evidence emerged of their ineffectiveness, Reference Serovich, Craft, Toviessi, Gangamma, McDowell and Grafsky 5 coupled with more tolerant social attitudes. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-10 classification in 1992. In 2014, the RCPsych published a position statement explicitly rejecting conversion therapy and supporting a ban. 6 Same-sex orientation is regarded as a normal, acceptable variation of human sexuality.

Enshrined in the Equality Act 2010, lesbians and gay men in the UK now enjoy the same civil rights as heterosexuals in terms of healthcare, marriage and raising of children, and equal employment. Although they enjoy equal status and increased visibility in most Western societies, there remain countries and cultures where same-sex practice is taboo or criminal, and where people still seek treatment.

In recent years, increasing links have been forged between lesbian and gay communities and those representing other gender identities. Stonewall describes ‘any person whose gender expression does not conform to conventional ideas of male or female’ as falling under the umbrella term ‘trans’. 7

Definitions have evolved beyond those included in the 1992 ICD-10 under ‘gender identity disorders’, with which psychiatrists might be familiar. 8 Transsexualism was widely understood to mean ‘a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, and an accompanied discomfort of one's anatomic sex’. 8 Underlying mechanisms are poorly understood, although there are similarities and overlaps with both body dysmorphia and body integrity identity disorder. Reference Bray 9 , Reference Ostgathe 10 Sufferers might embark on social and medical intervention to help them ‘pass’ as the opposite sex. Historically, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria would have been required for doctors to intervene in this group. 11

Transgender, however, has become a much broader category ( Fig. 1 ). New terminology reflects a conceptual shift from clinical disorder to personal identity. Reference Reiff Hill 12 Crucially, gender dysphoria is no longer integral to the condition. The World Health Organization has renamed ‘gender identity disorder’ as ‘gender incongruence’ and reclassified it as a ‘condition related to sexual health’ rather than retaining it in the chapter pertaining to ‘mental and behavioural disorders’, Reference Reed, Drescher, Krueger, Atalla, Cochran and First 13 a somewhat discrepant placement, reflecting a political rather than scientific decision-making process.

Fig. 1 A page from The Gender Book Reference Reiff Hill 12 (reproduced with permission of www.thegenderbook.com ).

By contrast, DSM-5 has removed ‘gender identity disorder’, renaming it ‘gender dysphoria’. It is possible to meet the criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria within DSM-5 without experiencing body dysphoria relating to primary or secondary sexual characteristics, 14 and the American Psychiatric Association emphasises that ‘not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria’. Reference Drescher and Pula 15

The following is from the 2018 ICD-11: 16

‘Gender incongruence of childhood is characterized by a marked incongruence between an individual's experienced/expressed gender and the assigned sex in prepubertal children. It includes a strong desire to be a different gender than the assigned sex; a strong dislike on the child's part of his or her sexual anatomy or anticipated secondary sex characteristics and/or a strong desire for the primary and/or anticipated secondary sex characteristics that match the experienced gender; and make-believe or fantasy play, toys, games or activities and playmates that are typical of the experienced gender rather than the assigned sex.’

Definitions are inadequate in explaining how anyone experiences the gender of the opposite sex. Without further explanation of ‘toys, games or activities’ that are typical of each sex, this is left to parents, teachers and doctors to determine. The inference might be that gender-congruent behaviours have some objective existence and not fulfilling them might indicate a ‘trans’ identity. Children who do not conform to social norms and expectations come to dislike their sexual characteristics: that embodiment of their gender dissonance.

There is a lack of consensus demonstrated as to the exact nature of the condition. Questions remain for psychiatrists regarding whether gender dysphoria is a normal variation of gender expression, a social construct, a medical disease or a mental illness. If merely a natural variation, it becomes difficult to identify the purpose of or justification for medical intervention.

The RCPsych gives a description within the position statement of ‘treatments for transgender people that aim to suppress or divert their gender identity – i.e. to make them exclusively identify with the sex assigned to them at birth’. 1 Conversion therapy is described as ‘any approach that aims to persuade trans people to accept their sex assigned at birth’. It goes on to include ‘placing barriers [to] medical transition’. Unfortunately, the statement does not define ‘approach’ beyond alluding to psychoanalytic or behavioural talking therapies. Thus, conversion therapy for transgender people appears conflated with that for homosexuality. Furthermore, there is little evidence that it is taking place in the UK. Reference Wright, Candy and King 17 Historically, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria was required before medical intervention; Reference Ostgathe 10 this is a part of standard gatekeeping that is now being criticised as a ‘barrier’ instead of regular safe medical practice. Reference King 2 Now, a self-declaration of being ‘trans’ appears to be indication enough for a patient to expect their doctor provide a range of complex medical treatments, with no evidence of dysphoria being required. Reference Ashley 18

The position statement 1 could also be read as suggesting that full medical transition is an ultimate goal in gender-diverse patients, rather than considering a range of possible goals, which might include limited interventions or reconciliation with one's own (sexed) body. With regard to conversion therapy in children, the statement does not refer to desistance; evidence suggests that the majority of children left alone reconcile their identity with their biological sex; the feelings of 60–80% of children with a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria remit during adolescence. Reference Ristori and Steensma 19 – Reference Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis 21

Gender theorists propose that all people must have a gender identity; it is not waivable. For those people whose internal identity aligns with their sex, the word cisgender and ‘cis’ terminology are used. Those whose identity is wholly that of the opposite sex are described as transgender or ‘trans’. However, there are other identities for those whose internal sense lies somewhere between or outside a neat fit into either gender-binary category. Fluidity and fluctuation in gender identity is also recognised, with categories such as ‘non-binary’, ‘gender-fluid’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘pangender’ and ‘genderfuck’ all recorded by clinicians at the UK's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for under-18-year-olds. Reference Twist and de Graaf 22 The social networking site Tumblr presently describes over 100 different genders. 23 Without a strong male or female identification, ‘agender’ becomes itself another gender identity.

Some consider gender identity to be fixed and absolute, with some neuroscientists asserting that it develops in utero in the second-trimester brain. Reference Bao and Swaab 24 , Reference Savic, Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab 25 However, there is little to no convincing evidence to support fundamental differences between the brains of females and males. Reference Joel, Berman, Tavor, Wexler, Gaber and Stein 26 If one's ‘internal sense of being a man or a woman’ no longer refers to a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ as defined by biological sex 27 then the definition of gender identity risks becoming circular.

Within current debates, if gender identity becomes uncoupled from both biological sex and gendered socialisation ( Box 1 ), it develops an intangible soul-like quality or ‘essence’. As a pure subjective experience, it may be overwhelming and powerful but is also unverifiable and unfalsifiable. If this identity is held to be a person's innermost core concept of self, then questioning the very existence of gender identity becomes equated with questioning that person's entire sense of being, and consequently risks being considered a threat to the right to exist, or even as a threat to kill. Behaviours such as ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ are understood by proponents of gender theory to be destructive, debasing and dehumanising. Reference Freeman 28 This might explain why the prevailing discourse has become as sensitive and at times inflammatory as it has.

Box 1 Sex, gender and gender identity

Humans are sexually dimorphic: there are only two viable gametes and two sexes, whose primary and secondary sexual characteristics determine what role they play in human reproduction. Sex is determined at fertilisation and revealed at birth or, increasingly, in utero . The existence of rare and well-described ‘disorders (differences) of sexual differentiation’ does not negate the fact that sex is binary. The term ‘assigned at birth’ suggests a possibly arbitrary allocation by a health professional, rather than the observed product of sexual reproduction.

Gender describes a social system that varies over time and location and involves shaping of a set of behaviours deemed appropriate for one's sex. It operates at an unconscious level via strong social norms, yet is also rigidly enforced by coercive controls and sometimes violence. Reference Ashley 18 The ‘rules’ exist regardless of how individuals feel about them. Gender can thus be perceived as oppressive and potentially painful to all people of both sexes within patriarchal societies, the dominant form of social structure across most, although not all, of the globe. Feminist theory holds that gender operates as a hierarchy, with men occupying the superior position and women the subordinate. As long as this hierarchy exists, all women are harmed to some extent, whether or not they conform to their sex stereotypes. Reference Ristori and Steensma 19

Gender identity

If sex refers to biology, and gender to socialisation and role, then gender identity may be viewed as the psychological aspect. The American Psychological Association defines it as ‘someone's internal sense of being a man or a woman’. Reference Steensma and Cohen-Kettenis 20 Gender identity is thus distinguished from biological sex and gendered socialisations. Reference Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis 21

Nonetheless, notions of gender identity are still contested and raise some ethical questions for professionals working at the interface of physical and mental disorder. Most psychiatrists reject Cartesian dualism, whereby the mind is something imprisoned inside the body, or the ‘ghost in the machine’. Reference Ryle 29 How should doctors consider the body? We are born as, and die as, a body; we are our bodies. How can someone be born in the wrong body? Many patients bring a ‘wrong’ or ‘wronged’ body to their doctor; these may be traumatised, wounded, diseased or disliked bodies. How should doctors react when someone informs them that, although they inhabit the body of a man, they are in all other respects female? We must deal with all our patients with compassion but also make safe medical decisions when demonstrable material reality is at odds with a patient's subjectivity.

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), Britain's only specialised gender service for children and adolescents and based at the Tavistock Centre, London, has recorded a 25-fold rise in referrals since 2009, most marked in biological girls (‘assigned female at birth’), who make up the majority of referrals presently ( Fig. 2 ). 30

Fig. 2 Referral rates to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Centre (Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust) in London between 2009 and 2019. 30

Despite gender dysphoria no longer falling within the remit of mental illness in ICD-11, there is a substantial body of evidence of increased levels of mental illness among adults, usually attributed to societal responses to gender non-conformity or ‘minority stress’. Reference Dhejne, Van Vlerken, Heylens and Arcelus 31 De Vries et al measured psychiatric comorbidity among those referred to a child and adolescent gender clinic in The Netherlands and also found increased rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation in this younger group. Reference de Vries, Doreleijers, Steensma and Cohen-Kettenis 32 However, a potentially worrying picture regarding causes and consequences emerges from more recent research in this young, increasingly natal-female population.

Kaltiala-Heino et al examined referrals to an adolescent gender identity clinic in Finland over a 2-year period, finding high rates of mental health problems, social isolation and bullying ( Fig. 3 ). Reference Kaltiala-Heino, Sumia, Työläjärvi and Lindberg 33 Most bullying pre-dated the onset of gender dysphoria and was unrelated to gender incongruence.

Fig. 3 Referrals to an adolescent gender identity clinic in Finland over a 2-year period (from 2011–2013). Reference Kaltiala-Heino, Sumia, Työläjärvi and Lindberg 33

Similarly, in the UK, Holt et al Reference Holt, Skagerberg and Dunsford 34 found that associated difficulties were common in children and adolescents referred to the GIDS in London ( Fig. 4 ). Same-sex attraction was particularly common among natal females, with only 8.5% of those referred to the GIDS describing themselves as primarily attracted to boys. This raises important questions about current societal acceptance of young lesbians even within youth LGBTQ+ culture. It is possible that at least some gender-non-conforming girls come to believe themselves boys or ‘trans masculine non-binary’ as more acceptable or comfortable explanations for same-sex sexual attraction, Reference Burki 35 a kind of ‘internalised homophobia’. Autism spectrum disorders are consistently overrepresented in referred children and adolescents. Reference van der Miesen, de Vries, Steensma and Hartman 36

Fig. 4 Referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Centre (Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust) in London between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2012. Reference Holt, Skagerberg and Dunsford 34 ASD, autism spectrum disorder.

The RCPsych's position statement acknowledges these elevated rates of mental illness within the transgender population, 1 but appears to attribute them primarily to hostile external responses to those not adhering to gender norms (or sex-specific stereotypes). Reference Arcelus, Claes, Witcomb, Marshall and Bouman 37 , Reference Bouman, Claes, Brewin, Crawford, Millet and Fernandez-Aranda 38 A deeper analysis of mental illness and alternative gender identities is not undertaken, and common causal factors and confounders are not explored. This is worrying, as attempts to explore, formulate and treat coexisting mental illness, including that relating to childhood trauma, might then be considered tantamount to ‘conversion therapy’. Although mental illness is overrepresented in the trans population it is important to note that gender non-conformity itself is not a mental illness or disorder. As there is evidence that many psychiatric disorders persist despite positive affirmation and medical transition, it is puzzling why transition would come to be seen as a key goal rather than other outcomes, such as improved quality of life and reduced morbidity. When the phenomena related to identity disorders and the evidence base are uncertain, it might be wiser for the profession to admit the uncertainties. Taking a supportive, exploratory approach with gender-questioning patients should not be considered conversion therapy.

Transgender support groups have emphasised the risk of suicide. After controlling for coexisting mental health problems, studies show an increased risk of suicidal behaviour and self-harm in the transgender population, although underlying causality has not been convincingly demonstrated. Reference Marshall, Claes, Bouman, Witcomb and Arcelus 39 Then, expressed in the maxim ‘better a live daughter than a dead son’, parents, teachers and doctors are encouraged to affirm unquestioningly the alternative gender for fear of the implied consequences. There is a danger that poor-quality data are being used to support gender affirmation and transition without the strength of evidence that would normally determine pathways of care. One 20-year Swedish longitudinal cohort study showed persisting high levels of psychiatric morbidity, suicidal acts and completed suicide many years after medical transition. Reference Dhejne, Lichtenstein, Boman, Johansson, Långström and Landén 40 These results are not reassuring and might suggest that more complex intrapsychic conflicts remain, unresolved by living as the opposite sex.

Established risk factors for self-harm and suicidal behaviour appear to be age related (younger trans patients are at higher risk) and include comorbid mental health problems, particularly depression, and a history of sexual abuse. Reference Marshall, Claes, Bouman, Witcomb and Arcelus 39 Thus, all new patients of any age warrant thorough assessment and formulation using a biopsychosocial model; the best evidence-informed interventions should be provided. If this is followed by an individual desisting it should not be considered conversion therapy. That term should perhaps be reserved for coercive treatments.

Best psychiatric practice avoids oversimplification of the causes and treatment of suicidal behaviour and self-harm. Preliminary data from a small ‘before and after’ pilot study of the use of puberty blockers at the Tavistock Centre in selected children found a reduction in body image problems in adolescents following a year of puberty suppression. However, positive effects were offset by increases in self-harm and suicidal thoughts. 41 Surprisingly, this unpublished study was deemed a success such that prescribing of puberty blockers was introduced as standard practice and commissioned with scaling up of services. There was no development of alternative psychological approaches, nor were randomised controlled comparisons made.

Evidence suggests that almost 100% of children commencing puberty blockade go on to receive cross-sex hormones. Reference de Vries, Steensma, Doreleijers and Cohen-Kettenis 42 This requires further interrogation to ascertain whether the high figures are due to robust, effective selection and gatekeeping or to a less palatable interpretation that preventing physical and sexual maturation crystallises gender dysphoria as a first step on a cascade of interventions. Reference Wren 43 The GIDS remains under intense scrutiny regarding research criticisms. Reference Cohen and Barnes 44 Although in the early 2000s it was criticised for being too conservative and not offering puberty blockers, there appears to have been a volte-face made in response to external pressure, Reference Giordano 45 without the publishing of robust data showing that this intervention is effective and safe.

Puberty blockers are known to affect bone and, possibly, brain development. They put users at risk of developing osteoporosis Reference Klink, Caris, Heijboer, van Trotsenburg and Rotteveel 46 and are associated with reductions in expected IQ. Reference Schneider, Spritzer, Soll, Fontanari, Carneiro and Tovar-Moll 47 They are described as ‘buying time’ for adolescents to make up their mind about whether to proceed with transition. Long-term effects are not known, but infertility appears inevitable when cross-sex hormones are introduced shortly after puberty blockers. Reference Johnson and Finlayson 48 Loss of sexual maturation will also be associated with lack of adult sexual function, although it is unlikely that a pre-pubertal child can truly understand this side-effect at the time of consent.

Those seeking transition are a vulnerable population who suffer from high levels of suicidality, psychiatric morbidity and associated difficulties. Medical and surgical transition is sought to relieve these psychiatric symptoms. Plausibly, there is an initial reduction in distress following transition, although no controlled trials exist. Therefore, the long-term outcome of medical and surgical transition in terms of mortality and quality of life remains unknown. No long-term comparative studies exist that satisfactorily demonstrate that hormonal and surgical interventions are superior to a biopsychosocial formulation with evidence-based therapy in reducing psychological distress, body dysphoria and underlying mental illness.

It is unclear what the role of psychiatry is in the assessment and treatment of gender dysphoria, now that it is no longer considered a diagnosable mental illness, and whether there is still a place for a routine psychosocial assessment. It could be argued that patients should be deterred from gender intervention pathways while comorbid mental illness is treated ( Fig. 5 ). Without long-term follow-up data, it is not possible to identify those who might reconcile with their sex and those who might come to deeply regret their medical and/or surgical transition. Moreover, it is not transparent where ultimate and legal responsibility for decision-making lies – with the patient, parents (if the patient is a child), psychologist, endocrinologist, surgeon or psychiatrist.

Fig. 5 Are these scenarios examples of good clinical practice or conversion therapy?

Psychiatrists understand that human development is necessary, but not always comfortable. Puberty, although a normal physiological process, is associated with particularly high levels of psychological and bodily discomfort. Psychiatrists’ role is to journey with patients as change is navigated and to provide support through sharing uncertainty and difficult decision-making. But in the current climate, psychiatrists may be unsure whether addressing psychological and social antecedents will lead to accusations of conversion therapy. Attempts to reconcile a sufferer's discomfort with their actual body would be good practice in other conditions involving body image disturbance, such as anorexia nervosa.

The magnitude of any benefits of medical and surgical transition is not clear. Follow-up studies are sparse, and with the new cohort of adolescents, clinicians step even further into the unknown. Reference Richards, Maxwell and McCune 49 These young people are not comparable to adult, mainly male-to-female, research participants on whom existing empirical clinical guidelines were based. Doctors are now questioning the wisdom of gender-affirmation treatment of children and young people, citing poor diagnostic certainty and low-quality evidence. Reference Laidlaw, Van Meter, Hruz, Van Mol and Malone 50 A recent review of evidence for the use of gender-affirming hormones for children and adolescents states that these drugs ‘can cause substantial harms, including death’ and concludes ‘the current evidence base does not support informed decision making and safe practice’. Reference Heneghan 51

Among a plethora of online videos by teenagers proudly displaying their mastectomy scars a worrying increase in detransitioner testimonies can now be found 52 ( Fig. 6 ). These are mainly young women who have rejected their trans identities and are reconciling with their birth sex.

Fig. 6 Reasons given for detransitioning in a female detransition and re-identification survey run between 16 and 30 August 2016 and shared through online social networking sites. 52

In theory, universal human rights should not pit disadvantaged groups against one another, but in practice, disputes occur. Women's rights activists point to persistent global inequalities, sex discrimination and violence against women and girls. They are concerned that ignoring sex as a reality risks no longer being able to name, measure and ameliorate sex-based harms. Endorsing old sex and gender stereotypes in an attempt to validate young patients may inadvertently shore up outdated notions of how men and women should look and behave. There is no reason to believe that women have an innate love of pink and wearing high heels and find map-reading difficult, any more than men have a natural leaning towards blue and playing football and make excellent leaders.

Inherent in the notion of ‘gender identity’ is that there already exists a specific subjective experience of being a man or a woman. However, there cannot be a significant intrinsic experiential difference between male and female human beings when we cannot know what those differences are. One cannot possibly know how it feels to be anything other than oneself. Medicine may be in danger of reinforcing social norms and reifying a concept that is impossible to define over and above material biological reality. At present, many health, social, educational and legal policies are being adapted to give gender primacy over sex. 53 – 57

Language that confuses or conflates sex and gender identity, while appearing inclusive, might have the unintended consequence of closing down the means to understand complexity and respond appropriately to patients’ emotional and material reality. The medical profession must be compassionate, accept differences and fight for those who are marginalised and discriminated against.

However, viewing transgender as a fixed or stable entity, rather than a state of mind with multiple causative factors, closes down opportunities for doctors and patients to explore the meaning of any discomfort. Being gender non-conforming, or wishing to opt out of gender altogether, is not only not indicative of mental disorder – it is, in many ways, an entirely rational response to present capitalist reliance on rigid gender norms and roles. However, when multiple medical interventions are required on an otherwise healthy body or doctors are expected to deny the concept of sex or the sexed body, the situation becomes less coherent. The notion of conversion therapy for those seeing themselves as transgender relies on another binary – that of ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ – being set, closed, biologically anchored categories without overlap, rather than a more plausible hypothesis that one's gender identity is flexible, informed by one's culture, personality, personal preferences and social milieu.

The push for early bodily modification and hormones by some transgender patients is a cause for concern. New services, modelled on commissioning guidance from NHS England for adults of 17 years and above, will allow for self-referral, preclude psychological formulation or therapeutic intervention as standard practice, and recommend hormonal intervention after two appointments. 58 This will further scale up hormonal and surgical interventions in young patients, who will miss out on pubertal development and necessary mental health treatment in their quest for interventions that may harm and that they may later regret.

In the rapidly moving and politicised debate, psychiatrists look to the RCPsych for guidance. Those providing and interpreting the scanty evidence from published research need to be independent and impartial, using best-quality measures rather than ideology. It is confusing to liken open-minded working with young patients as they figure out who they are to conversion therapy. Holding an empathic neutral middle ground, which might or might not include medical transition, should not be equated with this. Psychiatrists need to feel empowered to explore the meaning of identity with their patients, treat coexisting mental illness and employ a trauma-informed model of care when appropriate.

The General Medical Council's Good Medical Practice demands of clinicians compassion, shared decision-making and safeguarding of young people's open futures. 59 The counterargument to unquestioning gender affirmation is that the process of medical transition may itself prove to be another form of conversion therapy, creating a new cohort of life-long patients dependent on medical services and turning at least some lesbian and gay young people into simulacra of straight members of the opposite sex. Psychiatry sits on this knife-edge: running the risk of being accused of transphobia or, alternatively, remaining silent throughout this uncontrolled experiment. Respectful debate, careful research and measurement of outcomes are always required.

About the authors

Lucy Griffin , MBBS, BSc, MRCPsych, is a consultant psychiatrist at The Priory Hospital Bristol, UK. Katie Clyde , MBChB, MRCPsych, DGM, is a consultant psychiatrist with Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, Hampshire, UK. Richard Byng , MB BChir, MRCGP, MPH, PhD, is a general practitioner and Professor of Primary Care Research at the University of Plymouth, UK. Susan Bewley , MD, FRCOG, MA, is Professor (Emeritus) of Obstetrics and Women's Health, Department of Women & Children's Health, King's College London, UK.

Acknowledgements

We consulted a trans woman and a detransitioner for this article. We thank them for their input.

Author contributions

L.G.: undertook a search and analysis of the literature, and conceived and wrote the paper. K.C.: undertook a search and analysis of the literature, and contributed to the drafting of the paper. R.B.: participated in the conception and evolution of the analysis, critically reviewing the paper and suggesting amendments incorporated into the final paper. S.B.: participated in the conception and evolution of the analysis, critically reviewing the paper and suggesting amendments incorporated into the final paper.

Declaration of interest

ICMJE forms are in the supplementary material, available online at https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2020.73 .

Fig. 1 A page from The Gender Book 12 (reproduced with permission of www.thegenderbook.com ).

Fig. 3 Referrals to an adolescent gender identity clinic in Finland over a 2-year period (from 2011–2013). 33

Fig. 4 Referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Centre (Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust) in London between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2012. 34 ASD, autism spectrum disorder.

Griffin et al. supplementary material

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A Data Portrait of Cisgender, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming Populations in the United States: A Research Note

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Lawrence Stacey; A Data Portrait of Cisgender, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming Populations in the United States: A Research Note. Demography 2024; 11569501. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11569501

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The transgender population is a critically underresearched population in the United States, owing to rare measures on national and state-level surveys that ask about sex and gender or transgender identification. Consequently, we know relatively less about the sociodemographic, socioeconomic, family, and health lives of gender minorities. In this research note, I use population-level data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to provide a data portrait of cisgender, transgender, and gender-nonconforming populations on a range of sociodemographic (e.g., sexual identity, race and ethnicity), socioeconomic (e.g., education, homeownership), family (e.g., union status), and health (e.g., number of poor mental health days) characteristics. Results reveal that gender minorities are younger than cisgender men and cisgender women and are disproportionately sexual minorities and people of color. Gender minority groups also experience lower socioeconomic status, report drastically different family lives, and bear the burden of worse health compared with cisgender people. I conclude by contending that descriptive research of this nature can illuminate compositional differences between cisgender and gender minority populations, provide rationales for adjusting for certain characteristics, and highlight potential explanatory mechanisms to make better sense of well-established findings (e.g., the transgender health disadvantage).

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Gender equity paradox: Study finds sex differences in reading and science are largest in gender-equal countries

by University of Turku

A new study reveals that sex differences in academic strengths are found throughout the world and girls' relative advantage in reading and boys' in science is largest in gender-equal countries.

Gender equality often draws attention especially in fields where women are underrepresented, such as high-status, high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers.

Academic strengths, or a student's best subject, strongly influence their field of study. Students with strengths in mathematics or science gravitate toward STEM fields, while those with a strength in reading gravitate toward other fields (e.g., journalism).

The research team analyzed data from nearly 2.5 million adolescents in 85 countries over 12 years or in five waves (2006–2018) from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Their findings confirmed that girls' strength is typically reading, while boys' is typically mathematics or science. These patterns are found both across countries and time.

The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science .

Most notably, sex differences in reading and science as academic strengths are more pronounced in countries with greater gender equality, such as Finland. Sex differences in mathematics, on the other hand, remained stable regardless of country-level gender equality.

"These results suggest that in more gender-equal societies, women may be choosing fields other than STEM based on their strength in reading. Increasing the share of women in STEM will require more than just boosting girls' math and science skills or advancing gender equality," says Doctoral Researcher Marco Balducci from the INVEST Research Flagship at the University of Turku, Finland.

The finding that sex differences in academic strength in reading and science are larger in gender-equal Scandinavian countries than in more traditional Middle Eastern countries—known as the Gender Equality Paradox—challenges the popular belief that sex differences are mainly driven by socialization pressure.

"The common assumption is that as gender equality improves, traditional gender roles should fade, leading to smaller sex differences. But that is not what we found. Instead, our results align with recent research showing that sex differences either stay the same or even increase with more gender equality," says Balducci.

Professor David Geary from the University of Missouri notes that "Gender-equal, wealthy, and liberal countries offer more opportunities and allow greater freedom of choice. In these contexts, men and women make different decisions, leading to larger sex differences in various areas of life, including STEM fields."

The research team encourages policymakers to prioritize mentorship opportunities for talented girls, as these may increase their likelihood of enrolling in a STEM degree program. However, Balducci adds, "Our study highlights that achieving parity between boys and girls could be challenging as broader factors, like sex differences in academic strengths, play a key role in determining sex disparities in STEM."

Journal information: Psychological Science

Provided by University of Turku

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Patterns of Gender Development

Carol lynn martin.

1 Arizona State University, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Program in Family and Human Development, Tempe, Arizona 85287-3701; ude.usa@nitramc

Diane N. Ruble

2 Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York 10003; [email protected]

A comprehensive theory of gender development must describe and explain long-term developmental patterning and changes and how gender is experienced in the short term. This review considers multiple views on gender patterning, illustrated with contemporary research. First, because developmental research involves understanding normative patterns of change with age, several theoretically important topics illustrate gender development: how children come to recognize gender distinctions and understand stereotypes, and the emergence of prejudice and sexism. Second, developmental researchers study the stability of individual differences over time, which elucidates developmental processes. We review stability in two domains—sex segregation and activities/interests. Finally, a new approach advances understanding of developmental patterns, based on dynamic systems theory. Dynamic systems theory is a metatheoretical framework for studying stability and change, which developed from the study of complex and nonlinear systems in physics and mathematics. Some major features and examples show how dynamic approaches have been and could be applied in studying gender development.

INTRODUCTION

Understanding the changes that correspond with the passage of time is a hallmark of developmental studies, including the study of gender development. Gender developmental scientists are concerned with age-related changes in gender typing, and more broadly, with many issues about the emergence and patterning of gendered behaviors and thinking. Description of these changes is vitally important as it informs theoretical approaches to gender development. Using a broad lens on age-related changes provides important information describing how development occurs, but shorter time frames are also useful for identifying processes that may underlie developmental patterns. Gender developmental scientists are beginning to conceptualize temporal change and measurement of relevant variables over time in more nuanced ways and with new methods and analytic strategies.

Our goal in this article is not to provide an extensive review of changes in gender over childhood, but instead to focus on the perspective of developmental patterning. In selecting issues to review, we attempted to find a set of issues that would provide insights into processes underlying gender development while also being representative of contemporary issues and future directions in the field. First, to highlight developmentalists' interest in average or normative changes across age, we review the timeline of gender development for the emergence of gender understanding and stereotyping and how discrimination and prejudice develop in childhood. Second, we examine continuities within individuals over time as an important theoretical complement to the first focus on mean-level, normative patterns over time. Longitudinal studies are reviewed to examine whether individual differences are stable over time in two areas of gender typing: sex segregation and activities and interests. Finally, we discuss how dynamic systems theory may be applied in gender development and describe its potential for understanding patterns over different time frames.

HOW EARLY DO CHILDREN ACQUIRE GENDER CONCEPTS AND EXHIBIT PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION?

The first few years of life and into adolescence have been the focus of much theorizing and empirical research on gender development. Major questions have arisen about the timeline of gender development, and resolving these issues is central to understanding processes underlying gender development. In this section, we discuss two key aspects of gender development. First, the earliest emergence of gender understanding and behaviors provides insights about the origins of sex differences and the prominence of gender as a social category, and so it is not surprising that these topics have been highlighted in contemporary research on gender development. Second, because of the far-ranging implications on human social interactions, we review research evidence concerning the emergence of gender prejudice and discrimination.

Do Infants Understand and Use Gender?

A major issue that has driven research is whether children's basic understanding of gender identity motivates and organizes the development of gender-typed behaviors, an idea proposed by “self-socialization” theories of gender development. Self-socialization perspectives posit that children actively seek information about what gender means and how it applies to them and that an understanding of gender categories motivates behavior such that, in essence, they socialize themselves (see Martin et al. 2002 ). In contrast, others ( Bussey & Bandura 1999 , Campbell et al. 2002 ) have argued that gender understanding must not play an important role in the emergence of gendered behaviors because some gender-typed behaviors emerge prior to age two, presumably earlier than children's understanding or identification with gender. The evidence needed to resolve this controversy concerns whether behavior becomes increasingly gender typed with the onset of basic gender understanding, and recent findings have extended our knowledge of these fundamental issues. Much has been written about these topics and about the surrounding controversies ( Bandura & Bussey 2004 ; Martin et al. 2002 , 2004 ); here, we provide an overview and update of the evidence.

When do children begin to recognize that there are two types of people—males and females—and when are they able to link this information to other qualities to form basic stereotypes? A related question is, when do children recognize their own sex? Infants as young as three to four months of age distinguish between categories of female and male faces, as demonstrated in habituation and preferential looking paradigms ( Quinn et al. 2002 ). By about six months, infants can discriminate faces and voices by sex, habituate to faces of both sexes, and make intermodal associations between faces and voices (e.g., Fagan & Singer 1979 , Miller 1983 , Younger & Fearing 1999 ). By 10 months, infants are able to form stereotypic associations between faces of women and men and gender-typed objects (e.g., a scarf, a hammer), suggesting that they have the capacity to form primitive stereotypes ( Levy & Haaf 1994 ). Infants' early associative networks about the sexes may not carry the same conceptual or affective associations that characterize those of older children or adults, although the nature of these associations has yet to be examined in any depth (see Martin et al. 2002 ).

Because of the difficulties associated with testing infants, it has been challenging to determine when children first recognize their own or others' sex. Early studies suggested that labeling and understanding of gender may not emerge until about 30 months of age, but more recent studies have moved the age of understanding gender identity and labeling downward. In a study using a preferential looking paradigm, about 50% of 18-month-old girls showed knowledge of gender labels (“lady,” “man”), but boys did not, and 50% of 18- and 24-month-old boys and girls showed above-chance understanding of the label “boy” ( Poulin-Dubois et al. 1998 ). In another non-verbal testing situation, 24- and 30-month old children knew the gender groups to which they and others belonged ( Stennes et al. 2005 ). Similarly, most 24- and 28-month-old children select the correct picture in response to gender labels provided by an experimenter ( Campbell et al. 2002 , Levy 1999 ).

A recent study examined the naturally occurring instances of gender labels (e.g., girl, boy, woman, man, lady, guy) as indicators of knowledge of gender categories and assessed whether the onset of use of these terms related to children's observed free play with toys ( Zosuls et al. 2009 ). Information about gender labels was obtained from examining biweekly parent diaries of children's speech from 10 months of age onward. Zosuls and colleagues (2009) also analyzed videotapes of the children at 17 months and 21 months playing with a set of toys varying from high to neutral in gender typing. The results showed that 25% of children used gender labels by 17 months and 68% by 21 months. On average, girls produced labels at 18 months, one month earlier than did boys. These labeling results were used to predict changes in gender-typed behavior with the two most strongly gender-typed toys (trucks and dolls). Children who knew and used gender labels were more likely than other children to show increases in gender-typed play with toys.

Taken together, these studies suggest that most children develop the ability to label gender groups and to use gender labels in their speech between 18 and 24 months. As proposed by self-socialization theorists, the results from the Zosuls et al. study (2009) suggest that developing this ability has consequences: Knowing basic gender information was related to increased play with strongly stereotyped toys. These findings are consistent with research suggesting that children develop awareness of their own “self ” at roughly 18 months and then begin to actively engage in information seeking about what things mean and how they should behave ( Baldwin & Moses 1996 ).

When Do Children Develop Stereotypes?

Developmental researchers have identified that rudimentary stereotypes develop by about two years of age ( Kuhn et al. 1978 ), and many children develop basic stereotypes by age three ( Signorella et al. 1993 ). Children first show an understanding of sex differences associated with adult possessions (e.g., shirt and tie), physical appearance, roles, toys, and activities, and recognize some abstract associations with gender (e.g., hardness as male; softness as female) ( Leinbach et al. 1997 , Weinraub et al. 1984 ). Children develop stereotypes about physical aggression at an early age, and by age 41½, children believe that girls show more relational aggression than boys ( Giles & Heyman 2005 ). Interestingly, even when researchers examine children's spontaneous associations about boys and girls, a consistent pattern is found from preschool through fourth/fifth grade: girls are seen as nice, wearing dresses, and liking dolls, and boys are seen as having short hair, playing active games, and being rough ( Miller et al. 2009 ).

As children grow older, the range of stereotypes about sports, occupations, school tasks, and adult roles expands, and the nature of the associations becomes more sophisticated (e.g., Sinno & Killen 2009 ). Specifically, early in childhood, children make vertical associations between the category label (“girls,” “boys”) and qualities (e.g., “boys like trucks”). They appear slower to make horizontal inferences (e.g., recognizing that trucks and airplanes are associated with being “masculine”), which tend to appear around age eight. For instance, when told about an unfamiliar sex-unspecified child who likes trucks, older children but not younger ones predict that the child also likes playing with airplanes ( Martin et al. 1990 ). Concreteness of gendered items influences the ability of younger children to make these property-to-property inferences ( Bauer et al. 1998 ). In contrast, adults often rely on individuating information rather than the person's sex to make similar types of judgments ( Deaux & Lewis 1984 ). The difficulty that children have with these judgments suggests that they may not understand within-sex individual differences.

Meta-analytic studies find that stereotypes become more flexible with age ( Signorella et al. 1993 ). A longitudinal study of children from 5 to 10 years of age showed a peak in the rigidity of stereotypes at either 5 or 6 years of age and then an increase in flexibility two years later. Neither the timing nor the level of peak rigidity affected the developmental trajectory, suggesting that children generally follow the same normative path across development despite variations in when rigidity starts and how extreme it becomes ( Trautner et al. 2005 ).

Many questions remain to be answered about the developmental progression in learning the content of stereotypes and in exploring individual differences in patterns of development. For instance, when do children first begin to assume that there are similarities within one sex and dissimilarities between the sexes? Theorists are interested in examining the roles that personal interests and idiosyncratic knowledge play in the development or hindrance in stereotype formation ( Liben & Bigler 2002 , Martin & Ruble 2004 ). Furthermore, how children apply stereotypes once they have learned them is an issue of continuing interest in the field.

When Do Children Exhibit Prejudice and Discrimination?

Recent conceptual analyses suggest a range of factors that likely contribute to the development of stereotypes and prejudice, such as highly salient categorizing dimensions (e.g., sex) ( Martin & Ruble 2004 ) and labeling of these dimensions by others ( Bigler et al. 1997 ). Because recent reviews of Developmental Intergroup Theory have covered the influence of these factors and discussed studies of children's responses to novel stereotyping situations ( Arthur et al. 2008 , Bigler & Liben 2007 ), the focus here is on the age-related changes in cognitive and behavioral expressions of gender prejudice and discrimination, not with their origins.

Attitudes about the two sexes

How do children's evaluations of the two sexes change with age? This question involves a number of different kinds of attitudes and beliefs; we focus on two: ( a ) ingroup/outgroup biases, and ( b ) perceptions of status differences and discrimination. There has been relatively little research on these topics, but interest has increased recently.

Ingroup/outgroup biases

Children's growing awareness of membership in a social group (i.e., male or female) becomes an evaluative process through self-identification and thus affects how positively children regard the ingroup relative to the outgroup ( Ruble et al. 2004 ). Some research suggests that as early as preschool, children report feeling more positively about their own sex ( Yee & Brown 1994 ), and differential liking is also seen among older children (e.g., Heyman 2001 , Verkuyten & Thijs 2001 ). Studies are mixed regarding age trends, depending on the measure. Those examining negative versus positive trait ratings suggest that intergroup biases decline in elementary school (e.g., Egan & Perry 2001 , Powlishta et al. 1994 ), consistent with increasing stereotype flexibility described above; but studies tapping more affective reactions (e.g., liking the ingroup better) do not show this decline (e.g., Yee & Brown 1994 ), at least not until early adolescence ( Verkuyten & Thijs 2001 ).

We do not yet know whether and when ingroup favoritism is associated with outgroup derogation. That is, do children actually dislike or have hostile attitudes toward the other sex, or is it simply that children like their own sex better? Because many studies use difference scores, ingroup positivity and outgroup negativity are often confounded ( Brewer 2001 , Cameron et al. 2001 ). Moreover, Kowalski (2007) reports that studies of young children's interactions do involve evaluative comments between boys and girls but rarely involve animosity, suggesting that some researchers may have misinterpreted children's positive ingroup feelings in structured interviews as overt rejection of the other group. Recent research suggests that when they are decoupled, ingroup positivity effects are stronger than outgroup negativity among elementary school children ( Susskind & Hodges 2007 ). It is also not clear whether young girls' willingness to judge boys as “bad,” for example, indicates outright hostility ( Rudman & Glick 2008 ) or if, instead, such judgments reflect stereotypes about boys getting into trouble (e.g., Heyman 2001 ). On the other hand, studies showing that the other sex is disliked (e.g., Yee & Brown 1994 ) are consistent with a conclusion of negative outgroup evaluation. An important issue for future research concerns this distinction between cognitive and affective aspects of intergroup bias and its connection to the development of gender prejudice ( Halim & Ruble 2009 ).

A distinction in the adult literature between hostile and benevolent sexism ( Glick & Fiske 2001 ) represents a potentially very useful conceptualization for future developmental research. The idea is that, unlike most forms of prejudice toward outgroups, negative intergroup attitudes between males and females are likely to be complicated by intimate interdependence and thus are likely to be ambivalent, involving benevolent as well as hostile aspects. For example, women may be viewed as competitors seeking to gain power over men, but they may also be viewed as angelic (put on a pedestal) and vulnerable, in need of protection. Men may be resented for their dominance over women but also admired as providers and heroes. Applying this distinction to the developmental course of intergroup attitudes, Rudman & Glick (2008) argued that ambivalence does not characterize gender prejudice in young children, but rather that it moves from a simple form of childhood hostility toward competing groups to ambivalent sexism.

This is an interesting proposal with important implications, but questions remain. First, outgroup negativity in young children can be interpreted differently, as suggested above; their perceptions may be simple and competitive, but not extreme enough to be characterized as hostile. Perhaps, instead, children's need to master important categorical distinctions coupled with relatively limited cognitive skills make it threatening when peers cross gender boundaries ( Kowalski 2007 ). Second, young children's attitudes may involve some complexity and ambivalence, but of a different sort than for adults. For example, young children may dislike members of the other sex because they are boring (about girls) or rough (about boys) while still holding positive views about other characteristics of other-sex peers, such as girls are nice and boys play exciting games. Moreover, children begin to anticipate adult roles at an early age, and benevolent feelings could arise from a “princess” anticipating her “prince” or the expectation by two young opposite-sex friends that they will one day be husband and wife. Further examination of different interpretations of preschoolers' ingroup bias is important because knowing what it represents is critical to knowing when to intervene to minimize sexism.

Awareness of status differences and discrimination

When do children become aware of the status difference applied to males and masculine activities relative to females and feminine activities in most cultures? Although studies of gender stereotypes in young children show that they attribute greater power to males and helplessness to females ( Ruble et al. 2006 ), only a few studies have examined perceptions of inequality directly. First, research has found awareness of status differences in occupations typically held by men and women ( Liben et al. 2001 , Teig & Susskind 2008 ). Children as young as 6 years understood that jobs more likely to be held by men (e.g., business executive) are higher in status than female-typical jobs, but only older children (11-year-olds) associated fictitious “male” jobs as being higher in status ( Liben et al. 2001 ). A study of perceptions of a high-status job—the U.S. presidency—found that 87% of children aged 5–10 years knew that only men had been presidents, though knowledge increased significantly with age ( Bigler et al. 2008 ).

Second, research has examined the development of children's general perceptions of gender inequalities ( Neff et al. 2007 ). The findings showed a notable increase between 7 and 15 years of age in beliefs that males are granted more power and respect than females.

Finally, a few recent studies examined children's perceptions of gender discrimination. First, in the study of the presidency, only approximately 30% of the 5- to 10-year-old children attributed the lack of women presidents to discrimination, although this percentage increased with age. Instead, the most frequent explanation was ingroup bias: that men would not vote for women. These findings suggest that even young children are aware of how ingroup biases shape behavior and that they perceive such reasons as more important than institutional discrimination in determining the selection of the president ( Bigler et al. 2008 ). In a second study, children in two age groups (5–7 and 8–10 years) responded to a set of hypothetical stories about teachers deciding whether a boy or a girl did better on an activity ( Brown & Bigler 2005 ). The findings showed that the younger children were somewhat aware of gender discrimination, but such perceptions were higher in the older group. Children perceived discrimination, however, only when explicitly told that the teacher may be biased, not when the context was ambiguous.

Taken together, these studies suggest that children's awareness of the differential status of the sexes and gender discrimination are relatively late-developing phenomena. Young children show limited awareness, but only when contextual cues (e.g., explicit mention of biases) or social experiences (knowledge of status of real occupations) make inequities obvious. More subtle awareness of inequities may not emerge until later in elementary school. The slow development of this more “public” evaluation, such as recognizing status and power differences and institutional discrimination, is in stark contrast to the early developing “personal” regard shown by ingroup biases, suggesting different developmental underpinnings of the two types.

Gender prejudice and discrimination

In what ways might developmental changes in stereotypic beliefs and intergroup attitudes play out in actual choices and behavior? What little research there is on gender prejudice development has primarily focused on two types: ( a ) negative reactions to peers' violations of gender norms and ( b ) preferential treatment.

Reactions to gender norm violations

Because preschoolers have strong beliefs that boys and girls do different things, they would be expected to respond negatively to gender norm violations. Several early studies found support for this prediction ( Huston 1983 ). For example, when 3- to 5-year-olds were videotaped while playing with either a male- or female-typed toy (e.g., soldiers; dollhouse) in the presence of a same-sex peer, children were punished (e.g., ridiculed) by the peer when playing with cross-sex toys ( Langlois & Downs 1980 ).

Recent research has supported and expanded these findings. For example, teachers report that kindergarten children tend to respond in one of three ways to gender norm violations: correction (“give that girl puppet to a girl”), ridicule, and “identity negation” (e.g., “Jeff is a girl”) ( Kowalski 2007 ). Interestingly, one recent study found that preschool children are able to identify children who are more likely to enforce the gender rules and gender-segregated boundaries ( McGuire et al. 2007 ). Preschoolers were asked, “Who in your classroom says you shouldn't play because you are a boy/girl?” The findings showed that children who had greater exposure to “gender enforcer” peers were more likely to limit their play to same-sex peers. These findings suggest that there may be individual differences in overt “sexist” behavior as early as preschool, and that the actions of these gender “police” contribute more broadly to the maintenance of gender distinctions in the classroom.

Because children show age-related increases in the flexibility of stereotypes and other aspects of gender category knowledge, such as gender constancy and the ability to make multiple classifications, their negative reactions to gender norm violations should decline after preschool. Unfortunately, age trends in older children have received little attention, though examples of such behavior abound. Based on extensive qualitative ethnographic observations in middle-elementary school, Thorne (1993) found that boys who violated norms for masculinity were teased, shunned, or referred to as “girls.” For example, one girl excluded a boy from jump rope because “…you don't know how to do it, to swing it. You gotta be a girl” (p. 45). Other research documented the various “rules” that children have about maintaining gender boundaries and found that children who maintain boundaries are more popular with peers ( Sroufe et al. 1993 ). Finally, research with children exhibiting extreme gender-nonnormative behaviors suggests that girls and especially boys are teased and rejected by peers ( Zucker & Bradley 1995 ).

Studies using hypothetical stories also indicate that children make negative judgments of, and consider unpopular, peers who engage in gender-atypical behavior, especially boys. In contrast to the implications from the more behavioral studies described above, however, many of these studies fail to find negative evaluations of gender-atypical behaviors before middle-elementary school (e.g., Berndt & Heller 1986 ), and children often show increased negativity with age, although findings are mixed ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). The findings in the judgment studies may be influenced by the qualities and salience of the stimuli as well as by children's cognitive abilities and gender knowledge ( Arthur et al. 2008 , Lutz & Ruble 1995 ). For example, one recent study showed a dramatic decrease in negative judgments between 5 and 7 years of age, which was mediated by increasing gender knowledge—specifically, gender constancy ( Ruble et al. 2007b ).

Thus, conclusions about evidence of sexism in young children drawn from judgment studies can be different from conclusions drawn from studies of actual behaviors. This observation raises interesting questions for future about what exactly children are reacting to when they demonstrate seemingly sexist behaviors or attitudes toward peers engaging in atypical behavior. First, children's liking or popularity judgments in hypothetical situations may reflect egocentric considerations, such as preferring targets engaged in activities typical of their own sex (e.g., girls preferring male targets with feminine interests) ( Alexander & Hines 1994 , Zucker et al. 1995 ). Thus, young children's liking for gender nonconforming targets may not reflect their tolerance for gender nonconformity but instead their personal interest in masculine or feminine activities.

Second, it is not clear if the sexist behaviors found in preschool children (e.g., hitting a boy who wears fingernail polish) are based on global negative evaluations of such children as being gender atypical or if they reflect a more limited evaluation of a specific instance of a child breaking a rule (such as stealing cookies). Children's judgments of gender atypicality are likely influenced by additional factors such as their perceptions of the targets' dissimilarity to same-sex others (e.g., Egan & Perry 2001 ) and/or awareness of within-sex variability. Moreover, it may be only when children begin to recognize and understand the stability of behavior that individual atypical behaviors coalesce into a broader and more negative view of the person as being deviant ( Ruble & Dweck 1995 ). Unfortunately, developmental changes in children's perceptions of others' gender typicality have received little attention. This is surprising because perceptions of gender typicality are key to understanding reactions to gender norm violations and what they mean. Whether preschoolers' negative judgments and reactions reflect sexism and, if so, what form of sexism are interesting questions for future research.

Preferential treatment

Given that the in-group liking bias occurs at a young age, one might expect that children would show favoritism toward their own sex. When affiliative behavior is measured, children begin to show preferential selection of same-sex peers starting at age 3 ( La Freniere et al. 1984 ). Children also preferentially allocate resources to their own-sex group, beginning in preschool ( Yee & Brown 1994 ).

Other research has examined ingroup favoritism in terms of children's responses to hypothetical stories about excluding peers from gender stereotypic activities, such as a ballet or baseball “club” ( Killen et al. 2008 ). In these studies, there has been little evidence that children were more likely to choose same-sex members. Instead, children's exclusion and inclusion decisions were found to vary across age depending on exactly what they were told about the situation. When children were asked about a single child who wanted to join the club, most children responded that exclusion was wrong (e.g., to exclude a boy from a ballet club), even though they knew the stereotypes. Consistent with findings of increasing flexibility of stereotypes with age, however, this was true for only about 60% of preschoolers ( Theimer et al. 2001 ) versus 90% of older children ( Killen & Stangor 2001 ). When children were asked to select between a boy and a girl of equal competence, age differences in the influence of gender stereotypes on inclusion decisions appeared to be even stronger. Children in the study of preschoolers selected the stereotyped choice (e.g., the girl for the ballet class) ( Theimer et al. 2001 ). Older children, however, preferred the counterstereotypic choice ( Killen & Stangor, 2001 ) and offered justifications based on equal access (e.g., boys don't get a chance to take ballet). Such “fairness” considerations in inclusion decisions coupled with relatively low levels of exclusion are surprising in that they seem inconsistent with the observations of behavioral exclusion described above. Perhaps only a few children engage in exclusion (e.g., the “gender police”), or hypothetical situations might allow children to think instead of answering impulsively and thus may not invoke ingroup favoritism as much as more personal, immediate situations might.

In short, it appears that gender prejudice and discrimination begin as early as preschool; this finding is particularly evident in research examining actual behavior, whether naturalistic or experimental. That is, preschoolers respond negatively to violations of gender norms and favor ingroup members in actual choices of play partners (sex segregation) and allocation of resources. Findings of studies examining responses in hypothetical situations appear to be more mixed, however. From these studies, it appears that the form and bases of gender prejudice and discrimination vary across age and context. For example, in young children, prejudice may reflect simple same-sex liking biases or relatively straightforward applications of gender norms, whereas at older ages, prejudice may involve differential evaluation of capabilities and past history and thus be more closely linked to knowledge of status differences and discrimination. The few studies examining these issues have involved very different paradigms. Thus, findings that apparently conflict across studies cannot be evaluated without future research.

HOW STABLE ARE INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN GENDER TYPING?

It seems intuitively obvious that individuals vary greatly in how gender typed they are. Some girls are extremely “girly” and refuse to go anywhere without wearing a dress, often pink and frilly, whereas other girls have no such interest and instead prefer playing ball with the boys. Some men can handle any kind of tool (except kitchen tools!), whereas others lack such mechanical facility. It is commonly assumed that attributes associated with being a typical male or female are seen early on, show at least some continuity across time, and influence personal preferences and behaviors throughout life.

How much empirical support is there for these assumptions? Maccoby (2002) has argued that there is not much. According to her analysis, this is because different manifestations of gender typing in childhood do not cohere and because there is considerable situational variation in how gender typed a given child seems. Instead, she suggests that gender typing at this age may be more of a group phenomenon rather than something that reflects the dispositions of relatively more or less gender-typed children. Thus, she advocates a shift in research focus away from individual differences in gender-related outcomes and toward the study of how gender is manifested in groups of males and females.

Although we agree wholeheartedly about the importance of studying group-based elements of gender, we suggest that it may be premature to dismiss the importance of examining gender typing as an individual difference variable. Variation across contexts and domains of gender typing does not preclude the possibility that some aspects show stability across time within individuals. For example, some boys may show an interest in moving parts or vehicles that persists in different forms into adulthood, even if that interest shows no connection to rough-and-tumble play or to other male-typical interests and behaviors. Surprisingly, researchers have rarely directly examined the stability of gender-typed interests and behaviors, and the existing database is piecemeal and sketchy ( Huston 1983 , Powlishta et al. 1993 ). This is unfortunate, because knowing more about which aspects of gender typing are stable is critical to a full understanding of the nature and processes involved in gender development.

In the sections below, we provide a detailed analysis of longitudinal studies of gender typing in children and what the studies show about stability. We then reevaluate the evidence that led to Maccoby's (2002) conclusions that examining individual differences in gender typing is not productive.

Evidence of the Stability of Gender Typing from Longitudinal Studies

What do longitudinal studies of gender development tell us about stability? Although gender typing can involve a number of different features, we limit the present review to behavioral-type variables (e.g., play with same-sex peers; interests and activities) rather than cognitive-type variables such as stereotyping or gender identity. We do this because much research on gender typing has concerned young children's peer and activity preferences. It is also partly because cognitive variables show considerable variation during childhood ( Ruble et al. 2006 ) and may not be conducive to demonstrating stability, at least in young children.

Surprisingly, the few longitudinal studies of gender typing that exist have paid relatively little attention to this issue of stability. This may be partly because it has not been a primary component of major theories of gender development. Because most theories emphasize the factors that lead to gender typing, longitudinal studies have often focused on such issues as how contextual, socialization, or social-cognitive factors at one point in time affect gender-typing at a later point in time (e.g., McHale et al. 2004 ) rather than on the stability of gender typing across time. Other longitudinal studies have focused on normative changes in gender-typed behaviors or cognitions, such as attitudes or stereotyping (e.g., Bartini 2006 ).

In interpreting the theoretical significance of such studies, however, it is essential to determine whether gender typing represents some continuing characteristic of individuals that influences future beliefs and behaviors or whether it is better viewed as linked to a particular developmental time point or context, with little future implications ( Serbin et al. 1993 ). Moreover, identifying the factors that lead children to be more or less gender typed should help distinguish among alternative theories of gender typing ( Powlishta et al. 1993 ). Thus, information about which elements of gender typing are stable, over what period of time, and during which developmental periods seems essential to the study of gender development.

Longitudinal studies examining the stability of sex segregation

Some studies have used observational methods to examine the stability of preferences for spending time with same-sex versus other-sex others. Different types of assessments have been used: ( a ) split-half correlations (e.g., across odd versus even weeks), ( b ) cross-situational stability (e.g., across indoor and outdoor play); and ( c ) test-retest (temporal) stability (whether sex segregation scores are correlated over some period of time).

The findings have been mixed, both across studies and across measures, and most studies have involved small samples and relatively short time periods (six months or less). To illustrate, Maccoby & Jacklin (1987) reported nonsignificant test-retest reliability over a one-week period among 4½-year-olds (0.39) and among 6½-year-olds (0.17). They did find cross-situational (indoor-outdoor) stability in preschoolers, but for girls only (0.44). Powlishta et al. (1993) used a split-half reliability procedure across odd and even days over a four- to six-month period and found that sex segregation showed significant stability for preschool boys (0.73) but not for girls (0.20). Lloyd & Duveen (1992) found significant temporal stability (0.40) in children ranging in age from about 4 to 7 years when they correlated the proportion of same-sex play from one term to the next. Turner et al. (1993) also examined temporal stability in a large sample (n = 161) of 4- to 4½-year-old children from two countries across eight sessions. Sex segregation scores in sessions one to four were correlated with sessions five to eight at significant or marginal levels (0.3 to 0.7).

As a final example of studies examining relatively short-term stability, Martin & Fabes (2001) assessed sex segregation over two consecutive academic terms for preschool and kindergarten children. Observations took place inside and outside every weekday for six months. This study is unusual because of the large number of observations (about 300 per child) and because of the use of multiple forms of stability assessment. First, split-half procedures (odd and even weeks) showed high and significant correlations for both sexes and for younger and older children (0.69–0.84). Second, as suggested by Epstein (1980) , they calculated stability coefficients with data aggregated over differing lengths of time, a procedure that reduces error of measurement. The one-week coefficients were low (below 0.3), but as the number of weeks of aggregated data increased, the stability coefficients showed large increases, such that when data were aggregated over eight-week periods, stability coefficients rose to the 0.5 to 0.6 range and continued to rise across larger units of time. Finally, they found considerable temporal stability (>0.7) across the two academic terms. These findings suggest that a relatively large number of observations, spread over time, may be needed to observe stability in sex segregation. Thus, prior conclusions about a lack of individual stability in same-sex peer preferences may be misleading.

In short, some longitudinal studies show reasonably impressive stability of individual differences in sex segregation. One problem with these studies, however, is that stability is examined within a group context that does not change. That is, stability may be found not because of individual differences in same-sex preferences, but rather because groups are formed early in the class year, and these structures are maintained ( Maccoby & Jacklin 1987 ). Thus, the results of longitudinal studies involving longer periods of time are of considerable interest.

Unfortunately, few studies have examined temporal stability for longer than six months, and, as with short-duration research, the findings are mixed. For example, Maccoby & Jacklin (1987) examined stability in sex segregation in children across a two-year period (4½ to 6½ years). Given the low level of short-term stability found in this study, as described above, the authors did not expect to find, and did not find, much evidence of temporal stability, except for a significant correlation (0.31) over time for boys, but only for outdoor play. In contrast, Serbin et al. (1993) did find long-term temporal stability from one year to the next using a peer-nomination procedure (e.g., participants selecting photos of the children with whom they most like to play) in 5- to 12-year-olds. It is not clear exactly why this paper-and-pencil measure might yield more stable estimates, but it may be that the situational variation in observations was eliminated and that only the strongest relationships were assessed this way. Regardless, it is impressive that temporal stability was found across a time period when classrooms had changed.

Taken together, despite some nonsignificant findings, it seems fair to conclude that individual differences in sex segregation do show both internal consistency (split-half reliability) and temporal stability, given sufficient power and numbers of observations. Although observational data suggest that a child may vary in same-sex play from week to week, when observations are aggregated across multiple weeks, stability is seen. It would be helpful in future research to use data-aggregation procedures to see how many weeks of observations are needed to show temporal stability across one year or more. It would also be worthwhile to examine how long individual differences in segregation are maintained. For example, do preschool preferences predict preferences in middle-elementary school?

Longitudinal studies of the stability of interests and activity preferences

Studies of other indices of gender typing have been somewhat more consistent in finding temporal stability. Some observational studies of preschoolers and/or kindergartners have shown short-term, test-retest temporal stability in stereotyped toy and activity choices during free play (e.g., Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987 , Martin & Fabes 2001 ). Other observational studies have shown significant stability in terms of split-half consistency (e.g., Connor & Serbin 1977 , Powlishta et al. 1993 ). In addition, gender-stereotyped activity preferences have shown moderate to high stability over varying periods of time, as assessed with test-retest reliability involving pencil-and-paper measures completed either by the children themselves (e.g., Edelbrock & Sugawara 1978 , Golombok & Rust 1993 ) or by parents about their children (e.g., Golombok & Rust 1993 ).

One recent, impressive study examined the stability of gender typing using pencil-and-paper measures ( Golombok et al. 2008 ). This study warrants a more detailed look because it involved a much longer time period (from age 2½ to 8 years) and a much larger sample (more than 2700 girls and 2700 boys) than has been typical. When the children were ages 2½, 3½, and 5 years old, parents completed a toy and activity questionnaire (Pre-School Activities Inventory, or PSAI; Golombok & Rust 1993 ) about their child's preferences; at age 8, the children completed an age-appropriate modified version, the Children's Activities Inventory (CAI). To examine temporal stability during the preschool years (test-retest reliability), intercorrelations in PSAI scores were examined among all three time points (ages 2½, 3½, and 5 years). Stability coefficients for the PSAI were high: 0.6–0.7 for adjacent time points and 0.5 from 2½ to 5 years. These levels are comparable to or even higher than those reported in earlier studies and thus demonstrate moderate to high stability in gender-typed interests and activities over time periods ranging from 1 to 2½ years.

Golombok et al. (2008) also examined stability between the preschool years and age 8, though not with test-retest correlations. Instead, at age 3½, boys and girls separately were divided into nine categories of gender typing based on PSAI scores; children who varied in their categories were compared on CAI scores. For both sexes, the children who were most gender typed at age 3½ continued to be so at age 8. A similar analysis compared CAI scores at age 8 with scores indicating the trajectory (acceleration in gender-typed interests) from ages 2½ to 5 years. As predicted, children showing the greatest increase in gender typing at a young age were those with higher levels of gender-typical behavior at age 8.

These findings are interesting in part because the trends run counter to what would be expected from regression to the mean, in that the children who were most gender typed to start with became relatively more so over time. Moreover, the findings suggested the possibility that individual differences in gender typing may be more stable in children who are relatively high or low in gender typing when young, a pattern that was particularly marked for the least gender-typed girls. It would be of great interest in future research to examine the stability and trajectory of gender typing among children at the extremes, such as tomboys or girly girls.

Taken together, longitudinal studies of gender-typed interests and activities show fairly compelling evidence of stability of individual differences. Future research needs to examine stability across one year or more using observations rather than paper-and-pencil measures to be certain that the apparent stability of gender typing reflects actual behaviors rather than stability in self- or parent perceptions.

Interpretations and Conclusions About the Evidence from Longitudinal Studies

As we discussed in the introduction to this section, Maccoby (2002) suggested that the study of individual differences in gender typing was no longer productive on the basis of various types of evidence, most notably: ( a ) the idea that sex typing is multidimensional and lacks coherence, and ( b ) the situational variability of gender typing. In our review of the longitudinal data, we identified some reasons why prior findings might have led to Maccoby's conclusions. Most importantly, the longitudinal studies suggest that a lack of power and insufficient reliability may have made it difficult to observe temporal stability within domains or coherence across domains. The case is particularly clear for studies of sex segregation. The studies of very short-term stability suggest that children do vary from day-to-day and week-to-week in the proportion of time spent with same- versus other-sex peers. Over greater numbers of data points and amounts of time, however, relative consistency of individual children can be seen (e.g., Martin & Fabes 2001 ). This observation also speaks to the apparent lack of coherence seen across different indices of gender typing. Indeed, when stable, reliable measures are used, coherence across indices is often observed (e.g., Martin & Fabes 2001 , Serbin et al. 1993 ). In short, based on the findings reviewed, we conclude that the study of individual differences in gender typing may be more productive than has recently been thought. Nevertheless, we also urge caution: It would be unreasonable to conclude that gender typing is strong and stable throughout life, because the database is limited in a number of ways.

First, it is not clear how long such differences remain stable. For example, gender-typed behavior is perhaps most visible in young children, when rigid distinctions appear in children's appearance and play. Many if not most preschool girls show some manifestation of extreme “girliness,” refusing to wear anything but a dress, often pink and frilly, whereas boys are draped with superman capes or are holding swords and acting as superheroes ( Dunn & Hughes 2001 , Halim et al. 2009 , Maccoby 1998 , Ruble et al. 2007a ). We know almost nothing about the stability of such behaviors after preschool, however. It may be necessary to examine how one kind of gender typing at one age relates to a different kind at a later age ( McHale et al. 2004 ). Does a lack of interest in dresses predict later interest in sports or playing with boys? Future research using both longitudinal and retrospective methods may provide answers to such questions.

Second, it is not clear which forms of gender typing may be most stable and best characterize the essence of individual differences. The review of longitudinal studies focused on two frequently examined elements of gender typing (sex segregation and interests/activity preferences). Other aspects of gender development may turn out to be more fundamental, however, at least at some ages. One such candidate is a sense of oneself in relation to males and females. How important or central is gender to self-concept? How typical does one feel as a male or female? Multidimensional theories of social identity demonstrate the significance of such distinctions after the early elementary school years ( Ashmore et al. 2004 , Egan & Perry 2001 ). Moreover, perhaps stable individual differences are characterized not only by general feelings of typicality and centrality but also by the specific nature of one's fit with gender ( Tobin et al. 2009 ). For example, one preadolescent girl may recognize that she is not a typical female in the sense of having more interest than other females have in sports and less interest in room decoration or make-up, but she may feel part of girls as a group and want to look and act feminine in manner. Other children's sense of gender may emphasize avoiding gender-typical characteristics that they dislike: a girl may eschew the giggly, girly stuff; a boy may try to distance himself from macho elements of maleness.

Finally, future research might examine whether stable individual differences in certain gender-related cognitions emerge after preschool. Most children pass through a phase of believing that it is morally wrong for a boy to wear nail polish or for a girl to play football, but this typically ends by early elementary school ( Ruble et al. 2006 ). Thus, individual differences in tolerance of gender atypical behaviors may be found later. Indeed, recent research has shown quite high levels of stability (0.5–0.6) in gender role attitudes over a two-year period in 10- to 12-year-olds ( McHale et al. 2004 ). Also, a recent study provided direct support for the idea that once the period of rigidity has passed, individual differences may emerge. Stable individual differences in reactions to gender role violations were found across two time points and related to self-esteem only for children 5 years or older, past peak rigidity ( Lurye et al. 2008 ).

In short, our analysis of longitudinal research suggests that conclusions about the lack of evidence for stable individual differences in gender typing may have been limited by looking too hard and with too few data points for some unified construct. Although gender typing is clearly multidimensional, there may be stable elements in some components (e.g., behavior/interests) but not in others (e.g., attitudes/stereotypes), at least at particular ages. Perhaps, then, it would be productive to examine individual differences in gender typing as a developmentally malleable construct. Developmental factors may limit the extent to which biological predispositions can be expressed, change the way children are cognitively capable of thinking about gender, and expose them to varying social influences. Thus, the form of gender typing that is paramount may vary at different phases of life, and different combinations of biological, cognitive, and socialization processes could contribute to indi vidual differences in gender typing at different times.

HOW DOES THE STUDY OF GENDER DEVELOPMENT BENEFIT FROM DYNAMIC ANALYSES?

Gender development research has been guided by theories that offer differing explanations about the origins of gender typing and sex differences. These theories emphasize a variety of different processes, including cognitive developmental changes (e.g., Bigler & Liben 2007 , Kohlberg 1966 , Martin & Halverson 1981 ), socialization ( Bussey & Bandura 1999 , Mischel 1966 ), and proximal ( McCarthy & Arnold 2008 ) and distal biological influences (e.g., evolutionary pressures) (see Ruble et al. 2006 for a review of these theories as well as the multiple distinctions currently being made for each type of process). Despite differences, a common element among these theories is reliance on data collected at one or few time points, and in rare cases, multiple assessments are made over time and then are aggregated. Aggregation and limited assessment methods provide information about concurrent relations and long-term patterns; however, these methods sacrifice important information about variability over time, and are not focused on assessing short-term, moment-to-moment changes.

By applying methods and concepts used in the physical and biological sciences, the variation that most psychologists have considered error or background noise may be found to contain “the dynamic signature of purposive behavior” ( Van Orden et al. 2003 , p. 331). Dynamic studies of this background noise in behavior are beginning to reveal new and potentially important insights about a range of psychological and social processes, including motor development (e.g., Adolph et al. 2003 , Kelso 1995 ), emotional development ( Lewis & Granic 2000 ), dyadic play ( Steenbeek & van Geert 2008 ), structure of the self ( Nowak et al. 2000 ), cognitive development ( van Geert 2003 ), and stereotyping (e.g., Correll 2008 ). This revolutionary approach to describing and understanding patterns, based on complexity theory ( Waldrop 1992 ) or commonly labeled “dynamic systems approach” or “dynamic systems theory” ( Thelen & Smith 1998 ), has been gaining ground across fields.

Dynamic systems (DS) approaches have potential for illuminating processes involved in gender development by providing both conceptual and methodological advances that enable researchers to assess fine-grained as well as larger-grained developmental temporal variations ( Lichtwarck-Aschoff et al. 2008 ) and, especially important for developmental research, to delineate relationships between different timescales (e.g., Lewis 2002 ). A comprehensive theory of gender development needs to describe and explain long-term developmental changes but must also describe how gender is experienced and plays out in short-term interactions with objects and people. DS approaches provide conceptual underpinnings and methods for identifying patterns of behavior change over time, and in some cases, how these patterns may relate to one another.

The DS approach is appealing for a number of other reasons. Gender-related topics (e.g., work and family issues) have taken center stage in heated discussions about the roles of nature versus nurture, mainly concerning the origins and nature of sex differences. Because the DS approach advocates no distinctions between the sources of influence on a system ( Oyama 2000 ), they offer a rapprochement for debates about nature versus nurture. Furthermore, the DS approach has potential to provide a theoretical umbrella that would incorporate aspects of many gender development theories. Specifically, adopting a DS approach suggests new ways to collect, analyze, and describe data but provides limited guidance on which parameters to study; existing theories help to fill that gap.

Thus far, DS analysis of gender development has been limited to a few topics: sexual orientation (e.g., Diamond 2007 ), children's sex segregation ( Martin 2008 , Martin et al. 2005 ), and mother-infant interactions ( Fausto-Sterling et al. 2008 ). Below, we provide a description of basic concepts of DS approaches and then employ topics on gender development and review empirical studies to illustrate some of the major features of dynamic approaches (see Thelen & Smith 1994 , 1998 , 2006 ).

Dynamics and Complex Systems: Basic Concepts

Dynamic analyses are applied to complex systems, which are systems characterized by simple, interrelated interacting elements, where the interactions of these elements give rise to higher-order global patterns (e.g., Waldrop 1992 ). This process, called self-organization, does not require a higher-order agent and is not preprogrammed. Structures arise as the elements spontaneously organize and reorganize into emergent systems that are larger and more complex (e.g., Williams 1997 ). Examples of complex systems abound: heart-rate variability, army ant swarms, termite nest building, and the formation of hurricanes.

Scientists interested in applying dynamic systems must first identify and define the variable that represents the system of interest, called the collective variable ( Thelen & Smith 2006 ). The collective variable should be clearly defined and observable, and understanding how it behaves over different conditions is important. In developmental psychology, some classic examples of collective variables that have been studied include walking, reaching, and word learning.

Dynamic systems are marked by fluctuations from factors internal and external to the system, and this inherent activity provides potential for changes to occur in the system. In some cases, the system dampens down the fluctuations, allowing stability; in other cases, the system is “perturbed,” that is, it loses coherence, exhibits high degrees of variability, and may experience a qualitative change (i.e., phase shift) to a new coordinated state. As dynamic systems experience fluctuations, they have certain preferred states that occur with a high probability under certain conditions (called attractors). When displaced from these preferred states, the system tends to return there ( Thelen & Smith 2006 ). Some of these attractors are strong; others are weaker and have less “pull” on behavior. Other states act as repellors because behavior never or seldom settles there.

A goal for researchers is to understand and map both the immediate and longer-term stability/variability of complex systems. Researchers strive to identify the shifts among states because this is when the agents of change are most easily identified. These change agents (called control parameters) may be obvious (e.g., practice facilitating learning), but they also may appear incidental or minor ( Thelen & Smith 2006 ). For instance, in a classic study, King & West (1988) found that male cowbird song development was influenced by a seemingly unimportant factor—the patterning of brief wing flickering in female cowbirds. In developmental research, an aspect of language development that may appear unrelated to another domain of language development has been identified as an agent of change: Children who show a fast rate of word learning are limited in their ability to access well-known words ( Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith 1997 ). Regardless of their salience, such agents of change are more easily identified at transition points because they vary with changes in the collective variable.

Children's Play Choices: Sex Segregation as a Dynamic System

Children's tendency to assort by sex is an example of a complex system. Sex segregation is a pervasive, early-developing pattern that increases over childhood until interactions are so segregated that boys and girls have been described as growing up in separate cultures ( Maccoby & Jacklin 1987 ). A DS analysis of sex segregation may focus on the patterns that emerge over time in a child's choice of play partners and examine how these choices vary over the school year. Important variables to examine when children first begin congregating with peers (e.g., in a new class) might include social factors (e.g., each child's prior experiences with peers) as well as biological factors (e.g., hormone levels) or biosocial influences, such as the child's temperament (e.g., being inhibited). Children's choices are interdependent with others in the class: Choices are constrained by who is available to play on a given day, at a given time, and depend upon the choices made by others in the class immediately before the child decides to find a partner. Degrees of freedom for choosing a partner are lost the more other children have already claimed a partner.

Through repeated interactions and reshuffling, patterns of play may change as interactions become increasingly governed by children's experiences with classmates; their responsiveness to bids, play styles, and shared interests. Individual children may settle into particular patterns of play with particular partners. For instance, from individual children's experiences, more and longer-playing same-sex dyads may emerge in the system. As these processes play out over longer time intervals, a child's dyadic play may grow into larger groups of same-sex children, and these groupings may be formed and maintained depending upon the interests of children or the desires or openness of the initial dyad to including other children. Interestingly, simulations have demonstrated that even when individuals show only very slight preferences for similar others, segregation emerges ( Schelling 1971 , Wilensky 1997 ).

Play patterns can also be viewed from the perspective of the entire class. A series of bird'seye snapshots of a playground would show that the number of children in class who are involved in sex-segregated play varies as pairings and groupings of children form and break up, with groupings shifting over time. With more children involved in same-sex groupings, these groups may have enhanced appeal, and so other children will be drawn into the groups, thus illustrating how the higher-order structure of same-sex groups may also influence patterning of interactions. Sex segregation as an emergent structure of the system may become increasingly evident at both the individual-child and classroom levels. Although no one person directed the class or an individual child to choose same-sex partners for play, sex-segregation can emerge, suggesting a self-organizing system.

Variability in Systems: Sex Segregation, Gender-Typed Activities, and Gender Identity

Dynamic systems analyses involve studying temporal patterning—how a system transforms from one state to another over time. Scientists studying a system need to understand the short- and long-term stability and change in the system so the regular variability is distinguishable from extreme variability. Extreme variability holds particular fascination as it may signal a shift of a system from one kind of attractor to a new kind of attractor, or to a more highly organized state. For this reason, scientists using dynamic analyses may use cross-sectional data to narrow their focus to the time frames of most interest and then collect intensive data about variations in the primary variables of interest as well as about potential agents of change.

A gender application to illustrate this point would be the theoretically important issue of how gender-typed toy choices emerge. Since cross-sectional research suggests that boys begin to show gender-typed toy choices (e.g., playing with trucks) around the age of two ( Berenbaum et al. 2008 , Ruble et al. 2006 ), bracketing this time with intensive data collection about toy choices would be particularly interesting. Also, to better understand factors influencing such choices, other information about the play situation (e.g., other available toys, presence of peers), parents (e.g., stereotypic beliefs), and children (e.g., gender knowledge, activity level) should be collected. Developmental changes in any of these may influence boys' sense of control or feelings of pressure concerning toy selection. Studies of fine-grained changes from day-to-day or moment-to-moment gain import, and multiple data points are needed to detect these patterns.

When children enter preschool, qualitative changes may occur in their toy and activity choices. Preschool is a dramatically different setting from that at home; more peers of both sexes are available as play partners, and adult supervision may be low. Dynamic analyses involving longitudinal data about toy choices at home and school would shed light on this transition. Analysis of the activities children engage in at home versus at preschool, and the presence and reactions of peers, would provide insights into whether children's preferences change dynamically in preschool, where many toys are available, peers may tease them for “gender-inappropriate” play, and adults may react differently than their parents.

Fine-grained data have been collected on young children's peer choices, making this topic suitable for illustrating both stability and variability in dynamic systems. Controversy has arisen about the stability of sex segregation (see How Stable Are Individual Differences in Gender Typing section, above), but it appears that as more snapshots of behavior are aggregated, sex segregation becomes more stable until it reaches a moderately high level ( Martin & Fabes 2001 ). The stability of sex segregation may be questioned in part because of the variability in this behavior from day-to-day. To illustrate this more clearly, notice the day-to-day variation in children's play partners, based on observations conducted during the fall term for four children depicted in Figure 1 . Variability is apparent, although two children also show strong same-sex preferences day-to-day, but the other two children do not. There also is stability over time; children's patterns remain similar into the spring term of data collection. Extending this type of analysis to explore when and how variations occur would be fascinating.

Day-to-day variations in children's play partner choices as a function of sex of child and long-term patterning. Observed play partner choices were summed and averaged per day of observation using the following: Each boy play partner was given a +1; each girl was given a −1. Children with ID numbers 1032 and 1022 were girls; children with ID numbers 1041 and 1045 were boys. For girls, data below the 0 point represent same-sex peer play; for boys, data above the 0 point represent same-sex play. The graphs at the top of the page (1032 and 1041) represent patterns of children who tend to show long-term preferences for same-sex play; the graphs at the bottom of the page represent patterns of children who tend to show long-term preferences for playing with both sexes. Variability is apparent in all the graphs ( DiDonato & Martin 2009 ).

Another approach for applying dynamic analysis is to focus on the potential instability of constructs believed to be stable. Walking is a stable feature of most humans' behavior, but the exact form of walking at any given time depends on many different factors, including the type of surface being walked upon (e.g., thick rug versus tiled floor, slope of surface). Most researchers think of gender identity as being a stable feature, but if we consider when variations in gender identity might occur, it broadens the perspective on gender identity. An interesting analysis would be to explore variations in feelings (e.g., gender typicality, comfort) and displays of gender identity (e.g., style of dressing, voice, gestures) over different types of social “surfaces” (e.g., being in a sports bar, holding a baby) ( Martin 2000 ). Analysis of moment-to-moment changes in the patterning of gender identity may reveal surprising insights about gender development (a similar point is made about identity formation in Lichtwarck-Aschoff et al. 2008 ). For instance, collecting intensive time-series data about feelings of gender typicality (e.g., “How similar do you feel to your own sex right now?”) over a range of situations may illustrate that feelings of gender typicality are strong and show little variability in situations where one is a minority member, but that gender typicality is low but more variable when one is in a same-sex situation.

Dynamic Contexts: Gender Cognitions and Socialization

An important feature of dynamic analysis is how “context” is viewed. Although context is considered important in gender theories, it is often conceptualized as being distal (i.e., cultural contexts). In contrast, DS theorists view context as a dynamic characteristic of interactions, one that is temporally and spatially close and is an aspect of the interaction process itself ( Steenbeek & van Geert 2008 ). Even influences typically considered distal, stable, or abstract are represented and carried forward in time by their embodiment within everyday interactions. For instance, gender stereotypes and gender identity become embodied as children dynamically engage in “gendering”—remembering gender and acting on gender—incorporating the immediate contextual factors, and this being carried forward to the next moment of knowing and acting on gender.

Developmental processes that occur in real time then carry over and become consolidated and generalized across different contexts ( Fischer & Bidell 1998 ), and these then influence and constrain behavior (e.g., Lewis 2000 ) (although there is controversy about the extent to which this happens) (for review of the issue, see Witherington 2007 ). For instance, as toddlers come to understand their sex, become motivated by same-sex expectations, and begin to develop stereotypes, these features can be carried into interactions with others. The patterning and display of the gendered self may evolve into new forms (e.g., styles of dress, play partners, activities), which vary from moment-to-moment and over longer time periods. Thinking of gender as being enacted in each interaction is similar to proposals from sociological research traditions focusing on the social construction of gender ( West & Zimmerman 1991 ).

Gender socialization provides a good example of how both the child's and parents' cognitions are enacted in moment-to-moment interactions through the dynamic embodiment of gender. Parental expectations about what it means to have a child who is either a boy or girl (expectations colored by cultural values, etc.) become displayed as actions with the child (e.g., glances, touching, toy offering), and these embodied expectations interact with the child's phenotypic and early behavioral features. Thus, gender socialization involves parents and siblings, peers, other socialization agents, and the individual child, who all act and interact in varied contexts.

Methods and Analyses of Dynamic Systems

Studying complex systems involves identifying the collective variables that capture the behavior of interest and then collecting a long time series of data to watch the emergence of behaviors. Social scientists may avoid dynamic analyses because they expect that they will have to collect thousands of observations to identify complex patterns of behavior. However, even shorter time frames and smaller sets of time-series data may reveal important features that traditional methods may not disclose ( Williams 1997 ), especially when investigators use some of the newly proposed analytic techniques (e.g., Finan et al. 2008).

The recognition and study of complex systems have promoted development of an array of techniques designed to understand these systems, including techniques for nonlinear dynamics, time-series analyses, data visualization (e.g., Lamey et al. 2004 ), and computer simulations to model the behavior of systems (e.g., Griffin et al. 2004 , Schafer et al. 2009 ). This new and expanded toolbox provides better ways of describing, analyzing, and interpreting temporal data of all types ( Ward 2002 ). The mathematics involved in describing systems can be complex and unfamiliar to psychologists (e.g., May 1976 ); thus, DS ideas often are applied heuristically for thinking about patterns and for directing the kinds of data that are obtained rather than using the toolkit of analyses that describe obtained time-series data. However, psychologists have become increasingly interested in developing and applying these analytic tools (see Boker & Wenger 2007 , van Geert 2003 ). For instance, Thelen and colleagues (2001) conducted rigorous modeling of a developmental phenomenon involving touching patterns of infants (the A-not-B effect), which was originally identified by Piaget. Others are refining and expanding upon DS approaches to better integrate these ideas with connectionist models (e.g., Spencer & Schoner 2003 ) and neurobiology ( Lewis 2005 ). Regardless of how it is employed, DS perspectives hold promise for revealing patterns of gender development previously unrecognized.

Dynamic Analyses of Gendered Play Partners and Activities

Not all the applications of DS to gender development are as abstract as we have presented above. In this section, we outline specific examples of studies that have been conducted to apply a dynamic systems approach to gender development.

Data visualization, attractors, and repellors in children's sex segregation

In a dynamic view of sex segregation, children are seen to settle into certain behavioral patterns. This illustrates a characteristic of a dynamic system: Despite a large number of possible patterns among system elements, only a few ever stabilize. Dynamic analyses have been used to study the patterns of children's play partners in preschool classes and the role of gender in these interactions. Martin and colleagues (2005) used a new data-visualization tool, called state space grids (SSGs), to explore the extent to which preschool children showed attraction for same-sex and behaviorally similar children. Developmental scientists interested in applying DS methods (e.g., Granic & Lamey 2002 , Hollenstein et al. 2004 ) recognized the need for a methodology to visualize system dynamics; thus, they developed the SSG technique (e.g., Lewis et al. 1999 ).

SSGs involve mapping of dimensions onto a state space to determine the regularity or stability of the patterns (for a description of how to use GridWare, see Hollenstein 2007 ). In Martin et al. (2005) , SSGs were constructed based on children's choices of play partners derived from scan observations of three classes of preschool children over several months in order to examine whether sex of peers and behavioral tendencies act as attractors. Children were divided into types using cluster analysis: externalizing, internalizing, and socially competent children; play patterns of target children with types of peers (rather than one other child) were analyzed using SSGs. If children's play partner choices related strongly to behavioral similarity, then competent children should choose other competent children regardless of sex; if their selections relate to sex, then children should choose on the basis of similar sex regardless of behavior.

Attractors were characterized in three ways. First, a high number of individual interactions in the state space regions representing play with same-sex peers or particular peer qualities (e.g., externalizing) would indicate that those spaces are attractors. If same-sex peers act as attractors, then we would expect, for instance, that girls would have more interactions in the “girl peer” region than in the “boy peer” region. Second, when a region is an attractor, children should enter it quickly; for instance, early in the time series, girls would be expected to play with girls and would have few (or no) interactions with boys before they move into the “girl peer” region. Third, if a region is an attractor, children should return to the region quickly. Whenever girls leave the “girl peer” region, they would be expected to have relatively few interactions with boys before moving back to playing with girls.

The results supported these ideas. Same-sex peers were strong attractors for children: Both sexes had more than twice as many interactions with same-sex than with other-sex peers, were faster to return to same-sex peers, and started playing with them more quickly. Interestingly, these patterns were apparent even in the first 20 observations obtained on children after only several weeks of preschool. Figure 2 illustrates a typical pattern for a girl's first 20 interactions. The SSG shows data from a competent girl, whose first coded play bout is with a girl (open circle), and the pattern shows that she plays with girls more than with boys. Externalizing and social competence also contributed to behavioral states, but patterns varied by sex of child and peer (e.g., boys were more attracted to externalizing boys than to externalizing girls). As Figure 2 illustrates, the competent girl played much more with competent girls than with other girls, but she did not play with competent boys at all. Overall, the findings suggest that both the sex of peers and their behavioral qualities help fashion the social organization in the classroom.

A socially competent girl's state space grid, illustrating her patterns of play with peers of different sexes and different behavioral qualities over the first 20 observed interactions. The x -axis represents the sex of the peer with whom the target girl interacts; the y -axis represents the behavioral quality of the peers as determined by clustering teacher ratings of children's behavior. Each solid circle represents a single observed interaction, and the open circle represents the first observed interaction (with a socially competent girl). Lines between circles represent the ordering of observations. This girl showed strong sex selection: 16 of her first 20 interactions were with girls. She also showed a preference for interacting with socially competent girls but not boys ( Martin 2008 ).

In a similar study, Martin (2008) compared patterns of children who were highly gender typed in play to those with less gender-typed play patterns in order to examine whether children who differed in their overall patterns showed differences early in the time series of observations. Interestingly, within the first 20 observed interactions, highly gender-typed children experienced more positive emotions with same-sex than with other-sex peers; less gender-typed children showed no difference. These findings suggest that children who have early positive emotional experiences with same-sex peers but not with other-sex peers incorporate these experiences into their play, such that same-sex peers have increasing appeal, whereas other-sex peers lose their appeal. In this way, emotional experiences with peers appear to contribute to the overall patterning of children's play and to sex segregation in the class.

These studies use data-visualization techniques to illustrate a new approach to examining peer interaction patterns and suggest that both the sex of peers and peers' behavior act as attractors. Additional research involving moment-to-moment coding of behavior and new techniques for analyzing group patterns will allow for an even more detailed dynamic analyses of children's behavior with peers.

Self-organized criticality in the temporal patterning of children's gendered behavior

Many complex systems show a particularly intriguing pattern of organization, called self-organization near a critical state. These systems are balanced between enough stability to maintain order and enough instability or variation to be adaptive to change ( Bak et al. 1989 ). Adaptability is enhanced because new alternatives can be generated as needed in response to varying circumstances (e.g., Van Orden et al. 2003 ). In physiological systems, self-organized criticality is associated with well-being and health, and its loss or deterioration is related to disease, depression, and aging ( Goldberger 1996 , Linkenkaer-Hansen et al. 2005 , Sosnoff & Newell 2008 ).

Self-organization near a critical state involves “self-similarity” across time-scales; in other words, if one small portion of the time series is magnified, its appearance is similar to the larger time series in which it is embedded. That is, small-scale patterns reflect the patterns that would be expected at larger scales, such that identifying a regularity in a 2-minute window of time may share similarity to a pattern found in a 16-minute window, and both may share similarity to a pattern found on a much longer timescale (e.g., developmental changes that occur from early to later childhood). This self-organization near a critical state is represented by the presence of long-term, positively correlated variability in a time series ( Treffner & Kelso 1999 , Van Orden et al. 2003 ). Time series with completely independent data do not exhibit self-similarity. Given the implications for understanding different timescales and how they relate to one another, the implications of finding self-similarity in systems are far-ranging, especially for developmental scientists.

DiDonato (2008) applied both dynamic and traditional analyses to explore whether children's gendered behavior shows self-organized criticality and whether temporal patterns relate to children's adjustment. Brief observations of preschool children's activities and play partners were conducted daily over several months. By combining gender typing of activities and play partners across observations each day, DiDonato derived a single indicator of gendered behavior. Each child's time series was plotted and analyzed for self-organized criticality (e.g., Hurst 1951 ), and the results indicated this pattern, suggesting that children exhibited flexibility in their gendered behavior. For example, the implication of the findings is that a girl who normally plays with girls may adapt her behavior by playing with a boy if he is playing with her favorite toy. Furthermore, flexibility in gendered behavior was positively related to adjustment in girls but not in boys. Boys' restricted gender roles may constrain the relation between flexible behavior and adjustment.

These findings have implications for debates about how gender roles relate to adjustment and provide a compelling example of how both traditional and dynamic approaches can be combined to yield more information than would either approach alone. In this case, the short-term patterning of activities and partners related to adjustment, and it suggests that further explorations of changes in children's gendered behavior at different timescales are warranted.

In sum, DS approaches have potential for providing a new lens for viewing gender development. DS approaches adopt unique views of context, focus on describing variability, provide information about patterning of behavior over both short and longer developmental time frames, and suggest new techniques and different methods of data analyses and collection. Adopting a DS approach also has the potential to provide an all-encompassing theoretical umbrella and deflates controversy surrounding the roles of nature and nurture in gender development. At a broader level, DS approaches crosscut disciplinary boundaries, bridging methods and concepts across disciplines. Highlights of the appeal of exploring DS approaches include discovering new answers to old problems, recognizing new types of questions, and ultimately advancing alternative accounts of gender development.

CONCLUSIONS

Children's gender development unfolds over long time frames of average or normative change, over shorter time frames such as the emergence of relatively stable individual preferences in with whom or with what to play during the early school years, and over much shorter time frames—micro timescales—such as when an individual child selects an outfit to wear or carries on an interaction with a peer over a toy. In the present review, we illustrated each of these time frames in terms of a few specific current, and sometimes controversial, topics in the field of gender development.

First, we took the long view, examining normative changes from infancy through middle adolescence in key aspects of children's beliefs and behaviors regarding gender distinctions. In this way, we were able to speak to the question of temporal ordering of different elements of gender development and, thereby, analyze certain controversies within the field about how early children understand gender distinctions and how that understanding relates to behavior. Moreover, the analysis of temporal ordering helps generate hypotheses for future research about what indications of gender prejudice, such as ingroup favoritism, might represent for young children who can understand gender stereotypes but not necessarily status inequities between the sexes.

Normative trends involve only averages across individuals; they do not, however, inform us about whether there are stable individual differences in expressions of gender typing. Whether there are continuities in individual gender typing over time has been another important but controversial topic in gender development. For instance, identifying stability in sex segregation would suggest that individual children vary in their preferences and that sex segregation is not simply due to situational variability or normative constraints as had previously been assumed. Thus, in the second section, we reviewed studies of longitudinal change within individuals over shorter periods of time. We discovered that there is more stability in sex segregation and gender-typed activities and preferences than previously thought. However, future research must determine how long stability exists and over which periods of development.

Another advantage of normative trends is that they indicate at what points developmentally it would be useful to search for stable individual differences, such as after periods of rapid change, as when children first enter preschool. In the third section, we described a new tool for taking advantage of such opportunities. Dynamic systems theory provides a coherent set of principles and methods for examining change over differing time frames. Socialization, cognitive, and biological processes can be explored over multiple time frames using techniques that focus on temporal patterning of behavior. Dynamic systems theory complements existing theories by providing more nuanced views of gender at different timescales. For instance, sex segregation exhibits both variability and stability from a dynamic perspective. Particularly intriguing is the potential for small-scale patterns to provide insights into large-scale patterns. For systems that exhibit self-similarity, a pattern that appears at a microlevel time frame mimics the pattern found at a more macrolevel time frame. Considering similarity across timescales is an idea that, in our view, has no counterpart in developmental research or theorizing.

Developmental research on gender has primarily focused attention on the longer timescales to assess normative developmental patterning. Less attention has been focused on shorter timescales to explore individual patterns and stability of behavior, and very little has been done to explore gender development in terms of micro timescales. We hope our review has made it clear that comprehensive explanations of gender need to consider each of these timescale perspectives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This review was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1 R01 HD45816) and a grant from the T. Denny Sanford Foundation awarded to Carol Lynn Martin; a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Research Grant (1 R01 HD04994) to Diane N. Ruble; and a National Science Foundation IRADS grant (0721383). We are very grateful to Faith Greulich for assistance in preparing the manuscript and to Nia Amazeen, Matt DiDonato, May Ling Halim, Tom Hollenstein, and Kristina Zosuls for comments on an earlier draft.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The authors are not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

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