gender in the global research landscape

Gender in the Global Research Landscape

Through its New Scholars program, the Elsevier Foundation has contributed to the advancement of early- to mid-career women scholars for more than a decade via grants and other partner investments. These efforts laid a foundation of success upon which Elsevier has built broader corporate level gender initiatives. Last year, Elsevier placed a priority on fostering a gender-balanced workplace by implementing the EDGE (Eco- nomic Dividends for Gender Equality) program across our eight core business centers in numerous locations worldwide, thereby being among the first information service and technology companies in the world to be certified globally. Concomitantly, we formed a trans-business Gender Working Group to address external-facing issues such as enhancing sex and gender reporting in research and achieving gender balance for journal editorial boards and conferences. Further, Elsevier is committed to establishing a research framework for addressing gender issues to help advance policy. An important aspect of our commitment is this comprehensive report, Gender in the Global Research Landscape , a follow-on to Elsevier’s groundbreaking 2015 report, Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena .

Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies. Drawing upon a collection of high-quality global data sources and analytical expertise, Elsevier has produced this report as an evidence-based examination of the outputs, quality, and impact of research worldwide through a gender lens and as a vehicle for understanding the role of gender within the structure of the global research enterprise. Gender in the Global Research Landscape employs bibliometric analyses and methodologies that enable gender disambiguation of authors within the Scopus® abstract and citation database and includes comparisons between twenty-seven subject areas, across twelve comparator countries and regions, over two decades. Elsevier partnered with expert stakeholder organizations and individuals around the world who provided advice on the report’s development, including the research questions, methodologies, and ana- lytics, and a policy context for the report findings. Our intention is to share powerful insights and guidance on gender research and gender equality policy with governments, funders, and institutions worldwide and to inspire further evidence-based studies.

Key Findings

The proportion of women among researchers and inventors is increasing in all twelve comparator countries and regions over time. chapter 1

Women publish fewer research papers on average than men, but there is no evidence that this affects how their papers are cited or downloaded. chapter 1

Women are less likely than men to collaborate internationally on research papers. chapter 2

Women are slightly less likely than men to collaborate across the academic and corporate sectors on research papers. chapter 2

In general, women’s scholarly output includes a slightly larger proportion of highly interdisciplinary research than men’s. chapter 2

Among researchers, women are generally less internationally mobile than men. chapter 2

Gender research is growing in terms of size and complexity, with new topics emerging over time. chapter 3

The former dominance of the United States in gender research has declined as research activity in the European Union has risen. chapter 3

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Elsevier's reports on gender in research

Elsevier’s latest global analysis reveals progress toward gender parity, but women still trail men in number of publications and citations

Gender in the Portugal Research Arena: A Case Study in European Leadership

Over the last two decades, Portugal has exhibited the largest percentage increase in women’s representation — an impressive 10% — putting the country at the leading edge of closing the gender gap in research.

Gender in the Portugal Research Arena: A Case Study in European Leadership offers a data-led look at the dynamics underlying Portugal’s leading edge. At the same time, it points to persisting gender gaps in research that require stronger transformative efforts, and it reveals how these gaps tend to mimic and perpetuate structural inequalities between women and men.

Together with distinguished academic leaders in Portugal, we have worked to put into context quantitative analyses with policy perspectives, insights and best practices. We hope to contribute insights from the experience of one country to inform policy and inspire targeted initiatives among policymakers, research leaders and funders around the world to achieve gender equity in research.

View the report

Find out more about Inclusion and Diversity across Elsevier

Visit our Inclusion and Diversity hub

Key findings

Women represent nearly 50% of active authors in Portugal — the closest to gender parity for all EU28 countries analyzed.
Women are highly represented across the life sciences and health sciences fields, where gains in Portugal continue to be largest, and in chemistry, chemical engineering and psychology.
They remain most underrepresented within the physical sciences, especially in fields related to data science and AI such as computer science, mathematics and engineering
In Portugal, women are most highly represented among first authors, indicative of greater gender representation for early-career researchers. Also, unlike the trend seen in other countries, women researchers are likely to continue publishing over time, thus remaining in research.

Portugal’s leadership is the result of many deliberate steps, the result of specific policy initiatives and a coordinated approach to targeted interventions. Such efforts are combined with a longstanding commitment to strong early education STEM interventions and research on gender equality, as well as funding to implement work-life balance and gender equity plans.

Rosa Monteiro, Secretary of State for Citizenship and Equality, Portugal

The latest report gives us a positive picture of gender diversity progress in research. This seems to accompany women’s increased participation in the labor market. However, we also see that research reproduces structural gender inequality patterns. For example, having men with longer publication histories and established international networks is a reflection of career interruptions and the reality that women still shoulder a much larger share of unpaid care work than men over the life course, with gender gaps in terms of pay and vertical segregation.

Figure key: In the figures below and throughout the report, the following acronyms are used: PRT, Portugal; DNK, Denmark; ITA, Italy; EU28, an aggregate regional comparator that includes Portugal, Denmark, Italy and 25 additional European Union countries, including the UK.

Gender report 2020 : The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens

The report, titled The researcher journey through a gender lens , examines research participation, career progression and perceptions across the European Union and 15 countries globally in 26 subject areas.

Focus on Japan (English)
Focus on Japan (Japanese)

Based on 20 years of data from Scopus across 12 geographies and all 27 Scopus subject areas, this is the third report Elsevier has produced on gender in the research landscape. It follows a global report released in 2017 and a report on Germany in 2015.

As with these previous studies, the 2020 report serves as a vehicle for understanding the role gender plays in the global research enterprise. Among the changes it brings are improvements in the methodology of inferred gender disambiguation of authors in Scopus and expanded analyses to cover a total of 16 countries/regions. It also includes new elements, such as career progression and collaboration network analyses and perspectives from researchers.

The number of women to men among all authors is moving closer to being equal (Source: Scopus data in The researcher journey through a gender lens, Elsevier, 2020)

Research participation

In all countries studied and the EU28, the ratio of women to men among all authors was closer to parity during a recent 5-year period compared with a decade ago.
Men are more highly represented among authors with a long publication history while women are highly represented among authors with a short publication history.

Research footprint

On average, women researchers author fewer publications than men in every country, regardless of authorship position. The least difference in the number of publications by women compared to men is observed among first authors, and the biggest difference is observed among all authors.
Among first authors, the average citation impact of men is higher than that of women, suggesting gender bias in citation practice.

The greatest increase in the proportion of women among authors is seen in nursing and psychology, and the smallest increase is in the physical sciences. (Source: Scopus data in The researcher journey through a gender lens, Elsevier, 2020)

Publishing careers and mobility

The percentage of women among all authors in the cohort declines over time (between the year of authors’ first publication in 2009 up to 2018) in all countries and regions except Portugal.
In every country, the percentage of women who continue to publish is lower than men who continue to publish.

Collaboration networks

Across many subject areas and countries, men tend to have more co-authors than women and this difference is wider for authors with a longer publication history.
Women and men are more similar in the way they are connected to their potential collaborative space (second-order collaborators) through their direct collaborators.

Researcher perspectives

Researcher attitudes towards gender diversity and equity vary widely among men and women. Most of the differences in viewpoints are related to the importance in individual places on gender balance and to the perception of fairness in the academic system.

Survey question

Survey response to the statement: "In my organization, women have to perform better than men to be considered good at their job," by gender and subject area.

There are two opposing opinions on the causes of gender imbalance and inequality in academia.
Some groups (men and women) attribute gender inequality to the attitudes and ambition levels of women.
Other groups attribute gender inequality to a systemic and cultural (unconscious) bias against women.

While the report itself is rich in terms of the data presented, we are pleased to make the underlying data available for non-commercial research purposes.

This report incorporates methodology of inferred gender disambiguation of authors in Scopus . It has expanded analyses to cover 16 countries and regions. In addition, it includes career progression and collaboration network analyses as well as perspectives from researchers.

Use the Tableau dashboards to look at all the countries and subject-specific author gender statistics.

Comparing across countries within a selected subject
Comparing across subjects within a selected country
Download the raw data behind the report from Mendeley Data Repository

To cite this report

De Kleijn, M, Jayabalasingham, B, Falk-Krzesinski, HJ, Collins, T, Kuiper-Hoyng, L, Cingolani, I, Zhang, J, Roberge, G, et al: The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens: An Examination of Research Participation, Career Progression and Perceptions Across the Globe (Elsevier, March 2020) Retrieved from www.elsevier.com/gender-report

The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens: Findings from Elsevier’s Report

Expert commentary

Research insight

3 leading women in research on Elsevier’s gender report findings

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Alison Bert, DMA

Report 2017 : Gender in the Global Research Landscape

Gender balance in research: new analytical report reveals uneven progress

Elsevier examines research performance through a gender lens in global, cross-disciplinary study, by alice atkinson-bonasio | 8 march 2017.

There is widespread agreement that fostering diversity is integral to innovation in research, and gender equality is key to achieving this. Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies to support a data-informed approach to implementing interventions and policy related to gender inequality. A report released today provides unprecedented insight into these issues. Gender in the Global Research Landscape was produced by Elsevier in partnership with global experts to provide an analytical framework for better understanding the role of gender within the structure of the global research enterprise. Based on 20 years of data from Scopus and ScienceDirect – across 12 geographies and all 27 Scopus subject areas – the report is an evidence-based examination of global research performance through a gender lens.

Over the past decade, Elsevier has undertaken several large-scale initiatives pertaining to gender, such as the Elsevier Foundation ’s New Scholars program, a trans-business Gender Working Group , and the Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena report. This latest work builds on these and indicates that although there has been significant progress towards gender balance in research, there are many pressing issues left to be tackled.

A lot of discussions around gender disparity are driven by experience and speculation. While that’s a great place to start, there is a gap that makes it difficult to move to effective interventions and policy. This report focuses on data, providing empirical insight that must be an integral part of informed decision making. Progress is occurring, albeit incrementally and unevenly, which is a sign that efforts to encourage women to enter science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are gaining traction. With this report, we provide data that can be used – and built upon – by research leaders, stakeholders in government and funding bodies, and policymakers more broadly.

Read the report

Methodology

The report employs a unique gender disambiguation methodology and is based on analyses of Scopus and ScienceDirect data conducted by Elsevier. Scopus Author Profiles were combined with gender-name data from social media, applied onomastics, and Wikipedia. The disciplinary breadth of the Scopus database was used to assess changes across a wide range of subject areas over time.

For example, the following charts in Chapter 3 of the report show terms used in the social sciences (left) and biomedical sciences (right). The 2011-15 map includes more terms and is therefore more densely populated, reflecting the growth in gender research. The close association of terms reflected in the groups of overlapping clusters also indicate the increasing prevalence of interdisciplinary research.

The study was further informed by input from stakeholder organizations and individuals around the world, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) . These global experts provided advice on the report’s research questions, methodologies and analytics, as well as interviews with experts and influencers, supplementing the quantitative data with qualitative perspectives to provide context for the findings.

The aim of the report is to provide institutions, funders, governments and other stakeholders with data-driven insights and guidance on gender research and gender equality policy. The authors also hope it will inspire further evidence-based studies while establishing quantifiable benchmarks against which future progress towards gender equality in research can be measured.

Key Findings

The percentage of women among researchers and inventors has increased over the past 20 years.
Although women tend to publish fewer research articles than men, their articles are cited or downloaded at similar rates.
The proportion of patent applications with at least one woman among their inventors tends to be higher than the proportion of women among inventors.
Women are slightly less likely than men to collaborate across academic and corporate sectors on research articles.
Women are generally less internationally mobile than men; women are less likely to collaborate internationally on research papers.
Health and Life Sciences fields of research are found to have the highest representation of women, while Physical Sciences are dominated by men.

Drawing on the literature, the report also provides some possible explanations for continuing inequalities. Aside from a persistent bias in hiring, authorship, recognition and promotion, it describes a “ Matilda effect ,” in which women authors are associated with a lower perceived quality of publication and interest in collaboration compared to men. Generally, women are more likely than men to have a non-linear career path and to leave the academic track because of personal factors, such as maternity.

Yet in many areas, the report highlights that women do overcome such bias and continue to significantly contribute to the global research ecosystem. One indication of this is the fact that the number of patents listing women as an author is significantly higher than the number of women inventors across several key geographies. In Japan, for example, only eight percent of inventors are women, yet the proportion of patents listing women among their inventors is twice as high, hinting at high productivity rates in terms of patent applications among those who do manage to break through these barriers.

Looking to the future

Key members of the global research community agree that the evidence-based approach adopted in the report is key to enabling policymakers to effectively tackle gender inequality going forward. Accurate and comprehensive empirical insights will empower governments, funders and institutions worldwide to make better decisions as they set their gender balance agenda and look to implement policies and initiatives.

These are some comments by the subject experts who provided guidance for the report.

I was excited to see how emerging technologies can provide precise information about gender differences in existing scientific publications. Elsevier’s Scopus can be interrogated to tell who publishes what, where, and when, and this report uses the data to identify discrepancies in the publishing practices of men and women worldwide. This makes it an important resource, which will enable us to explore ideas about the causes of gender inequality in science.

Prof. James Stirling, PhD, Provost, Imperial College London

Prof. James Stirling, Provost, Imperial College London:

The primary value of the data is that it enables us to benchmark ourselves, not only with other UK institutions, but also, and just as importantly, with other comparable international institutions. When I read through the report, there were several sets of data that I found particularly interesting because they were providing quantitative confirmation of my perception of the issues; for example, the imbalance in the proportion of female authors and subjects was consistent with my own understanding.

Vladimir Šucha, Director-General of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre

Vladimir Šucha , PhD, Director-General of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre:

With the complex problems policymakers face they will surely need evidence. But they will also need a new understanding of how evidence and policy interact. I see great potential for data analysis in identifying biases, including gender bias, in our organizations and in how we evaluate research. Your report is an important step towards obtaining this evidence.

Miyoko O. Watanabe, Deputy Executive Director, Office for Diversity and Inclusion, Japan Science and Technology Agency.

Society has changed, and as situations become more complicated, we now need data and evidence to make informed decisions data can in fact prove to be a new common language in the future: “It can be very difficult to communicate on a global scale, across languages, particularly when a situation is very complicated…If we analyze evidence through scientific data, it is much easier to understand each other. I think data is our new language.

An example of valuable insight extracted from this data is the fact that among researchers, women have been shown to specialize less than men; their output tended to be slightly more interdisciplinary in nature.

“We see that based on your indicators, women are doing slightly better than men on this front,” said Dr. Vladimir Šucha, Director-General of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. “However, we have a problem there… interdisciplinary output tends to have a lower citation impact.”

With that in mind, Dr. James Stirling, Provost of Imperial College London, suggested that “perhaps more consequential promotion of interdisciplinarity could have a positive impact on women researchers in particular.”

“Women prefer research that links more than one field,” explained Miyoko O. Watanabe, Deputy Executive Director of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. “This is probably related to women being more inclined to think and work globally. Women are capable of working anywhere and communicating with many people across broad fields of research.”

She added that this interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly important nowadays, and that gender equality can serve to connect disparate issues and provide better solutions to complex problems.

In spite of the many ongoing challenges, there is also much optimism about the future for gender equality in research: “Female representation among graduate and doctoral students is growing, this is an increasing and promising basis for achieving equal representation of both genders in science,” Dr. Šucha said.

Watanabe said that what is needed is a “new type of labor force – one that fully includes women – to revitalize innovation.

Prof. Londa Schiebinger, PhD, Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment at Stanford University.

Dr. Londa Schiebinger, Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment at Stanford University , agreed. In addition, in an interview in the report, she urges funding agencies and universities to provide more training for researchers:

Even though a lot of funding agencies have policies that consider the “gender dimension,” or how sex and gender are integrated into research, most researchers don’t know how to carry out this type of research in sophisticated ways. These methods are not at the heart of university curricula.

Meanwhile, Dr. Stirling believes the crucial question we must ask ourselves is a fundamental one: “Why it is important to have more women in STEM?”

To me, the answer is quite simple: with this level of gender imbalance, we are not properly exploiting the UK scientific talent base. The evidence clearly shows that there is absolutely no difference between the quality of research performed by men and women scientists. So, it stands to reason that if we want to increase the quality of science globally, we need to have more women involved in STEM research. It is as simple as that.

Report 2015 : Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena

Getting women to the top in science challenges Germany, per report at #GS7Eu

Elsevier’s new report on gender in german research will be presented at the gender summit in berlin – download it here, by lei pan, phd, judith kamalski, phd and elizabeth kalinaki | 5 november 2015.

In Germany, even though the number and share of female scientists has increased in the past 5 years, they are still outnumbered and lag behind their male counterparts in research performance.That was a key finding of the new report Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena , conducted by Elsevier’s Analytical Services team . It will be presented today at the Gender Summit 7 Europe in Berlin.

Making use the full potential of women and men is crucial for ensuring the quantity, diversity and quality of research. The report finds evidence that

The publications authored by only females are the most internationally collaborative.
Mixed-gender research teams are more likely to produce interdisciplinary publications compared to male-only or female-only teams (Figure 1).
Publications for which the majority of the authors are female focus on different research topics compared to male-only publications in a gender balanced research area.

“This report provides new insights to governments and the European Commission by showing that the goal to promote interdisciplinary research and to open up new research fields will be achieved more quickly by including more women in science,” said Prof. Martina Schraudner , head of the Department of Gender and Diversity in Organisations at the Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management of the Technical University of Berlin and the Fraunhofer Center for Responsible Research and Innovation .

That was a key finding of the new report Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena , conducted by Elsevier’s Analytical Services team . It will be presented today at the Gender Summit 7 Europe in Berlin.

The report links Scopus author profiles to data from a large on-line social networking service where users disclose their gender and country of origin, to identify German researchers’ gender based on their first names.

The analysis revealed a significant gender gap. For example:

In 2014, 30.9 percent of German researchers in Scopus were women. Among the senior researchers with more than 10 years of experience since their first publication, just 19 percent were women.
German female researchers produced 2.07 publications per year on average, significantly lower than male researchers’ 2.34 in the period 2010-14.
In the same period, across all subject areas, the average field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) of German female researchers is 1.68, also significantly lower than that of male researchers (1.75).

The challenge to have more women in science in Germany is mainly at the junior and mid-senior levels, the report shows. For German researchers who have been active for less than 5 years since their first publication, male researchers’ research productivity is 9.9 percent higher than that of their female counterparts (Figure 2). The difference increases dramatically to 17.6 percent for researchers who have 5 to 10 years of experience since their first publication. One plausible explanation for this finding is that this is the period during which most women start to have children and carry heavy family responsibilities.

At this mid-senior level, 32.9 percent of the researchers are women. However, because of the big gap in research performance between women and men in this category, women face big challenges in getting to the top in science. For the most senior category – more than 10 years since first publication, just 19 percent are women. Women who do reach this level, however, are just as productive in their research output as men. With older children, women in this seniority category are more likely to have similar family responsibilities as men. A similar pattern is observed when field-weighted citation impact instead of research productivity is used as the measure of research performance.

To reduce gender gaps, we believe it is essential to have regulations, policies and funding programs that support and stimulate junior and mid-senior female researchers to overcome the obstacles they face due to, for example, family responsibilities, insufficient access to informal networks of collaboration or lack of access to funding in order to pursue their career in academia.

Infographic: Mapping Gender

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“We have a responsibility”: Elsevier’s Holly Falk-Krzesinski on gender equality in research

January 22, 2020 | 8 min read

By Ian Evans

Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski presents data from Elseviers 2017 Gender in the Global Research Lamdscape

Elsevier’s VP of Research Intelligence talks about using a data-informed approach to address gender disparity and bias in research

Pictured above: Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Gender Working Group Co-chair and Vice President of Research Intelligence at Elsevier, presents data from Elsevier’s 2017 Gender in the Global Research Landscape report at the Gender Representation in Academia Summit, hosted by the Harvard Data Science Initiative. (Photo by Alison Bert)

In the fourth of our Elsevier Chats, Content Director Ian Evans interviews Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski, Gender Working Group Co-chair and Vice President of Research Intelligence at Elsevier.

Holly, we’re talking about gender equality in research today. It’s often described as a critical issue in the world of research, but what makes it so important?

There are two perspectives on this. On the one hand, you can take an empirical view and look at the data, which indicate that gender diversity helps produce more inclusive and reproducible research, and that considering different viewpoints is beneficial to research. And to continue to support a robust research workforce, women must be equally supported to purse career pathways therein. You can also take the perspective of fairness and argue that it’s simply the right thing to do to ensure that women are positioned for success in research as much as men, and doing that means eliminating bias and discrimination — both explicit and implicit — where we find them.

That’s a crucial issue in the world of research for several reasons, from producing more inclusive research, considering different viewpoints, and bolstering the STEM workforce. What role does Elsevier play in driving for more equal gender representation?

Broadly, I see two major elements in our contribution. The first of these is through our gender reports. In March, Elsevier will launch its third report on gender in research, following on from our global report in 2017 and our Germany-focused report in 2015. Elsevier also contributed to the most recent European Commission She Figures report.

Download PDF opens in new tab/window

Our latest report will further examine critical gender issues and performance in research through a gender lens. It will include quantitative analyses into new areas and themes — including collaboration networks and career progression — plus a qualitative research component focused on perceptions of gender diversity in academia.

That’s a serious undertaking. What makes Elsevier the right organization to deliver that?

The way I see it is, Elsevier is a steward of the world’s research, and as such, we have an obligation to promote gender diversity and advance gender equity in the global research community. So it’s not exactly a question of whether we’re the right organization to do it – we have significant data assets and analytics expertise that we can bring to bear, so in fact it’s our responsibility to foster a data-informed approach to address critical issues such as gender disparity and bias in research. And through our efforts, we add to a critical body of knowledge that can be used by governments, funders, and institutions worldwide to inspire evidence-based initiatives and policy and inform further studies.

And what has the response from the research community been to the previous reports?

The research community stakeholders we serve and partner with – universities, funders, professional organizations, researchers – have really welcomed them and have been very supportive and enthusiastic about the reports. They came about because we looked outward and saw that there are significant issues that need addressing by sound studies. Promoting gender equity in research is an area where we really have something to offer, both in terms of the quality and breadth of our data and the extent of our analytical expertise. It’s been exciting to see the reports cited in other published research studies opens in new tab/window , and findings included in presentations at the international Gender Summits opens in new tab/window .

Dr. Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski presents at the 2014 Gender Summit Europe in Brussels.

You mentioned there are two major elements in Elsevier’s work in driving gender equality in research. What’s the second?

Through Elsevier’s Gender Working Group, we have a set of workstreams in place to examine key processes and provide targeted interventions to support equitable and inclusive research. For example, we’ve been working hard to align journal editorial policies related to the reporting of sex and gender in research studies to ensure that we provide strong guidance and support for editors, reviewers and authors who choose to publish in our journals, especially in ways that comply with funder requirements.

What sort of compliance are we talking about there?

Funders like the National Institutes of Health in the United States, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and the European Commission have all adopted various policies that require their grantees – who then become authors with us – to consider sex as a biological variable from project inception through analysis to published findings. We thus aim to be a good partner to both funders and researchers to integrate sex and gender into research and the reporting on that research.

I see. That covers one element of gender equity in research – producing more accurate research by ensuring sample groups are gender balanced. But what about the research community itself? You mentioned that gender equality in research is necessary in part because it brings in additional viewpoints and addresses the need for more STEM researchers.

That’s right, and we have several initiatives in place that address representation in research when it comes to gender. For example, in our sponsored conferences, we ensure that we no longer have all-male panels. We also built an in-house data dashboard based on the data from previous reports, which empowered our journal publishers to address the issue of gender diversity on editorial boards using an evidence-based approach. They were able to take information about their disciplines to their editors and say, ‘Look, here’s some detail about our community; here are areas where maybe the gender representation isn’t what it should be.’

Holly Falk-Krzesinski and Hannah Valentine

Pictured above: At the 2018 Research Funders Summit, moderator and summit organizer Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, introduces speaker Hannah Valantine, MD, MRCP, the NIH’s first Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity. Dr. Valantine will be the keynote speaker at the Gender Symposium 2020 March 18 in Washington, DC. Dr. Falk-Krzesinski is holding up Elsevier’s 2017 report Gender in the Global Research Landscape, which cites Dr. Valantine’s research.

That seems like it could be a tricky conversation to start.

Absolutely, and I’m a believer that a data-informed discussion is a more effective approach than accusation. What we absolutely didn’t want to do was point fingers and say, ‘Hey, there aren’t enough women on this editorial board – you’re at fault.’ We considered a more productive approach to use the data and conversation to increase awareness, consider the current state, and develop plans for change toward greater gender diversity with concrete milestones.

And is it working?

We have indeed seen progress! For our sponsored conferences, the percentage of women invited speakers has more than doubled to over 32 percent. And let me share a great story that our CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, relayed at the Gender Summit Europe in Amsterdam . The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal had an editorial board with 5 women and 22 men, all of them longstanding, loyal team members. The editor wrote to 11 of them regarding the need for greater inclusion and better gender balance, and 10 immediately responded by agreeing to step down. That board now has 12 women and 11 men. I know that there’s still more work to do, and we have both top-down and bottom-up commitments to continuing to do so.

What a great example.

Yes. You know, some of the early initiatives I was involved in were the Gender Summits, which are supported by the Elsevier Foundation. Through our involvement, I saw that there was a lot of valuable information and experience being shared, but that there was also a need for more data and supporting evidence. Especially because the world of research is so broad, comprised of so many different fields of study and geographies. As a scientist, I’m all about data and evidence – and thought about how we might contribute to fill that gap.

And was that the point where you saw how Elsevier could play a useful role in driving gender equality in research?

Yes. Around the same time, the National Science Foundation and the NIH – two of the largest research funders in the United States – each put out a call to action of sorts about the need for data and evidence on issues of gender and diversity. I said, ‘This is it – this is where we can add value in a really unique and meaningful way.’ Our Analytical Services team was already looking into methodology and using Scopus data for inferred gender disambiguation of authors, and we had a lot of support from our senior management. Getting that underway and turning it into what became our first global gender report in 2017 was a big accomplishment, and I’m proud to have been part of the collaborative effort that made it happen.

Find out about Elsevier's forthcoming global gender report: The researcher journey through a gender lens

Contributor

Senior Director, Editorial and Content

Gender in the Global Research Landscape Report

Posted at March 15, 2017

Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies. Drawing upon our high-quality global data sources, analytical expertise and unique gender disambiguation methodology, Elsevier has produced this comprehensive new report, Gender in the Global Research Landscape , as an evidence-based examination of research performance worldwide through a gender lens and as a vehicle for understanding the role of gender within the structure of the global research enterprise.

This free report covers 20 years, 12 geographies and 27 subject areas, providing powerful insight and guidance on gender research and gender equality policy for governments, funders and institutions worldwide. In addition to global results and trends, Gender in the Global Research Landscape includes thought-provoking interviews with global experts. The report is based on Elsevier’s SciVal and Scopus data combined with name data from social media, applied onomastics, and Wikipedia. The analyses were further informed by input from stakeholder organizations and individuals around the world including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) . We partnered with expert stakeholder organizations and individuals around the world to advise on the report’s development, including the research questions, methodologies, and analytics, and to provide a policy context for the report findings.

Gender in the Global Research Landscape is a follow-on to our groundbreaking 2015 report, Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena .

View some key findings of the Gender in the Global Research Landscape report in our latest infographic and flyer .

“As a steward of world research, Elsevier has a responsibility to promote gender equality in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics and advance understanding of the impact of gender, sex, and diversity in research. In this regard, Elsevier fully supports the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5, “to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” and the Global Research Council’s Statement of Principles and Actions Promoting the Equality and Status of Women in Research.” – Ron Mobed, Elsevier CEO

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Published: 21 March 2017

Gender bias distorts peer review across fields

Erin Ross

Nature ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Peer review

This article has been updated

Editors are more likely to select reviewers of the same gender.

In many scientific fields, women publish fewer papers than men, are less likely to be listed as first authors 1 and are less likely to receive glowing letters of recommendation from their advisers 2 . These disparities have decreased over time, but they persist . Now, a study finds that some journal editors might be inadvertently taking gender into account when selecting reviewers for papers.

They found that, on average, male editors were much more likely to pick male reviewers, whereas female editors were more likely to pick other women. This bias was stronger for men, the researchers report in a study 3 published on 21 March in eLife .

Previous papers have looked at gender bias in peer review, but most of them have focused on one field. But this latest study analysed 142 journals in the Frontiers family of publications across science, health, engineering and social sciences.

“The quality of scientific work is not determined by gender,” says Markus Helmer, a computational neuroscientist, and the lead study author, who performed most of the work while at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. “So if gender is impacting which reviewers are chosen, that means journals are not getting the highest-quality reviewers.”

Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin says this is similar to what happens on corporate boards. By limiting board members — or journal reviewers — to one gender, these groups can overlook some of the top candidates.

Helmer, now at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, was surprised to see that gender bias in peer review existed across the fields of science that he and his colleagues surveyed.

Because Frontiers journals make public the identities of their editors and reviewers, Helmer’s team was able to look at more than 9,000 editors and 43,000 reviewers of studies published between 2007 and 2015. They found the overall pattern among journal editors after controlling for the number of men and women who have published in each field. And they were also able to see the gender bias of individual reviewers.

Helmer and his colleagues found that bias was widespread across male editors, but for women, the overall effect seemed to be driven by just a few female editors. When researchers removed those outliers from the data set, female editors’ preference for female reviewers disappeared.

Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences and former editor-in-chief of Science , thinks that the data are solid, and she is happy to see this disparity documented. But she also thinks that there is a major gap in the study’s design: the data set shows only the numbers of men and women who actually reviewed papers, not how many were asked to perform a review. A previous study of geophysical journals found that women between 20 and 80 years of age decline the invitation to review papers more often than men 4 .

Dana Britton, a sociologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, also notes this hole. “They leave out any consideration of people’s willingness to respond to review requests,” she says. “So, it could be that the initial pool of choices is more diverse than the ultimate pool of reviewers.”

The people you know

Helmer and his colleagues suggest that the editors’ preferences for reviewers of their own gender could be due to differences in the way that men and women construct their social networks, or humans’ supposed innate tendency to associate with people with similar qualities. They also suggest that some female editors might be attempting to make their field more egalitarian by deliberately picking female reviewers.

McNutt thinks that such bias might have less to do with human nature and more to do with social networks. “I have my network of go-to scientists, and most of them are women,” she says. “Women scientists also tend to mentor women students, and that expands their network.”

Britton agrees, saying that men in the US and Europe tend to be full professors. "These men are more likely to know each other, and to consider each other experts in their field,” she explains. So biases in peer review could be the result of existing disparities in academia.

Change history

23 march 2017.

This story originally stated that a previous study found women declined peer review invitations more often than men. An age range has been added to clarify that finding.

Elsevier. Gender in the Global Research Landscape (Elsevier, 2017); available at https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/campaigns/gender-17

Dutt, K., Pfaff, D. L., Bernstein, A. F., Dillard, J. S. & Block, C. J. Nature Geosci. 9 , 805-808 (2016).

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Helmer, M. et al. , eLife http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21718 (2017).

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Gender in the Global Research Landscape

Gender in the Global Research Landscape is a follow-on to our groundbreaking 2015 report, Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena .

View some key findings of the Gender in the Global Research Landscape report in our latest infographic and flyer .

1 No poverty
2 Zero hunger
3 Good health and well-being
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Elsevier report: Gender in the Global Research Landscape

Elsevier’s comprehensive report on research performance through a gender lens spans 20 years, 12 geographies (including the EU and Japan), and 27 disciplines.

This global study draws upon data and analytics, a unique gender disambiguation methodology, and involvement of global experts. Some of its key findings are:

The proportion of women among researchers and inventors is increasing in all twelve comparator countries and regions over time (Japan yet scoring very low at 15%).
Women are less likely than men to collaborate internationally on research papers.
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Men publish more papers on average than women in all countries surveyed, except Japan where women publish approximately 40% more. In general, women’s scholarly output includes a slightly larger proportion of highly interdisciplinary research than men’s.
Gender research is growing in terms of size and complexity, with new topics emerging over time. The former dominance of the United States in gender research has declined as research activity in the European Union has risen.

In an interview featured in the report, Miyoko Watanabe, deputy executive director of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion at JST, Japan, said:

"I expect to see more women leaving Japan to work abroad, as the Japanese workplace is not as welcoming to women. [..] It’s actually quite difficult for women to get a good job in Japan, so female researchers tend to leave to work in other countries. It is very difficult for women to get a similar position in research in Japan as they would overseas, and this is a serious problem in Japan. We have to more actively involve women in research in Japan—we have not succeeded in keeping talented female researchers in Japan."

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Sex, gender and the brain: Towards an inclusive research agenda

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Sex, gender and the brain: Towards an inclusive research agenda

Emi is a Global Health Manager in the Health Policy and Insights team at Economist Impact. Emi is a global health equity specialist with a focus on the social determinants of health and has a wealth of experience in global health research, policy and programming. Her expertise in global health advisory, program design and healthcare communications means that Emi brings a breadth of experience to the team across technical areas. Her current role involves exploratory research using economic models, rapid reviews of scientific papers and the development of a global index on health inclusivity. Emi also designs and works on longer-term research assignments across the international development sphere, including related to Education and WASH. Emi has experience working across sectors, having held various roles across the health and social care industry, serving as a Health Inequalities Manager within the UK Department of Health and Social Care, Consultant Epidemiologist with the World Health Organisation under the Health Securities and Preparedness Division and as a Technical Delivery Officer with UNICEF. Emi has an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Science from the University of Warwick, a Master's in Public Health from Imperial College London and is currently completing a PhD in Health Equity at the University of Exeter.

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The level of risk, rate of progression, severity of disease and management approach for brain diseases are influenced by, among other factors, an individual’s sex, (denoted by characteristics that are biologically defined) and gender (denoted by socially constructed features). Yet, data detailing the influence of sex and gender on brain diseases are limited as these variables are rarely investigated or disaggregated. This gap in clinical research leads to inequitable service provision, from delayed diagnosis to inappropriate treatment and caregiving.

This Economist Impact white paper, informed by expert interviews, presents an economic impact framework to examine how sex and gender differences manifest across five brain diseases: Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease and Migraine. The paper also explores the economic impact of proposed precipitating factors, consequences of differences in disease outcomes, and the most promising solutions to address the imbalance in research – which is, currently, primarily informed by clinical trial data dominated by male participation. This is the first phase of a research programme to create a modelling framework that quantifies the economic implications of sex and gender differences.

Key highlights from the report include:

Brain diseases are growing in prevalence, mirroring the global ageing population. One in three people worldwide live with a brain disease and the total number of people who have died from them has increased significantly over the last 30 years, costing US$1.7trn in the US and Europe.
Most brain diseases have a higher prevalence among females: Multiple Sclerosis is twice as common in females than males, Migraine is two to three times more common, and two-thirds of the Alzheimer’s Disease burden occurs among females. However, Parkinson’s Disease is more prevalent among males.
The economic impact of these conditions is shaped by factors including age of onset, promptness and accuracy of diagnosis, and the burden of caregiving. The human and economic cost calls for an increase in more inclusive and advanced scientific research.
Both sex and gender influence the prevalence, onset, and progression of brain diseases. Sex can modulate responses to treatment and disease progression, while gender influences factors such as communication between patients and healthcare providers, perceptions, stigma, and individual health-seeking behaviours.
The economic burden of brain diseases is vast, thereby paralysing global markets and stunting international development. The growing burden and longevity of brain disorders will economically impact individuals, their families and society for years to come. Symptoms can make maintaining a job difficult and often lead to both patients and caregivers, who are primarily women, having poor educational attainment as well as leaving the labour force. Tackling brain diseases therefore is not just a health problem, but also an economic one.
Females are ‘missing’ from science. They are under-represented in clinical trials and data are generally extrapolated and deemed suitable for all.
Biases are persistent in clinical research but there are tools to reveal and overcome them. More inclusive clinical trial design, as well as the recruitment and inclusion of sex and gender sensitivity as a requirement for research funding are examples of tools that can be used to enable more inclusive brain research and policy agenda. More equitable preclinical and clinical research that tackle the biases that emerge from narrow trial populations would provide data to improve treatment protocols, adherence to drug regimens and overall disease outcomes.

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The impact of neurological diseases is most felt in low- and middle- income countries, where 70% of the global burden is concentrated. Yet the burden of neurological disorders is also significant in wealthier regions—the direct costs in Europe, for example, are greater than those for cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes combined. As populations increase and grow older, the burden will only increase, presenting a significant challenge to health systems and national economies.

Strategies and programmes that reduce the burden of neurological disorders are desperately needed. Yet the provision of neurological care, including efforts to enable equitable access, is insufficient. A further, unfortunate truth is that data on the burden of neurological are scarce, even in high-income countries, and especially in comparison to other non-communicable diseases. We do know that urgent action is needed to drive prevention, improve care effectiveness, and leverage policymaking and funding to reach achievable advances in outcomes. But the first step is developing a clear understanding of the issue and the significant nuances involved.

A new Economist Impact programme, The Value of Action: Mitigating the Global Impact of Neurological Disorders, seeks to break down existing silos by assessing the epidemiological burden, economic impact and current policy landscape on a multi-regional and disorder-specific basis. One of the first of its kind, this programme quantifies the value of action from an added angle: the indirect costs that would be avoided by reducing the substantial caregiver burden and productivity losses that arise from neurological disorders. Building a detailed economic picture spanning several conditions, our analysis finds that 50% the total cost of neurological disorders is due to these indirect costs. We also found that scaling-up prevention, treatment and rehab to adequate levels for the top 10 neurological disorders would save over US$4trn by 2030, across the 11 countries that we studied.

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Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations International Center for the Study of Research, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier, Kidlington, Oxford, United Kingdom

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations International Center for the Study of Research, Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Inc, New York, New York, United States of America, School of Professional Studies, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Validation, Visualization

Roles Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Rachel Herbert,
Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski,
Kristy James,
Andrew Plume

Published: October 7, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657
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Through efforts of the Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes benefit women and men equally. Our research focuses on the extent to which sex and gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and gender terms. The approach visualizes the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and overlays that view with the proportion of the publications associated with sex and gender topics. We show that attention to sex and gender topics is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between an SDG and consideration of sex and gender is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG have little explicit connection with sex and gender. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

Citation: Herbert R, Falk-Krzesinski HJ, James K, Plume A (2022) Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration. PLoS ONE 17(10): e0275657. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657

Editor: Olga Scrivner, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology / Indiana University, UNITED STATES

Received: April 20, 2022; Accepted: September 21, 2022; Published: October 7, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Herbert 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: Owing to Scopus data sharing policy, we are not permitted to share the underlying database of articles on which these maps are based. Instead we have included the files that permit the reader to open the maps directly in the freely-available VOSviewer software in a Mendeley dataset. The files necessary to open the maps generated in this paper and the accompanying online supplementary material are available here: Herbert, Rachel; James, Kristy; Plume, Andrew; Falk-Krzesinski, Holly (2022), “Data for: Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/8kthxbmmm5.1 .

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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

Introduction

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the benefits of incorporating sex and gender analysis into research, with calls for this dimension to be considered from the research design stage [ 1 , 2 ]. By doing so, research questions will be answered more comprehensively and the research itself will be more robust and reproducible [ 3 ].

It has also become evident, particularly through a report by UN Women [ 4 ] and discussions and work presented at the Gender Summits held since 2011 [ 5 , 6 ], and previous research [ 7 ], that the targets for the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [ 8 ] must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that gender-responsive policies and accountability processes are developed and the outcomes to achieve the goals benefit women and men equally. This is also highlighted by the UN principle of ‘Leave No One Behind’ [ 9 ]. Indeed, progress on the goals can only be achieved through action plans that incorporate this consideration [ 10 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also called for more nuanced consideration of gender: a broader view of the concept [ 4 ] and a deeper understanding of the reasons behind gender differences do exist [ 11 ].

Attention to sex and gender has increased in many areas of life in recent years, but this important dimension is still often missing from published research. This is especially the case where the first and last authors of publications are not women [ 12 ], and it has been demonstrated in recent findings from an Elsevier report that women authors are less commonly last authors than men [ 13 ]. Although the significance of the first and last author position varies, in some fields, such as molecular biology, the last author position is usually reserved for the principal investigator or equivalent [ 14 ]–an author who will steer the overall research project. Taken all together, this suggests that the situation is unlikely to change without much greater attention on this issue in research institutions.

Several of the SDGs are written with a recognition of the role of sex and gender in achieving outcomes and are specified in their targets and the indicators used to measure progress. But while the UN has recognized a need for “systematic mainstreaming of a gender perspective” [ 15 ], this is not the case across all 17 goals: one UN Women report identified cases where targets that included a gender dimension were lacking that dimension in the monitoring indicator [ 4 ] and another reported insufficient data to enable comprehensive tracking of progress [ 16 ]. With SDG outcomes fixed to a 2030 target date, building an understanding of how sex and gender are embedded within the research supporting the SDGs is an immediate imperative to support evidence-based implementation of the agenda and ensure that the impacts of the SDGs in gender can be robustly assessed. To establish an understanding based on published research studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and/or gender topics. In the rest of this paper we will outline this approach and highlight some key findings.

Expanding on previous studies that investigated gender in research from a topical perspective using the Scopus database [ 17 ], we have developed a keyword search-based approach to identify publications that explicitly include terms related to sex and/or gender topical research in the title, abstract or keywords. These publications are matched to the corpus of publications reflecting research related to each of 16 SDGs (excluding SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals) that have been defined on the basis of expert-informed Scopus keyword searches augmented with machine learning [ 18 ].

As an important point of departure from previous work, in this study we consider sex and gender together. Following the WHO’s definitions, sex “refers to the biological characteristics that define humans as male or female,” and gender “refers to the socially constructed norms, roles and relations of and among women, men, boys and girls,” as well as the “expressions and identities of women, men, boys, girls and gender-diverse people” [ 19 ]. While they are separate concepts, they are also related and the keyword search that we have developed incorporates terms that relate to both. This allows for the often interchangeable (and perhaps incorrect) use of terms relating to either or both of these concepts by publication authors.

The keyword-based approach to identify publications including terms related to sex and/or gender in the title, abstract or keywords was created in an iterative fashion as follows. We captured relevant keywords from: i) keywords from publications within the public Mendeley library “Gender in the Global Research Landscape” [ 20 ]; ii) terms used by established organizations and societies, e.g. Gender Identity Research and Education Society, UNICEF and UNESCO; iii) and terms provided by Portia Ltd, the organizer of the Gender Summits. Each keyword was tested individually in a Scopus search of publication titles, abstracts and author/index keywords for precision and recall and appropriate wildcards, Boolean and proximity operators were identified for each. Some keywords (such as ‘man’, ‘marriage’ and ‘family’) were excluded because their non-specificity resulted in decreased precision without any increase in recall. While it is true that many of those terms that appear in the final query add only incrementally to the sum total of the publications retrieved in Scopus, we were conscious not to oversimplify our query to those terms that did retrieve the majority of the results (such as the single term ‘gender’, for example). We also consider that all relevant terms are equally valuable to include and that sex and gender terms are used inconsistently and sometimes incorrectly in the literature and our keyword search deliberately conflates them in order to reflect that ambiguity.

We studied years 2015 to 2020, but for the term mapping, publications were limited to those published in 2020, as this is the most recent period for which we had a full data year of articles within Scopus when we executed the analysis, and to peer-reviewed types (i.e., articles, reviews, conference proceedings, short surveys and data articles). In selecting 2020, we are illustrating the analysis that our proposed approach could show and the insights that can be revealed. The final, selected Scopus sex and gender keyword search can be found in Table 1 .

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t001

For each of the 16 SDGs included in this study, a corpus consisting of the publications identified by queries described recently [ 18 ] was created from an analytical copy of the Scopus dataset accessed via ICSR Lab [ 21 ], snapshot dated June 1 st 2021. This delivered a unique publication set for each of the 16 SDGs. A second corpus consisting of the publications identified by each SDG keyword search AND the selected sex and gender keyword search was created from the same data. Publications in the first corpus (SDG-related publications) that also appear in the second corpus (sex and/or gender-related publications) were tagged as such after matching using Scopus unique publication identifiers. This tagging was used as the basis for calculating the proportion of each SDG’s publications that include those related to sex and/or gender research topics as well as for developing topical maps using VOSviewer.

VOSviewer is “a software tool used for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks” [ 22 ]; the current version at the time of analysis (Version 1.6.18) was employed. This tool uses natural language processing and network mapping techniques to process publication data exported from Scopus for visualization and further analysis. Owing to the processing limits of VOSviewer, where SDG publication sets were too large for mapping they have been randomly down-sampled to approximately 20,000 publications; this applies to all SDG publication sets except for SDG 1, which resulted in fewer than 20,000 publications and so all publications were included because that volume falls within the processing power of VOSviewer. In VOSviewer, we applied binary counting of terms, meaning that the presence or absence of a term in a publication was used for determining the occurrence frequencies and term co-occurrence, not the number of occurrences of a term in a publication. We applied a term occurrence threshold of at least 100 occurrences for inclusion in the map across each SDG’s publication set with the exception of SDG 1, where the smaller volume of retrieved publications meant that a threshold of at least 50 publications was more appropriate; these thresholds were selected heuristically as a trade-off between comprehensiveness and readability/interpretability of the resulting maps, and other thresholds did not materially alter our observations. VOSviewer’s default setting to map 60% of the most relevant terms (based on the calculated relevance score) was selected since “terms with a high relevance score tend to represent specific topics covered by the text data, while terms with a low relevance score tend to be of a general nature and tend not to be representative of any specific topic. By excluding terms with a low relevance score, general terms are filtered out and the focus shifts to more specific and more informative terms. By default, 40% of the terms are excluded based on their relevance score” [ 23 ]. To further validate the specificity of the sex and gender keyword search, we carefully examined the results of the approach described above for SDG 5: Gender Equality. We found the expected high degree of overlap between the SDG 5 publication set and those publications within it tagged as also being identified by the sex and gender keyword search.

Most SDGs have a low and steady proportion of publications related to sex and/or gender

The number of research publications in 2020 identified by each SDG query is shown in Table 2 , along with the number and proportion of these that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword query. The variation in volume of each of the SDG’s corpus is apparent, ranging from SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being (417,443 publications) to the much smaller SDG 1: No Poverty (13,424 publications), to some extent reflecting the disparity in the number and complexity of the targets relating to each goals (e.g. 13 targets for SDG 3 versus 7 targets for SDG 1). Of particular relevance to the present work we note the relatively small number of publications returned by the SDG 5: Gender Equality query (25,601 publications). Most of the SDGs have a low proportion of publications that explicitly relate to sex and gender research topics. SDG 5: Gender Equality and SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being stand out for their high shares (95% and 62%, respectively). Among the remainder, no SDG has a share above 40% and eight are under 10%. This means that most research on SDGs does not include explicit consideration of sex and/or gender: indeed, among the full, deduplicated dataset of 1.6 million publications, 21% of publications explicitly mentioned sex or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t002

SDGs 1–16 with the count of publications in 2020 identified by the SDG query, and the count and proportion of publications of these also found by the sex and gender keyword search. SDGs are ranked descending by this proportion. The gender classifications are those identified within the UN Women report [ 4 ].The ranking of the SDGs by proportion of sex and/or gender topical publications does align to some extent with the classification that the report from UN Women gave to the SDG indicator framework [ 4 ]. In Figure 2.1 of that report, each SDG was classified as either “gender-sensitive”, “gender-sparse” or “gender-blind” to reflect the extent to which the SDG indicators are gender-specific; this classification appears in the final column of Table 2 . While the UN Women classification addressed gender (not sex), it is nonetheless clear that the “gender-sensitive” SDGs tend to have the amongst the higher proportions of sex and gender publications, and the “gender-sparse” and “gender-blind” SDGs tend to have the lowest shares of sex and gender publications. However, SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities appears to have a higher than expected proportion of publications on sex and gender given its “gender-sparse” indication, and conversely the “gender-sensitive” SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth has a relatively low proportion. It is important to note that some of the SDGs with low proportions of publications explicitly mentioning sex and gender and which are “gender-sparse” or “gender-blind” under the UN Women classification nevertheless do deal with targets and topics of high sex and gender relevance. For instance, SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy indicates a need to transition much of the world’s population towards “clean cooking fuels and technologies” which is highly gender-relevant; such nuanced views are more clearly resolved by disaggregating these summary statistics into thematic topics through the use of a term mapping approach.

The results for the single year snapshot (2020) serve as the basis for the next steps in our approach to depict the extent to which sex or gender is considered in the research for each of the 16 SDGs. However, we also wanted to understand how the proportions are changing over time. The SDGs were established in 2015 [ 8 ] and so we also calculated the proportions of each SDG’s publications that consider sex or gender for the years 2015 to 2020 ( Table 3 ). Although there are publishing lags that may mean that some 2015 papers were written prior to the SDGs being established, we include all years for completeness. Table 3 shows just the proportions for each year; in the online supplementary information section of this paper, a full table including all the publication counts of all publications relating to each SDG and the subset of which relate to sex or gender can be found ( Table 1 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.t003

The results for 2015–2020 ( Table 3 ) show very little change in the proportions of publications that consider sex or gender. At most, the proportion of SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being publications referencing sex and gender dropped by 2.0 percentage points between 2019 and 2020. If this change did prove to be meaningful in the longer term, we might speculate that this may be linked to an influx of COVID research in 2020 which did not explicitly make reference to sex or gender, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic response. The only other notable change is for SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions which had a slight increase in the proportion of publications that consider sex or gender, increasing by 1.5 percentage points across the six-year period. For the rest of the SDGs, the changes in proportions fluctuate slightly but remain steady.

SDGs 1–16 with the proportion of publications found by each SDG query and by the sex and gender keyword search for publication years 2015–2020. The gender classifications are those identified within the UN Women report [ 4 ]. In the supplementary information accompanying this article, an extended version of this table ( Table 2 ) is available which includes the raw counts of the publications associated with each SDG, and the raw counts of those publications also associated with sex and/or gender.

For the most current view using the most recent full year at the time of conducting the research, we selected 2020 to demonstrate our approach to mapping for insights. Though we do acknowledge that 2020 was not a typical year owing to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we nonetheless believe that small perturbations in the research output and sex and gender focus that year will be minimal and only likely to appear in SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being.

The term mapping approach allows us to examine topical clusters in the corpus of research relevant to each SDG, and to overlay this with a view on those clusters which explicitly include terms related to sex and/or gender, which represent publications on sex and gender research topics. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the terms used by the authors of these publications themselves to be examined, rather than relying on any external classification scheme that which may not be sufficiently fine-grained to detect niche topics or emerging research fronts. In the following sections we will present a selection of these SDG maps. In the online S1 File , the maps for all 16 SDGs are presented.

SDG 5: Gender equality has the expected high coverage of sex and gender relevant research

The term map created for SDG 5: Gender Equality is shown in Fig 1 , and the topical clusters clearly reveal the diversity of research relevant to this SDG’s targets and indicators. Major clusters of terms relating to gender in health on the right side of the map and gender in social policy on the left are bridged by a cluster relating to the medical and policy literature around sexual abuse and exploitation appear at the top of the map. Fig 2 illustrates the high degree of overlap (95% of publications, as shown in Table 2 ) between the SDG publication set and those publications within it tagged as also being identified by the sex and gender keyword search, i.e. those that also cover sex and gender research topics. None of the terms visible in the map at this scale are associated with a low proportion of sex and gender tagged publications.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g001

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 25,601 publications in 2020, and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g002

Sex and gender relevant research is unevenly spread across SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being

Given the importance of human health to societies around the world, and the volume of funding made available to address research priorities ranging from formulating evidence-based public health policies to understanding the human genome, the SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being keyword search retrieves an order of magnitude more publications than most other SDG queries. The variation in volume of each of the SDG’s corpus is apparent, ranging from SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being (417,443 publications) to the much smaller SDG 1: No Poverty (13,424 publications), to some extent reflecting the disparity in the number and complexity of the targets relating to each goals (e.g. 13 targets for SDG 3. To work within the processing capability of VOSviewer, a random sample of approximately 20,000 publications was used to create the map shown in Fig 3 , which shows the topical clusters relevant to this SDG’s targets and indicators. Topics related to health evidence, governance and policy appear in red on the left side of the map, while the underlying biology of human illness and disease appear in green on the right. Bridging these two larger topical domains is a smaller set of terms in blue, relating most closely to surgical interventions in cancer treatment. Of particular interest are the terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic at the bottom on the left cluster in this map such as ‘covid’, ‘pandemic’, ‘coronavirus’ and related viral designations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g003

Acknowledging the “gender-sensitive” nature of this SDG [ 4 ] and the high proportion of publications that are also identified by the sex and gender keyword search (62% of publications per Table 2 ), the strong overlap of sex and gender in this SDG shown in Fig 4 is to be expected. What is perhaps surprising is that the terms in this map associated with publications that do not explicitly mention sex and/or gender terms are largely in the topical clusters relating to fundamental biology (the cluster on the right side of the map) but also those terms on the left of the map that relate specifically to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is despite calls for sex and gender to be incorporated and reported in research across the spectrum of human health [ 3 , 24 – 26 ]. Such calls recognise that our understanding of the underlying causes of poor health and effective prevention and treatment requires attention to sex and/or gender disaggregation in studies in the published research literature. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic-related terms, this apparent under-acknowledgement of the role of sex & gender is despite early evidence that COVID-19 patient outcomes are different for men and women [ 27 ].

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 19,983 publications in 2020 (sampled from 417,443 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g004

Sex and gender aspects of SDG 4: Quality education are explicit in education practice but not education policy research

Pedagogy is the theory and practice of teaching and learning, and research relevant to this field is represented in the map for SDG 4: Quality Education shown in Fig 5 by four topical clusters. On the right of the map, the green cluster represents terms dealing primarily with educational settings from early years (preschool and kindergarten) through to high school (secondary education); on the left, the focus is on tertiary education as well as vocational education and labour force outcomes. The blue cluster at the top of the map deals with issues relating to medical education.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g005

SDG 4 is classed as “gender-sensitive” by the UN Women report [ 4 ] and for many years it has been known that formative educational experiences and educational attainment are different for boys and girls [ 28 ]. However, it has also become clear more recently that teacher (professor) gender in higher education affects attainment and outcomes for women but not for men [ 29 ]. However, Fig 6 appears to reflect sex and gender elements are included in publications addressing topics around early years, junior and senior school education (and to a lesser extent in medical education) but is almost absent from those parts of the map dealing with higher education or the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 37,206 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g006

SDG 13: Climate action has very low coverage of sex and gender relevant research

The final map we examine in detail here is for SDG 13: Climate Action, and Fig 7 illustrates the breadth of topics that this global challenge encompasses. The red cluster in the bottom left covers climate change risk, response and adaptation, while the blue cluster is focussed on carbon, especially carbon capture and storage (perhaps unsurprising given the policy emphasis on carbon sequestration [ 30 ]). Linking these is the green cluster, dealing primarily with climate and energy governance and policy.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g007

SDG 13 has just a 3% overlap of publications found by both the SDG query and the sex and gender keyword query (and is considered “gender-sparse” according to the UN Women classification [ 4 ]). As Fig 8 makes clear, very few terms in this map are associated with a relatively high proportion of sex and gender tagged publications, and these are related mainly to perceptions of and adaptation to climate change. This seems appropriate, since evidence is building that women and men experience climate change effects differently, partly as a result of the intersection between gender, poverty and political engagement [ 31 – 35 ].

Binary counting (present/absent, not count of occurrences) was applied to terms in titles and abstracts of 20,030 publications in 2020 (sampled from 42,699 in total), and those with at least 100 occurrences were mapped using VOSviewer. Node size indicates count of occurrences, and node proximity reflects frequency of co-occurrence (nodes close together co-occur more frequently than nodes far apart). In this overlay visualization, the color scale indicates the proportion of publications associated with the mapped terms that were also identified by the sex and gender keyword search: blue nodes indicate terms with relatively low consideration of sex and/or gender; yellow terms indicate terms with relatively high consideration of sex and/or gender.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.g008

The approach described here offers a fresh perspective on both the UN SDGs and sex and gender consideration in SDG research by visualizing the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and then overlaying that view with the proportion of the publications associated with each term that also explicitly include sex and/or gender terms. In establishing this approach, we want to emphasize that this is not an end-point in of itself: as research evolves and the terms used by authors to describe their work in their publications evolve too, we understand that these keyword queries will need to be revised and updated, perhaps even extended or narrowed as policy and research priorities shift and change.

What we have been able to show with great clarity even with a single year (2020) snapshot is that consideration of sex and gender is uneven across the SDGs ( Table 2 ), and that even where overlap between the SDG and sex and gender research corpus is high as in SDG 5: Gender Equality, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG do not consider sex and/or gender (Figs 1 and 2 ). Furthermore, we have demonstrated that the proportion of publications that consider sex and/or gender is quite steady over time, despite increasing calls for this consideration and even as the SDGs matured. With this, we have demonstrated that there is progress to be made if we are to ensure that women and men benefit equally from achievements that stem from the UN SDGs. However, we acknowledge that the formulation of the SDG goals and targets was not necessarily conducted with reference to sex and gender considerations and that it must not be necessarily expected that the research community has responded to the design of the UN SDGs with targeted sex and gender relevant research.

Importantly, this study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and/or gender across research in every SDG, as well as an approach to evaluate change across each SDG over time. Our approach could be used to inform future reports by UN Women [ 4 ] to provide a rigorous evidence base to support the inclusion of sex and gender in the formulation of fresh sustainability goals and targets.

Fresh maps and tables can be created each year to monitor sex and/or gender integration progress as we move toward the 2030 SDG target goal. Furthermore, this approach could be adapted to investigate the extent to which animal and human subject studies in SDG research clusters incorporate sex and/or gender disaggregated analyses (also referred to as sex and gender-based analysis, SGBA), drawing on methodology developed for the 2018 She Figures report [ 36 ] and included within a study examining the sex and gender-based analysis of Alzheimer’s Disease research studies [ 37 ].

Supporting information

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275657.s001

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Pollitzer (director of Portia Ltd and founder of the Gender Summits) for the inspiration and her encouragement to conduct this work and her valuable input toward the creation of the sex and gender keyword search.

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Creating a Culture of Collaboration at GWU (C3@GWU)

A GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SEMINAR

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Join us on March 31st in Washington, DC for a report symposium featuring an overview of key findings and a broader expert discussion of the importance of an evidence base to address gender inequality and gender research.

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The Scholarly Kitchen

What’s Hot and Cooking In Scholarly Publishing

The Global Gender Gap: Research and Researchers

Whether as writers, editors, publishers, or disseminators of science and scholarship, everyone working in scholarly communications can play a role in shining a light on the research we are responsible for. To celebrate International Women’s Day, Elsevier is doing just that in their analysis of 20 years of global research from a gender perspective, published today.

“Gender in the Global Research Landscape” uses data from Elsevier’s Scopus database of over 62 million documents to identify trends in global research from a gender perspective over 20 years, 12 countries and regions, and 27 subject areas. The three main topics covered in the report are: The global research landscape through a gender lens; Gender and research leadership, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and mobility; and The gender research landscape. Elsevier used tools that provide information on first names and gender by country, such as Genderize.io , NamSor sociolinguistic analysis, and Wikipedia name lists to assign a gender to author profiles with a first name. This information wasn’t available for all authors and, together with the geographical focus on just 12 countries/regions (China, for example, is notable for its absence), this somewhat limits the value of the study. However, it contains much of interest and the findings are still likely to be directionally accurate.

First, the good news.

The proportion of women among researchers and inventors has increased over time in all 12 comparator countries and regions. Brazil and Portugal, where 49% of researchers are now women, lead the field, and women represent 40%+ of researchers in all but three countries studied. Given that in 1996-2000 only Portugal had more than 40% women researchers, this is a big improvement (Japan lags far behind, however, with just 20%, up from 15%). In addition, in most countries and regions studied, women now compose between 40-60% of researchers in a number of fields, including health and life sciences, psychology, and most notably, nursing.

Gender research is also growing — especially in the European Union — and is now distributed more evenly between the United States (34%) and the EU (35%), compared with 20 years ago when a full 50% of papers in this field were published in the US. This research is also cited slightly more (3%) than the average across all subjects, with the highest impact papers coming from the US (Field-Weighted Citation Impact [FWCI] of 1.35), UK (1.34), and Denmark (1.31).

The proportion of women among researchers and inventors has increased over time in all 12 comparator countries and regions.

Portugal, in particular, stands out as a country where real progress has been made in terms of gender equality — at least in terms of the number of researchers. Women today make up 49% of all researchers, up from 41% in 1996-2000. The report’s authors note that this may be the result of the country’s efforts to improve gender disparity through policy, such as banning gender discrimination in school textbooks, and initiatives to promote the participation of girls and women in STEM such as the Portuguese Association of Women in Science, Rails Girls, Girls Lean In, Portugal Girl Geek Dinners, and Geekettes. A valuable lesson for other countries and regions — although the authors also note that:

Despite these positive initiatives, criticisms remain regarding gender wage gaps, career advancement, and other aspects of gender equality in Portugal.

And what about the not so good — or less clear-cut — findings?

First, women still publish, on average, fewer papers than men — and in 10 of the 12 countries/regions studied that gap has widened since 1996. Disappointingly, given its progress in terms of the number of women researchers, the gap has increased most in Portugal — from 1.7 papers per woman and 1.9 per man in 1996-2000 to 2.0 per woman and 2.7 per man in 2011-2015. The report’s authors speculate that:

An overall career view of women and men researchers might show a detrimental effect of career breaks on the lifetime productivity of women, and career breaks may have influenced some of the gender-based differences in our analysis…Women take career breaks more often than men, usually for reasons related to starting a family or caring for a family member.This gender difference may be related to a lack of choice around parental leave, societal expectations around caregiving, and gender-based differences in income.

However, although women publish less than men, their publications are cited and downloaded about the same — or in some cases, slightly more (for example, women’s FWCI in the US is 1.61 while men’s is 1.52). And encouragingly, women are slightly better represented in the highest impact interdisciplinary disciplinary outputs (top 10%) — if only by a couple of percentage points.

Although overall there are more globally authored papers than in 1997, women were then — and are still — less likely than men to collaborate internationally. The biggest author gender gap is in Chile, where international outputs are 10% higher for men than women, but there’s also a fairly significant gap (5-9%) between male and female global collaboration in most other countries/regions. And, as with the number of papers published by women, that gap is increasing for most of the countries and regions studied compared with 20 years ago.

It’s perhaps not surprising that women researchers also tend to be less geographically mobile than their male counterparts. To quote the report:

We can hypothesize that the findings around international collaboration and mobility are linked: if women are less internationally mobile, it may also restrict their network and international collaboration opportunities. If international collaboration occurs less frequently for women than men, their networks may remain small and this may negatively affect opportunities for career progression and mobility.

Interestingly, Japan — which ranks low in several other respects — appears to buck this trend, with little difference in mobility between men and women and a relatively high number of female researchers leaving the country.

Women also constitute a tiny proportion of inventors — at least as indicated by the number of patent applications they submit — though in most countries/regions the gap is starting to close. In Portugal, for example, women now make up 30% of inventors, compared with 14% in 1996-2000, while in Mexico they’ve increased from 7% to 21%. Although actual numbers in both countries are low, this trend is encouraging. However, women are still less likely than men to collaborate across academic/corporate sectors, although the difference here is just 1-2%.

There’s much more information in the report including interviews with experts from Japan, the UK, the EU, and the US (two men and two women, for the record). The section on regional and local initiatives to address gender disparities in STEM, which summarizes how various organizations are starting to develop policies and programs to improve the situation, is especially useful.

All in all the report is a valuable addition to the literature on gender in scholarly communications — kudos to Elsevier!

Alice Meadows

I am a Co-Founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a scholarly communications consultancy with a focus on open research and research infrastructure. I have many years experience of both scholarly publishing (including at Blackwell Publishing and Wiley) and research infrastructure (at ORCID and, most recently, NISO, where I was Director of Community Engagement). I’m actively involved in the information community, and served as SSP President in 2021-22. I was honored to receive the SSP Distinguished Service Award in 2018, the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing in 2016, and the ISMTE Recognition Award in 2013. I’m passionate about improving trust in scholarly communications, and about addressing inequities in our community (and beyond!). Note: The opinions expressed here are my own

5 Thoughts on "The Global Gender Gap: Research and Researchers"

Sorry, pet peeve: To comprise is to contain, as in “Our country comprises many ethnic groups.” To compose is to make up, as in “Many ethnic groups compose our country.”

Mar 8, 2017, 11:59 AM

Thanks, fixed. Late night copyediting will get you every time…

By David Crotty
Mar 8, 2017, 12:29 PM

Thanks Alice for highlighting Elsevier’s analysis (and indeed, kudos to Elsevier for putting the effort in here). The point about career breaks is worth pursuing. A fascinating next step would be to undertake some interviews with some of the researchers whose work featured in the study, to quantify the extent of career breaks vs time in work, and then re-compare e.g. citation ratios based on time in work. A huge effort, I appreciate, but one that would be vital to better understanding whether career breaks do affect such measures of career performance (in which case normalising the measures used to allow for career breaks could enable fairer analysis of women) – or not (in which case we will know that there is a different issue to be pursued, and the red herring of career breaks could be put aside).

By Charlie Rapple
Mar 9, 2017, 3:27 AM

Thanks Charlie – and yes further research to quantify the extent and effect of career breaks (by gender) would be really helpful. Would love to know if anyone is working on this…

By Alice Meadows
Mar 9, 2017, 9:29 AM

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Dorottya Rédai

September 12th, 2024, in a time of global anti-gender politics, research and activism also needs to be transnational.

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Reflecting on the challenges facing gender activists and researchers in Hungary, Dorottya Rédai outlines how interactions between researchers and activists could be more productive and why taking a transnational perspective is increasingly important.

As a gender scholar and activist , I have always tried to balance my activities and support one field of my work with knowledge and experiences from the other, splitting my time between academia and the NGO/CSO sphere. I have never actually found this binary quite meaningful for my own work. However, as remaining in academia has become untenable for me, I find myself investing my full working capacities in activism.

This happened in Hungary, a country where gender studies masters programmes were banned in 2018 and research and teaching positions even loosely related to gender studies are hardly available. Moreover, beyond academia there has been a wide-ranging legal and political attack against LGBTQ+ people launched by the ruling far-right government since 2020.

Transnational perspectives draw out commonalities in such anti-gender, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-democratic politics across different national contexts and are currently receiving significant scholarly attention . They are crucial for developing an understanding of how these politics work and their impacts, but at the same time present challenges for analysing local political contexts.

it is more important than ever to go beyond the activist/academic binary and seek substantial collaboration

In Hungary, anti-LGBTQ+ political attacks are the strongest and most open part of an anti-gender politics that props up the regime. Having no significant parliamentary opposition has positioned LGBTQ+ organisations as almost the only functioning opposition to the ruling party. Finding myself directly involved in this struggle as an activist at Labrisz Lesbian Association and simultaneously giving up (or at least suspending) active engagement with academia, I have been thinking about how the two could better collaborate and how this fits into a transnational political context.

Firstly, it is more important than ever to go beyond the activist/academic binary and seek substantial collaboration, to do theory-informed activism and activism-informed scholarship in parallel. In fact, in countries and regions where the institutionalisation level of gender studies is none or low, it is quite common that feminist and queer activists have some academic background in gender studies, but it is less common that academics in gender studies do activism, as well. I share some suggestions for better cooperation. These are idealist suggestions, and I am aware of the complexity of the issues, but constructive conversations have to start somewhere.

Speaking a common language

Building linguistic bridges between activist and academic lingo would be important not only so that academics and activists understand each other better, but also for the so-called ‘general public’. Many people find both academic and activist language too abstract and irrelevant for their daily life. Populists know how to talk to people’s concerns and fears. The critical analysis of popular discourses should not only be a methodological tool, but also a pro-active technology. Discourses and narratives can be influenced by activists who can be supported by academics who work on critical discourse analysis.

Many people find both academic and activist language too abstract and irrelevant for their daily life.

Besides sharing a common language, academics could support activists in working critically with concepts. In my view, activists often use concepts understood to be universal, and this can lead to speaking in ways that don’t resonate within a local context. Conceptualising what we are doing, why, how, and with what aim can be a challenge if few people are comfortable working with and adapting theory and concepts in an organisation.

Working across academia and activism

Activists could be given more voice and more roles in academia. Activists can be invited into social science research projects as experts and on-the-ground consultants. No, I don’t mean the most recent practice in EC-funded research consortia where activists are invited into consultation boards for free. I mean decent expert fees, because activists are very knowledgeable, very busy and very badly paid people. At least in my country.

Inclusive publishing

Publication standards could be changed towards being more activist-friendly; acceptable genres and ways of writing should be diversified. To mention a personal example, I was very happy when I read the call for papers for a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies , because it invited authors to write in a diverse range of genres. It’s not that I couldn’t have written an academic paper, it’s just that I didn’t want to. And although there were some mild attempts by the reviewers to “academise” my activist essay, in the end it remained and was published as an activist essay in the special issue . More such initiatives would be welcome.

Useful data

People like and understand numbers. Reliable quantified research data can make people reflect about their own standing in connection with a given social issue. Therefore, activists need data. Some CSO-s are large, funded and staffed well enough to produce data on the issues they work on, but smaller organisations are unable to do so. Activists need data which they can understand and use in a way that their target groups and the broader public also understand them (by the way, journalists also need such data). Activists also need data which gives them feedback about the work they do, the impact they have made. Activists know what kind of data they need, they often have brilliant ideas about what should be researched. It would be a very fruitful kind of collaboration if researchers and activists on a given field could consult each other about what to research and what kinds of data to produce.

Collaboration for transnational funding

Last, but not least, resistance has to be transnationally funded, because funding is not available for critical research and activism in countries where the regime is actively trying to suppress both (like in Hungary), so it is arguably most needed. Activists and academics usually have their own transnational networks through which they seek funding for their work. These do not overlap in most cases, but I can imagine co-funded transnational projects where activists and academics jointly work on dismantling anti-gender forces.

Activists and academics usually have their own transnational networks through which they seek funding for their work. These do not overlap in most cases

In countries where gender studies are banned and hostility against LGBTQ+ people and organisations is at the core of national-level politics, academic research on and resistance to anti-gender politics has to be transnational . Because anti-gender networks are also transnational, and politicians borrow ideas from each other. Even if transnational support for resistance triggers more immediate political hostility.

The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

Image credit: Zoltan Galantai on Shutterstock .

About the author

Dorottya Rédai is an activist and freelance scholar in Hungary. She is currently the Executive Director of Labrisz Lesbian Association.

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November 7th, 2022.

Researcher Activism – Reflections on a career

July 17th, 2020.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? – review

May 2nd, 2024.

To support civil society organisations, research funders must listen to their needs

September 2nd, 2021.

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Trends in climate adaptation solutions for mountain regions

Original Article
Open access
Published: 10 September 2024
Volume 29 , article number 74 , ( 2024 )

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Veruska Muccione ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9773-3125 1 , 2 , 3 ,
Julia Aguilera Rodriguez 2 ,
Anna Scolobig 2 , 4 ,
Rosie Witton 5 ,
Johanna Zwahlen 6 ,
Alex Mackey 6 ,
Julia Barrott 5 ,
Otto Simonett 6 ,
Markus Stoffel 2 &
Simon K. Allen 2 , 3

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This study addresses the critical need for documented adaptation progress in mountain regions by reviewing recently implemented or ongoing adaptation solutions collected from the Adaptation at Altitude Solutions Portal (A@A Solution Portal). Using a data driven approach, the research explores the characteristics, feasibility, and transformative potential of these solutions. Findings reveal a predominant focus on addressing droughts and floods, aligning with the IPCC’s emphasis on water-related impacts in mountains. Notably, watershed management practices emerge as popular solutions, showcasing their capacity to address multiple concerns beyond climate impacts. Education and awareness, along with land use practices, dominate the types of solutions, reflecting their positive impact on project acceptability and low associated risk of maladaptation. Agricultural land and forests are the main ecosystems where solutions are reported, with an evident association with education and awareness and land use change solutions. Most SDGs and Sendai targets are found to be addressed by the solutions emphasising the importance of documenting project experiences as way to bridge previously reported gaps between policy frameworks and on-the-ground implementation. Despite community involvement being high in many of the solutions, challenges such as gender inequality persists. While solutions often demonstrate local relevance and depth of change, upscaling remains challenging, with limited evidence of mainstreaming and replication. Sustainability criteria are moderately met, incorporating inclusive decision-making but with uncertainty regarding long-term plans. Furthermore, findings underscore the significance of co-developing and maintaining adaptation solution portals, illustrating how this approach enriches our understanding of adaptation progress in mountains. Moreover, this research contributes to broadening the scope of systematic adaptation assessments by providing a nuanced perspective that integrates local needs and diverse knowledge systems. In essence, this study makes a valuable contribution to the evolving landscape of adaptation research, emphasizing the importance of practical insights and collaborative efforts to address the complex challenges posed by climate-related impacts and corresponding adaptation efforts.

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1 Introduction

Climate change is having a significant impact on mountain ecosystems, which are home to a quarter of the world’s population and a source of freshwater for billions of people (Adler et al. 2022 ). Mountain communities are highly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, and changes in the mountain environment can have significant social, economic, and cultural impacts (Huss et al. 2017 ; Mengistu et al. 2020 ; Schmeller et al. 2022 ; Reader et al. 2023a ). Alongside climate and environmental change, demographic change, land use change and urbanisation also create numerous disruptions, in particular when settlements and infrastructures appear in hazard-prone areas (Viviroli et al. 2020 ; Thornton et al. 2022 ). Therefore, adapting to climate change in mountains is essential to ensure the well-being of mountain and lowland communities, as well as the long-term sustainability of mountain ecosystems (McDowell et al. 2019b ; Adler et al. 2022 ).

Evidence from mountain specific research confirms that climate adaptation is taking place in many mountain countries, often as a reaction to realised impacts, and sporadically as part of coordinated strategies and plans (McDowell et al. 2019b ; Adler et al. 2022 ). The status quo of mountain adaptation is that of small adjustments to existing risk management strategies with limited scope and extent. Yet, as risks become ever more complex and pervasive, the need to move from small adjustments to substantial innovation and systemic changes, is becoming more pressing (Colloff et al. 2017 ; Klein et al. 2019 ; Palomo et al. 2021 ; McDowell et al. 2021 ). Indeed, in terms of the hallmark approaches taken to adaptation, those of incremental and transformational adaptation, are perhaps the two most prominent (Kates et al. 2012 ). Although, as many authors have noted, there is no fixed definition for transformative adaptation and its interpretation differs among different users and contexts (Fedele et al. 2019 ), its relevance and necessity are nevertheless widely recognized (Klein et al. 2019 ; Bentz et al. 2022 ). Such importance appears to lie in the need to move from business-as-usual or traditional incremental strategies to systemic commitments that better address the complex challenges linked to climate change risks through a shift in paradigms and values (Lonsdale et al. 2015 ). Lately, the success of adaptation, whether transformative or incremental, has become strongly interrelated to its effectiveness in reducing climate risks (Owen 2020 ; Chausson et al. 2020 ), with the feasibility of adaptation as an indication of potential barriers, limits or maladaptation (Singh et al. 2020 ; Thomas et al. 2021 ).

In the pursuit of achieving a synthetic picture of the overall landscape of adaptation, its characteristics, effectiveness and transformative potential, numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have emerged in the past decade (McDowell et al. 2014 , 2019b ; Berrang-Ford et al. 2015 , 2019 ; Berrang-Ford, Sietsma, et al., 2021 ). Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a combined traditional review methods with machine learning to take stock of empirical adaptation globally. Meanwhile, other reviews have focused on specific sub-topics within the adaptation literature, such as health (Berrang-Ford et al. 2021b ), equity (Araos et al. 2021 ), adaptation limits (Thomas et al. 2021 ), and government adaptation (Berrang-Ford et al. 2019 ). Systematic reviews of adaptation also exist for specific topological regions, including the Arctic (Canosa et al. 2020 ) and mountain areas (McDowell et al. 2014 , 2019b ; Terzi et al. 2019 ; Vij et al. 2021 ).

These reviews have proved extremely valuable to tracking adaptation progress, and some have played a key role in global assessments such as the IPCC (Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ; Adler et al. 2022 ; O’Neill et al. 2022 ). Notwithstanding, they predominantly assess adaptation if evidence is reported in the academic literature. Technical and logistical challenges have been identified when attempting at systematically assessing adaptation practice from the grey literature in ways that are comparable and on pair with the academic evidence (Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ). This is often because adaptation projects carried out in the public, NGO and private sectors are seldomly reported in peer-reviewed literature (McDowell et al. 2019b ; Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ; Vij et al. 2021 ). In response, a number of portals have been developed over the years to track adaptation on the ground, such as Climate-Adapt of the European Environment Agency (Mattern and Jol 2018 ; Dubo et al. 2022 ), the Climate Change Knowledge Portal of the World Bank, and the Dutch adaptation web portal (Laudien et al. 2019 ). Facts and figures from these portals are starting to gain recognition by the scientific literature, and their usefulness is increasingly acknowledged (Laudien et al. 2019 ; Dubo et al. 2022 ; Jevne et al. 2023 ).

This study responds to the urgent need of shedding light on adaptation practice in mountains by compiling wide ranging facts and figures from a dedicated portal on adaptation solutions in mountain regions. It seeks to produce a comprehensive inventory of adaptation efforts taking place in mountains as part of realised and ongoing projects. The focus is placed on implemented adaptation solutions, where solutions are referred to as actual measures, approaches, or processes designed to adjust natural or human systems to current or anticipated climate-related impacts in ways that reduce climate risks and increase resilience (Haasnoot et al. 2020 ). Solutions were collected from the Adaptation at Altitude Solutions Portal (hereafter A@A Solution portal) (Adaptation at Altitude 2021 ), which was co-designed by scientists and practitioners in response to the increased needs of a more practice-oriented science of adaptation that takes into account local necessities and different knowledge systems (Muccione et al. 2019 ). We assessed 88 adaptation solutions initially featured in the A@A Solution portal, implemented across various mountain regions and countries by different organizations and project developers. We explored their characteristics, feasibility and transformative potential. By highlighting the importance of co-developing and maintaining an adaptation solution portal, we demonstrate how such an approach enriches our understanding of adaptation progress in mountains and contribute to broaden the landscape of systematic assessments ofadaptation.

2 Methods and data

The methodological approach used in this study was designed in the context of Adaptation at Altitude (hereafter A@A), launched in 2020. A@A aims to enhance the resilience and adaptive capacities of mountain communities (Adaptation at Altitude 2021 ). The programme addresses four main challenges of adaptation in mountains, namely: (1) data information and monitoring; (2) regional science-policy exchange and collaborative action; (3) knowledge generation and sharing; and (4) policy mainstreaming. To address challenge three, “knowledge generation and sharing”, an online survey was designed to systematically collect relevant information from mountain adaptation projects with the ultimate goal of building a live portal of adaptation solutions in mountains. To this end, the A@A Solution Portal collects, in one place, relevant information concerning numerous adaptation projects and their implementers around the world. The portal allows the sharing and exploring of past or ongoing tried-and-tested adaptation solutions in mountain regions. A schematic view on the methodological approach used in this study is given in Fig. 1 and explained in the next sub-sections.

Schematic overview of the methodological approach used in the paper from survey design to assessment of the solutions

2.1 Survey design

The survey employed to populate the A@A solution portal was co-designed by the partner institutions of the programme and informed by a preparatory phase that included a user needs assessment, as well as a review of existing on-line climate adaptation platforms. The user needs assessment involved eleven semi-structured interviews and one on-line workshop with international actors engaged in the funding, evaluation, planning, management and/or implementation of climate adaptation activities in mountain regions. These stakeholders included representatives from A@A partners, the World Bank, Business for Nature, and lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). More detailed information on the project and its partners can be found on the A@A website (Adaptation at Altitude 2021 ). The user needs consultation was done bottom-up and allowed participants to define the type of information most valuable to practitioners and developers of adaptation projects, as well technical gaps or shortcomings of existing platforms. In parallel, the review of on-line platforms providing climate adaptation solutions was also conducted. This review consisted of three main phases: screening, in-depth analysis of selected platforms, and gaps identification. From the 55 platforms screened, 20 were selected for in-depth analysis. This analysis revealed that more than half of the platforms (54%) showcase climate change adaptation (CCA) solutions primarily at the local scale, followed by mixed (23%, this category includes local, regional, national, international and global), national (15%) and regional (8%) level solutions. None of the analysed platforms specifically focussed on mountain regions, nor considered a comprehensive range of factors that enable or limit transformative potential. The results of the preparatory phase are described in (Scolobig A. et al. 2020 ). The final product of the preparatory phase was a survey with multiple choices and open-ended questions that served to populate the solution portal. The survey was co-developed in an iterative process involving A@A partners in eight review rounds. Along with the descriptive information, the survey collected significant supporting documentation, and the contact details of some of the principal actors involved in the planning and/or implementation processes.

An overview of the main information collected through the survey is given in Table 1 , while a copy of the survey can be found in the supplementary material. Project implementers fill in the survey through an electronic template. This process benefitted from the extensive media efforts of the A@A team that promoted the survey and ultimately the solution portal on websites of the partner institutions, Facebook, X (former Twitter) and LinkedIn, as well as in workshops, seminars, and conferences, mainly under the umbrella of the A@A programme. In addition to project implementers directly responding to the survey, the A@A team also actively collected information from project resources available online, in all cases iterating with project implementers to ensure accuracy of the information entered into the portal. Training resources for filling in the survey, such as a step-by-step guide, an example of a filled-in survey, and the inclusion of sample responses into the questionnaire were made available through the A@A website. To secure consistency and high quality of information, all completed surveys undergo a quality control evaluation, performed by the project team before the corresponding adaptation solution is published on the portal. At the time of writing this article, the A@A Solution Portal consisted of 88 solutions.

2.2 Analytical framework of the survey

For the purpose of this study, we assessed the (1) general characteristics of the solutions, namely location, climate impact addressed, type of mountain ecosystem, sectors where the solution was implemented and type of solution, (2) their feasibility and effectiveness, and (3) their transformation potential. To measure feasibility, we followed a concept developed by Singh et al. 2020 where feasibility is understood as the potential for an adaptation solution to be implemented. We measured the contribution made to the implementation of the solutions in terms of knowledge, technology, political/legal, institutional and socio-cultural factors, to which we refer as “capacities”. Such list of factors was agreed upon using existing literature (Singh et al. 2020 ) and supplemented by the user needs consultations. The analogy of feasibility with capacity is related to the concept of adaptive capacity in adaptation science, which is the ability of a systems to prepare for, or respond to potential damages, and to take advantage of new opportunities by making the appropriate adjustments. The definition of each category is provided in Table 1 . We measured each category using a qualitative scoring from 0 (not present) and 1 (very low), to 5 (very high). To capture effectiveness, we focused on the outcomes of adaptation (Singh et al. 2020 ), both as risk reduction benefits and as more extensive benefits derived from adaptation as improvement in environmental, economic or socio-political conditions (Remling and Persson 2015 ; Sharifi 2021 ).

Regarding the transformation potential of adaptation solutions, this was measured using the four key dimensions for transformations developed by the World Bank (World Bank Group 2016 ). This choice is justified by the need to focus on an approach coming from an applied or practical perspective. In a nutshell, we measured four dimensions:

Relevance – does the solution address a major constraint or problem of critical importance to sustainable development in mountain regions?

Depth of change – does the solution cause or support fundamental change in a governance system or behaviour?

Scalability of change – could the solution be feasibly scaled-up and duplicated in other mountain regions?

Sustainability – does the solution demonstrate financial, economic, and environmental sustainability?

One key difference from more academic approaches such as those that measure transformations as speed (how fast adaptation is being implemented), scope (breadth of the measures in terms of both sectorial and spatial extent), and depth (represents the novelty of adaptation actions) (Termeer et al. 2017 ; Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ), is that we allocated a greater emphasis on the potential for scaling up, rather than on the initial scale of the solution. This enabled the inclusion of small-scale solutions (e.g., community-based approaches) that may be only in the pilot phase but offer large potential for future replication and mainstreaming. An overview on the characteristics assessed, as well as proxies to measure feasibility, effectiveness and transformation (or transformative potential) is given in Table 1 .

For the data analysis, the information included in the solution portal was downloaded from the A@A Portal website and saved in an excel sheet. The dataset was subjected to a series of pre-processing steps to ensure its suitability for subsequent analysis. The dataset was structured into a Pandas dataframe object. The dataframe serves as a two-dimensional, size-mutable, and heterogeneous tabular data structure, providing a convenient and intuitive way to perform data manipulation and analysis (Pandas 2024 ). To facilitate analysis of categorical variables, we applied one-hot encoding, converting categorical attributes into a binary representation. Such transformation is essential for preparing categorical data for certain types of analysis that require numerical input. To analyse the solution description text, we first utilize the spaCy ( https://spacy.io/ ), which is an open-source natural language processing library specifically crafted for extracting information from text corpora. Subsequently, the term-frequency times inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique is employed to reducing the influence of frequently occurring words that lack informative value within the corpus (Leskovec 2014 ). TF-IDF serve diverse purposes, including facilitating the visualization of words via word clouds.

The capacities were scored on a five-point scale going from very low to very high. The score for each solution and its capacities was assessed by a minimum of 2 project members to check for consistencies and discussions were held until agreement was reached on the final score. The score was also triangulated with the qualitative description of the text on the corresponding capacity, which is also stored in the solution database.

At the time of analysis, the solution portal contained 88 discrete adaptation solutions. New solutions are being uploaded to the A@A Portal on an ongoing basis. The final dataset with the 88 solutions can be found in the supplementary material and the notebooks needed to reproduce all analysis and figures are available through the https://github.com/vmuccion/Adaptation-Altitude .

3.1 General characteristics of solutions

The first entry in the database alongside the unique title, is a description of the solution. Figure 2 displays a word cloud illustrating the prevalence of the words extracted from the description text. Notably, “water” is highlighted as the most prevalent word, followed by other key words such as “community”, “land”, “local”, and “capacity”. This pattern indicated a prevalence of community and local based measures, with water being the dominant aspect, not only in terms of sector, but also concerning the typology of solutions.

World cloud of most frequent single words obtained from the summary description of the solutions

The geographical distribution of solutions in Fig. 3 (top panel) shows that there is a considerable tendency in the portal towards specific regions such as North and Southwestern South America, East Africa, and the Hindukush Himalaya (HKH) region. Moreover, there is a handful of solutions in Europe and the Caucasus, but so far, none from North America or Oceania. This is because the solution portal was mainly an effort to collect solutions from the Global South, expressed through the stakeholder needs consultation. However, efforts are underway to have a more balanced geographical coverage that includes additional regions. When it comes to the impacts addressed (Fig. 3 bottom panel), a diversity can be observed in the majority of continents, except in Europe.

Top figure shows a choropleth map of the solutions per country. The bottom figure shows the proportion of climate impacts addressed per continent. Only continents having at least one solution or more are shown

The general characteristics of the solutions are shown in Fig. 4 . Across all solutions, drought emerges as the most common climate impact addressed (63), followed by flood (39), and almost in equal proportion, landslides, altered growing seasons, and heat stress. Wildfire is addressed by only 5 solutions. In addition to these main impacts, the portal retains information on secondary impacts as well. The open nature of this question resulted in greater diversity in terms of reported impacts. In this case, water stress is the most common secondary impact, followed by land degradation, and glacier lake outburst flood. Other secondary impacts include erosion, snow scarcity, and unseasonal frost. The distribution of solution types shows that education and awareness, as well as land use practice, are the most common solution types, followed by monitoring and engineering strategies. Finance solutions are the least common. The sectorial distribution is dominated by agriculture and water, reflecting the emphasis on addressing drought and flood. A similar distribution is seen amongst other sectors, namely human health and well-being, natural hazards, plans and policy, ecosystem, and biodiversity. Tourism and transport are the least covered sectors. Finally, there is a more proportional distribution in the ecosystem types, with a prevalence of agricultural land, forest and high alpine. Urban solutions represent the lowest percentage.

Summary of the main characteristics across all solutions, from top to bottom clockwise, in orange the number of solutions per climate impact addressed, in blue the number of solutions per mountain ecosystem type, in green the number of solutions per solution type and finally in pink the number of solutions per sector

To gain deeper insights into adaptation efforts—particularly the nature, location, and methodologies of implemented solutions—we analyzed the co-occurrence of selected pairs of characteristics. As depicted in Fig. 5 , this analysis focuses on the relationships between solution types and climate impacts (left panel), as well as between solution types and ecosystems (right panel). Notably, education and awareness initiatives, along with land use practices, emerge as the predominant strategies employed to address a wide array of impacts. This includes adapting to the effects of droughts and floods, which constitute the primary climate impacts documented within our portal. Our observations reveal that solutions emphasizing education and awareness are frequently implemented in response to these challenges, complemented by the adoption of land use practices and engineering solutions. However, wildfire mitigation efforts are relatively limited, represented by only five documented solutions, thus revealing a lack of discernible co-occurrence patterns. Moreover, when examining the ecosystems wherein these solutions are enacted, it becomes evident that education and awareness types, alongside land use practices, are prevalent across diverse ecosystem types, spanning from agricultural lands to lakes and rivers. Conversely, fewer solutions are observed in ecosystems such as meadows, peatlands, and urban mountain areas, resulting in a lack of notable co-occurrence patterns within these contexts.

The heatmap on the left side represents co-occurrence between solution types and climate impact addressed; the heatmap on the right side represents co-occurrence between solution types and ecosystem types. The numbers within each cell represent the observation counts in ascending order from light blue to dark blue

3.2 Feasibility and effectiveness

Presented here are the feasibility results assessed through the lenses of five capacity categories, scored on a qualitative scale ranging from very low to very high, as shown in Fig. 6 . As can be observed, many of the solutions exhibit very high capacity in all the categories. Knowledge capacities ensure that adaptation is informed from the outset by diverse knowledge types, including scientific, evidence based, and indigenous knowledge. Overall, political/legal and technology capacities were evaluated by solution providers as less crucial than knowledge, institutional, and socio-cultural capacities in enabling the implementation of the solutions. In contrast, providers gave high evaluations to the role played by socio-cultural and institutional capacities. However, it should be noted that approximately one quarter of solutions do not report results on one or more capacities. This gap in reporting complicates the determination of whether a specific capacity is relevant for that solution or not.

The figure shows the number of self-assessed solutions with respect to the five dimensions of capacity on a qualitative scale going from very low to very high. NA means that the dimension was either not assessed or was not relevant

In order to understand the effectiveness of solutions in delivering positive changes ex-post, we explored various categories of benefits. All solutions have benefits associated to them. Our observations indicate that the majority of solutions have resulted in environmental benefits (33), followed by climate risk reduction (32). Other key benefits include social (13), economic (6), and technological (1) benefits. No solution indicates political benefits (Fig. 7 ).

Number of solutions reporting some type of benefits after implementation

3.3 Transformative potential

The last segment of the analysis focuses on the assessment of the transformative potential of solutions whereby transformation is assessed according to the indicators described in SM Fig. 1 . The file used to assess the transformative potential is uploaded as supplementary dataset. Figure 8 summarises the results, depicting the number of solutions addressing specific criteria measured by corresponding sets of indicators. As it can be observed, relevance is prevalent across almost all the solutions, except for a handful which either address only one sector or report no specific climate impacts. The depth of change also shows a similar behaviour, with most solutions showing evidence of innovation within their own context and addressing multiple SDGs and Sendai Targets. Further details on specific SDGs and Sendai Target, as well as on their relationship, is provided later in this section. Sustainability is reported in more than two thirds of the solutions, while only a few solutions provide evidence on the scalability of change. While we acknowledge the importance of tailoring adaptation solutions to local environmental, cultural, social and institutional contexts, under transformative adaptation there is an expectation to see learnings and a pathway forward as to how the basic fundamentals of the solution could be transferred to another community, village, district, country or region. Evidence of mainstreaming into wider policies and plans is reported in less than one third of the solutions, and approximately half of them offer evidence of overcoming barriers and successful replication.

Number of solutions for each indicator of transformative potential. A score of 1 is given for each of the indicators being present and 0 when there is no evidence of such. Indicators corresponding to the same dimension of transformations are grouped by colour to facilitate observations. The dimension is shown on top of each group of indicators

In line with the survey design and scope of the study, this analysis includes a review of the principal contributions that the solutions provided to the SDGs (United Nations, 2022). Likewise, the survey also sought to investigate evidence of supporting at least one of the 7 global targets set under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Observations indicate that most solutions address at least one SDG, while 18 solutions do not address any of the Sendai targets. Overall, all SDGs, except “life under water” (Fig. 9 ), and all of the Sendai targets (Fig. 10 ) are addressed by the solutions. Some solutions address more than one SDG or Sendai target. As it could be expected given its relevance on the matter of climate adaptation, the most common SDG addressed is Goal 13 (Climate Action), followed by Goal 15 (Life on Land), and Goal 1 (No Poverty). Goals 4 (Quality Education), 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), and 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) are the least frequent. In the case of Sendai Targets, target B, “Substantially reduce the number of affected people globally by 2030”, is addressed by almost 2/3 of the solutions. Target A, “Substantially reduce global disaster mortality by 2030”, is the least addressed target.

The figure shows the number of solutions addressing each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Details on the SDGs are provided on the right side of the figure

The figure shows the number of solutions addressing each of the 7 Sendai Targets. Details on the targets are provided on the right side of the figure

4 Discussions and conclusions

Documented adaptation efforts which are measurable and comparable are critical to track progress on the status of implementation (Magnan and Chalastani 2019 , Nalau 2021 ). Therefore, it is essential to assess adaptation experiences by systematically collecting and analysing information on implementation that is happening on the ground (McDowell 2019 ). To respond to this need and as testimony of increasing adaptation efforts, several adaptation portals have appeared in the past few years. These portals facilitate organized tracking of adaptation progress and are well suited for further analysis and assessments (Cebrián-Piqueras 2023 ). In this study, we analysed and assessed the recently implemented or ongoing adaptation solutions in mountain regions, that were collected from the Adaptation at Altitude Solution’s Portal.

The initial survey employed to populate the portal, was co-designed with a bottom-up process by experts and practitioners, this with the aim to capture the elements of adaptation which matter to both groups.

Our research results illustrate that drought (63) is largely the most targeted climate impact, followed by flood (39). This finding is corroborated by systematic reviews, and research articles consistently highlights drought as the primary climate impact targeted for adaptation, followed by flood, in mountain regions (Dubo et al. 2022 ; Wyss et al. 2022 ). Furthermore, the latest IPCC report also indicates that drought and flood pose key risks with the potential for severe consequences for mountain people and livelihoods and highlighted the significance and urgency of addressing water-related hazards in mountains (Adler et al. 2022 ). The prevalence and importance of water for mountains and adaptation are visible in the key words analysis of solutions summary description in Fig. 2 . Interestingly, it is observed that many of the solutions addressing water-related impacts prioritize the integration of watershed management practices. These practices have demonstrated their capacity to effectively tackle multiple concerns beyond climate impacts, including the improvement of water quality (Shin et al. 2023 ), the promotion of aquifer recharge (Bigdeli Nalbandan et al. 2023 ), and the enhancement of the natural linkages between upstream and downstream areas through transdisciplinary planning process (Cheng et al. 2017 ).

When examining the type of solutions, there is a prevalence of education and awareness focused solutions, followed by land use practices. These solutions although implemented to address the majority of climate impacts, appear to be commonly implemented to respond to impacts from floods and droughts (see Fig. 5 ). Evidence indicates that the implementation of this type of solutions is often accompanied by improvements in project acceptability and reduced risk of maladaptation (Nalau and Cobb 2022 ). This positive outcome is attributed to the fact that awareness is, in most cases, the result of community involvement (Oliver et al. 2023 ). The solutions showcased on the A@A Solutions Portal reveal a high involvement of local community groups and populations in project activities, well beyond the classical initial consultations. Remarkably, about 75% of solutions show inclusive decision making (see Fig. 8 ). However, despite the pivotal role of community participation, the exercise often faces a number of challenges and requires careful handling to prevent the reinforcement of social issues, such as gender inequality and class-based hierarchies (Nalau and Cobb 2022 ; Singh 2020 ).

Agriculture land and forests emerge as the main mountain ecosystems wherein solutions are reported, with agriculture and water being the main sectors within which solutions are mostly implemented. This further reflects the importance of tackling water-related impacts and risks for the management of critical sectors, given that mountains boast some of the highest proportions of water availability globally, as well as water withdrawal (Reader et al. 2023b ). The type of solutions implemented in these mountain ecosystems point at a prevalence of education and awareness and land use practices since, as already mentioned, these are by far the most used solutions. It is not surprising that land use practices are highly present in forest and agricultural land areas. However, while the dataset highlights a significant contribution of education and awareness as adaptation solutions in almost every typology of ecosystem, it paradoxically reveals a low impact on Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) regarding quality education (Fig. 7 ). This discrepancy may stem from the underreporting of capacity-building and awareness-raising activities under the broad category of education. Additionally, it prompts consideration of whether the targets outlined in SDG 4 are perceived as exclusively related to conventional curriculum-based education, potentially overlooking non-traditional forms of educational initiatives such as those related to awareness raising or building capacity. McKenzie et al. ( 2024 ) have argued that indeed it is currently difficult to track progress on SDG4 in relation to climate change due to a lack of quality and appropriate indicators. Despite this discrepancy, the overall picture remains positive, with many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Sendai targets being addressed laterally within the solution portal, with only a few exceptions (Fig. 7 ). This observation aligns with the significant synergies underscored in the IPCC WG2 Cross-Chapter paper on Mountains (Adler et al. 2022 ). Based on the findings of our research, we have identified that several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Sendai targets are indeed addressed within the solution portal. This evidence counters previously highlighted gaps that acknowledged the limited evidence of implementation of international agendas in addressing disaster risk reduction and adaptation in mountainous regions (Adler et al. 2022 ; Alcántara-Ayala et al. 2022 ). By tracking evidence collected from empirical adaptation, we underscore here the imperative for sustained efforts to bridge the disparity between policy frameworks and their practical implementation on the ground.

Nuanced concepts such as feasibility, effectiveness, and transformative potential, were assessed by means of proxy indicators. In the case of feasibility, we examined the score of five main categories of capacity that were present in the project survey and that are analogous to the characterisation of feasibility according to existing literature (Singh et al. 2020 ). Although the results in Fig. 6 would point at high to very high capacity for many categories, we recognise that there is a high proportion of solutions which do not provide such information and cannot be assessed. There are nonetheless some noticeable patterns as for example, the fact that knowledge capacities score very high for more than half of solutions, whereas technological capacities show a more heterogeneous picture as enablers of solution implementation. This could be due to technology in mountain areas, being used in diverse ways, such as the development of high-resolution models that incorporate climate and socio-economic impacts on natural ecosystems, and on significant resources such as hydrological components (Immerzeel et al. 2020 ). At the same time, adaptation initiatives may rely on the formulation of structural and physical components (e.g., hard adaptation), addressing agriculture and food security, water management, and infrastructure, for example, through the creation of reservoirs and modern irrigation systems, water conservation techniques, and hazard management technologies such as early warning systems (Adler et al. 2022 ). However, in contrast, solutions which focus on education and awareness raising do not rely upon strong technical capacities from the onset, but rather aim to build these capacities through the lifetime of the project. A more pessimistic explanation for the medium to low scores could be the lack of appropriate technological know-how and technology transfer where it is most needed (Wang et al. 2020 ). This though would be at odds with the high score in the knowledge capacities, which can be reasonably associated with technological knowhow, among other dimensions of knowledge. The effectiveness also scores low in technical and political benefits, which might again indicate a persistence in the low technologic and political scores even after solutions are implemented. This last assertion would confirm the findings in McDowell et al. 2021 ; which cite limited technological know-how and political willingness as hindrances to the full realization of adaptation solutions in mountainous areas. In general, we can infer that solutions are being effective in reducing risks and improving environmental conditions and are benefitting from high knowledge capacities to enable implementation. Nevertheless, solutions do not seem to spur technological or political improvements, or such improvements are not relevant to the project scope, which suggests possible missed opportunities for important co-benefits. Analogous studies which performed systematic assessments of the adaptation literature in mountain regions have reported also environmental co-benefits but limited political or institutional positive spill over (Aggarwal et al. 2022 ).

To get a sense of the transformative potential of solutions, we explored transformations through the lenses of four criteria, namely relevance, depth of change, scalability of change, and sustainability. We see from the results in Fig. 8 that solutions are being implemented where they are most relevant, and that almost all of them cause or support fundamental change (depth of change). As most solutions are local or sub-national (see Fig. 3 ), it is plausible to infer that such depth of change happens more at the community level. However, the fact that upscaling is difficult to achieve poses questions concerning the identification of the enabling factors that eventually lead to upscaling. This is also supported by the finding that only a handful of solutions provide evidence of mainstreaming and replication. Berrang-Ford et al. ( 2021a ) confirmed this trend of limited scope of solutions in their global stocktake of human adaptation. Indeed, they reported that globally, adaptation solutions generally have a limited geographical extent and low levels of mainstreaming (Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ). In part, this comes down to the typical short duration of adaptation projects (4–5 years) where mainstreaming becomes something of an afterthought towards the end of the project cycle rather than a goal in itself. Nonetheless, the reported success of the mountain solutions in terms of depth of change at local or sub-national level bodes well for future mainstreaming and upscaling, even if this is not occurring as rapidly as would be desired.

In essence, we can say that while the criteria of relevance and, to a geographically limited extent, depth of change, have largely been met, solutions had difficulties in demonstrating that their contribution to deliver large-scale impact by introducing new measures into the local policy frameworks or by replicating their actions in other locations. Research on social innovation identifies different types of upscaling that may be instrumental also for climate adaptation (Moore et al. 2015 ), namely, scale up (impacting laws and policies), scale out (increasing number of people or communities impacted by the solution), and scale deep (impacting cultural values and beliefs). Given the longer time frames needed, designing project with a second phase dedicated to mainstreaming and upscaling efforts would significantly increase the transformative potential of adaptation solutions in mountain regions.

The sustainability criteria are moderately met for our analysed solutions, and it is encouraging to see that inclusive decision-making processes and future proofing are being embedded in many of them. It is less clear though, whether long term plans are being integrated, and again, this is something that confirms the limited scalability and mainstreaming potential of solutions. Limited scalability, mainstreaming, and long-term planning could be all explained by an observed tendency in climate project decision making to leave planning and discussion around scaling up or replication until very late stages or following the closure of interventions (Jain and Bardhan 2023 ). Furthermore, the gap in the implementation of adaptation mainstreaming seems closely related to the lack of political commitment and mandate at the higher governmental levels (Runhaar et al. 2018 ).

Far from being all encompassing, the A@A Solution Portal misses yet the showcasing of other important mountain regions, possibly because of a bias in the initial scope of the survey and solicitation efforts, which were mainly geared towards international development and cooperation. Fortunately, efforts are underway to have a more geographically balanced display of solutions that will enhance learning between mountain regions in the global south and north. It is worth pointing out that the portal collected information not only from the project developers and implementers but also triangulated this information with project evaluation reports, which are usually developed by independent evaluation bodies and consultants. Typical mid-term or final project reports are normally based on a mix of interviews conducted with those involved in project implementation and projected beneficiaries. To minimise bias in reporting, the information was thoroughly screened for quality control by the independent team members from the A@A project. For example, project reports only seldomly involve any longer-term monitoring and evaluation of the solutions. Hence, effort was made during the quality control to ensure that statements around the foreseen long-term success and sustainability of the solutions was well-supported with concrete evidence that financial and technical plans were in place. Obvious difficulties exist for reaching out to an independent and representative sample of stakeholders, particularly ensuring representation of the most vulnerable or marginalised members of the communities. Therefore, the implementation of adaptation project design should from the beginning include more regular external evaluations and broader stakeholder engagement, whose views would equally constitute the body of independent evidence for ex-post project assessment (Wamsler et al. 2020 ; Oliver et al. 2023 ). In absence of such independent information, it is often difficult to get a sense of the progress for those who are the direct beneficiaries of these solutions and therefore such views cannot fully by captured in the remit of this solution portal. The second phase of the A@A project will attempt to fill this gap for selected solutions, by undertaking focus group meetings and interviews with benefactors and other stakeholders to gain ground level insights on the long-term effectiveness of the implemented solutions.

Another challenge of adaptation is the persistent lack of integration of concepts and terminology across different strains of literature, whether adaptation, vulnerability, or impact driven (Berrang-Ford et al. 2021a ). This has been identified as a persistent barrier to adaptation assessment. To this end we invoke here for a common adaptation taxonomy. Currently absent, such a taxonomy would require consensus within the broadest community, offering scholars and practitioners a detailed and common description of benefits, ecosystems, sectors, solutions, capacities, as well as other critical concepts. The survey conducted within this study presents intriguing entry points for such a taxonomy specific to mountain regions. For instance, it identifies solutions and their characteristics in mountains, including sectors, ecosystems, and solution types. Yet, further work is necessary to achieve a robust consensus.

Data availability

Data and Jupyter notebooks for the analysis are all accessible through the following GitHub repository https://github.com/vmuccion/Adaptation-Altitude .

Code Availability

The notebooks are accessible through GitHub: https://github.com/vmuccion/Adaptation-Altitude .

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This research has been supported by the Adaptation at Altitude project, which is a project financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

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VM developed the concept for the paper and wrote every section of the manuscript. She did extensive data pre-processing and most of the data analysis. SKA had the initial ideas for such a paper and contributed in developing the methodology to assess the transformative potential together with JA. AS and JA were actively involved in the development of the methodology for the data collection and quality control. RW and JB hosted the portal database and provided VM with the raw dataset from the Adaptation at Altitude website. RW maintained the Adaptation at Altitude Portal together with JZ, OS, and SKA. Everyone contributed to edit and revise the paper. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to [email protected].

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Muccione, V., Aguilera Rodriguez, J., Scolobig, A. et al. Trends in climate adaptation solutions for mountain regions. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 29 , 74 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-024-10168-8

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comprehensive report, Gender in the Global Research Landscape, a follow-on to Elsevier's groundbreaking 2015 report, Mapping Gender in the German Research Arena. Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies. Drawing upon a collection of high-quality global data sources and analytical expertise,
Gender in the Global Research Landscape
Elsevier recently released a comprehensive report on research performance through a gender lens, called Gender in the Global Research Landscape. This global study draws upon data and analytics, a unique gender disambiguation methodology, and involvement of global experts to provide powerful insight and guidance on gender equality policy for ...
The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens
Based on 20 years of data from Scopus across 12 geographies and all 27 Scopus subject areas, this is the third report Elsevier has produced on gender in the research landscape. It follows a global report released in 2017 and a report on Germany in 2015. As with these previous studies, the 2020 report serves as a vehicle for understanding the role gender plays in the global research enterprise.
Gender equality in science, medicine, and global health: where are we
The fields of science, medicine, and global health are in the midst of a gender reckoning. 1 Four contemporary social movements have helped to shape the global gender and health landscape: online movements against violence, including #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos; intersectional feminism; the evolving recognition of men and masculinities; and the global transgender rights movement.
Elsevier Gender Report: Gender in the Global Research Landscape
This free report covers 20 years, 12 geographies and 27 subject areas, providing powerful insight and guidance on gender research and gender equality policy ...
Patchy progress on fixing global gender disparities in science
Patchy progress on fixing global gender disparities in science. Nature ( 2017) Cite this article. 'Leaky pipeline' stands the test of time, with overall progress for women in research ...
Gender in the Global Research Landscape
Elsevier's comprehensive report on research performance through a gender lens, Gender in the Global Research Landscape, spans 20 years, 12 geographies, and 27 disciplines. This global study draws upon data and analytics, a unique gender disambiguation methodology, and involvement of global experts. Source
"We have a responsibility": Elsevier's Holly Falk-Krzesinski on gender
Pictured above: Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, PhD, Gender Working Group Co-chair and Vice President of Research Intelligence at Elsevier, presents data from Elsevier's 2017 Gender in the Global Research Landscape report at the Gender Representation in Academia Summit, hosted by the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
Gender in the Global Research Landscape Report
Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies. Drawing upon our high-quality global data sources, analytical expertise and unique gender disambiguation methodology, Elsevier has produced this comprehensive new report, Gender in the Global Research Landscape, as an evidence-based examination of research performance worldwide through a gender lens and as ...
Gender bias distorts peer review across fields
This bias was stronger for men, the researchers report in a study 3 published on 21 March in eLife. Previous papers have looked at gender bias in peer review, but most of them have focused on one ...
Gender in the global research landscape report raw data
Raw data behind the Gender in the Global Research Landscape Report, which provides an analysis of research performance through a gender lens across 20 years, 12 geographies, and 27 subject areas, is now available online.
Gender in the Global Research Landscape
Elsevier's Gender Report importantly supports SDG 5 - gender equality - by applying a gender lens to the field of science and research. It examines the proportion of female researchers and inventors in twelve countries, the fields women tend to specialise in and whether women or men publish more articles. This report provides sound data for understanding the role of gender within the structure ...
Elsevier report: Gender in the Global Research Landscape
Elsevier report: Gender in the Global Research Landscape. Elsevier's comprehensive report on research performance through a gender lens spans 20 years, 12 geographies (including the EU and Japan), and 27 disciplines. This global study draws upon data and analytics, a unique gender disambiguation methodology, and involvement of global experts.
Sex, gender and the brain: Towards an inclusive research agenda
Economist Impact conducted an in-depth research program exploring the role of sex and gender in brain disease outcomes to define the economic case for greater investment in sex and gender inclusive brain research. The burden of death and disability from brain diseases is a global health challenge, costing over US$800bn in the United States (US ...
Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on
We captured relevant keywords from: i) keywords from publications within the public Mendeley library "Gender in the Global Research Landscape" ; ii) terms used by established organizations and societies, e.g. Gender Identity Research and Education Society, UNICEF and UNESCO; iii) and terms provided by Portia Ltd, the organizer of the Gender ...
Gender in the Global Research Landscape Report Symposium
Critical issues related to gender disparity and bias must be examined by sound studies. Drawing upon its high-quality global data sources and analytical expertise, Elsevier is developing a comprehensive new report, Gender in the Global Research Landscape, as an evidence-based examination of the outputs, quality, and impact of research worldwide through a gender lens ...continue reading "Gender ...
Integrating the gender dimension in teaching, research content
A similar approach has been pursued in Elseviers report on "Gender in the Global Research Landscape" which demonstrates that gender- and sex issues are addressed over an increasing spectrum of scientific disciplines, contributing to the growth in terms of size and complexity (Elsevier, 2017). However, automated metrics for assessing the ...
The Global Gender Gap: Research and Researchers
"Gender in the Global Research Landscape" uses data from Elsevier's Scopus database of over 62 million documents to identify trends in global research from a gender perspective over 20 years, 12 countries and regions, and 27 subject areas. The three main topics covered in the report are: The global research landscape through a gender lens ...
Introduction: the future of teaching gender and development
Background to the special issue. Gender and development (GAD), as an interdisciplinary field of study, has existed since the 1950s. Within the discipline, there have been many theoretical shifts, beginning with Women in Development - an approach to contesting existing theories of economic development as having identical impact on men and women (Boserup Citation 1970; Reeves and Baden ...
In a time of global anti-gender politics, research and activism also
In countries where gender studies are banned and hostility against LGBTQ+ people and organisations is at the core of national-level politics, academic research on and resistance to anti-gender politics has to be transnational. Because anti-gender networks are also transnational, and politicians borrow ideas from each other.
Trends in climate adaptation solutions for mountain regions
This study addresses the critical need for documented adaptation progress in mountain regions by reviewing recently implemented or ongoing adaptation solutions collected from the Adaptation at Altitude Solutions Portal (A@A Solution Portal). Using a data driven approach, the research explores the characteristics, feasibility, and transformative potential of these solutions. Findings reveal a ...

Gender in the Global Research Landscape

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Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

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Most SDGs have a low and steady proportion of publications related to sex and/or gender

SDG 5: Gender equality has the expected high coverage of sex and gender relevant research

Sex and gender relevant research is unevenly spread across SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being

Sex and gender aspects of SDG 4: Quality education are explicit in education practice but not education policy research

SDG 13: Climate action has very low coverage of sex and gender relevant research

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