Introduction
Gender equality has been embedded in the European Union’s legal and policy framework for decades. The principle of equal pay was established in the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The 1996 European Commission Communication introduced gender mainstreaming across all EU policy areas. The EU Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 further emphasises equal labour market participation, reduction of gender pay gaps, and improved work–life balance. In addition, the CAP 2023–2027 explicitly promotes gender equality and women’s participation in farming. This paper benchmarks the situation of women in Lithuanian agriculture against these strategic commitments.

Methods
A policy benchmarking approach is applied, using EU strategic documents as normative reference points. Quantitative indicators from Eurostat and national statistics are analysed to assess Lithuania’s alignment with EU objectives across three dimensions: economic equality, policy integration, and work–life balance.

Results
Lithuania represents a paradox within the EU: while it has one of the highest shares of women farm managers, structural inequalities remain pronounced. A persistent gender pay gap of around 6% in agriculture challenges the principle of equal pay. Women-managed farms are significantly smaller and generate substantially lower economic output, limiting economic parity. Although gender equality is recognised in CAP objectives, Lithuania’s CAP Strategic Plan does not systematically address the structural constraints faced by women farmers. Furthermore, time-use data show that 60% of women versus 33% of men perform daily domestic work, indicating an unequal distribution of care responsibilities, which constrains women’s participation in innovation and leadership.

Conclusions
The Lithuanian case demonstrates a clear implementation gap between EU gender equality commitments and rural realities, highlighting the need for gender-sensitive agricultural policy and targeted structural support.

Introduction

Gender norms fundamentally shape social identities, power dynamics, and daily interactions. Popular culture mirrors these norms while actively constructing and contesting gendered meanings. In Türkiye, television series and social media are pivotal arenas for feminist debates and representations of masculinity. This study centers on how feminist discourses challenge masculine norms, examines portrayals of masculinity and diverse female representations in popular culture, and explores their societal impact on gender perceptions.

Methods

A qualitative approach was used, employing content and thematic analyses. The dataset includes three popular Turkish TV series—Masumlar Apartmanı, Kırmızı Oda, and Camdaki Kız—covering 20+ episodes from 2019–2024 and featuring gender-centric arcs (e.g., abuse, vulnerability, empowerment). It also covers 50+ social media posts from feminist influencers like @feministtarih and @kadinkultur on Instagram and X. A gender theory-informed coding framework addressed feminism (autonomy, resistance), masculinity norms (dominance, restraint), power relations (patriarchy), and female representations (agency vs. subjugation). Themes were coded in NVivo and interpreted against gender and media scholarship to assess validity.

Results

Female portrayals are ambivalent: some depict empowerment and feminist awareness (e.g., protagonists resisting abuse in Camdaki Kız), others uphold traditional domesticity (e.g., sacrificial mothers in Masumlar Apartmanı). Masculinity emphasizes dominance, emotional stoicism, authority, and provider roles, remaining rigid amid crises (e.g., stoic leads in Kırmızı Oda). Social media amplifies feminist critiques and diverse female images-intersectional identities, activism, yet hegemonic masculinity dominates TV, sustaining gender hierarchies.

Conclusions

Türkiye's popular culture is a contested space: feminist challenges erode masculine norms, but traditional portrayals reproduce them. Diverse female representations grow visible via social media, yet entrenched masculinity curbs transformation. This duality highlights the media's role in cultural battles. Findings advance gender-media studies, offering insights for creators, scholars, and policymakers to promote equality through equitable narratives.

Introduction
This article examines university engineering education in Spain’s rural areas, with particular attention paid to depopulated regions such as Castile and León, and identifies the gender gap as the system’s principal constraint. In addition to demographic decline, it assesses the extent to which limited female participation is constraining the development of human capital in comparison with the rest of the country.

Method
Official data on engineering enrollment and graduation rates are used, broken down by level (bachelor's and doctorate), region, and gender. The analysis prioritizes the evolution of female participation and projects trends up to 2030.

Results
The data show a decrease in enrollment and low participation at the doctoral level, but the most significant problem is the persistent underrepresentation of women. Women remain a minority at the undergraduate level and have not achieved parity at the doctoral level. This gap directly reduces the available talent pool and exacerbates the effects of demographic decline.

Conclusions
The gender gap is not only a matter of equity, but also the main obstacle to the system's sustainability. Without the greater incorporation of women, Castile and León will continue to lose training and research capacity by 2030.

The study is grounded in an intersectional approach that examines the intersecting identities of gender, ethnicity, and class, producing triangular marginalization. To be more specific, it raises the following question: How do these overlapping layers of exclusion contribute to establishing the higher education and social assimilation of Indigenous women in urban Bangladesh? While migration can be a source of empowerment and a learning process in the case of Indigenous women of Bangladesh, it tends to cause institutional marginalization. This paper evaluates the situation of Indigenous women students who have moved to urban areas, such as Chittagong and Dhaka. The data were collected qualitatively, and semi-structured interviews were used to examine structural exclusion at both the academic and social levels. Additionally, this study analyzes how structural inequalities shape the higher education of Indigenous women. The findings suggest that Indigenous women students have been struggling with the language barrier and cultural alienation from the mainstream culture of patriarchy. Colleges and universities are referred to as inclusive, yet in practice, they marginalize and generalize minority identities. This study reveals the current equity policies by comparing two cities. It concludes that the policy and its implementation should be more practically inclusive and overcome various barriers, including gender prejudice and ethnic and social segregation. This study advocates for inclusion over exclusion in the educational experiences of Indigenous women and emphasizes the need for programs to address their challenges and promote equality.

This study addresses the "hermeneutical injustice" in Algeria, where evolving social realities for women are constrained by a stagnant linguistic repertoire. While legal frameworks have modernized, the conceptual "software," specifically gendered metaphors, remains tethered to 19th-century restrictive archetypes. This research applied Conceptual Engineering and Cognitive Metaphor Theory to develop an ameliorative program, aiming to redesign metaphors that stifle female agency. Utilizing a mixed-methods concurrent triangulation design, this study first analyzed a 500,000-word digital corpus of Algerian media and social discourse (2019-2025) using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP). Secondly, twenty purposively sampled "conceptual stakeholders" (lawyers and activists) were interviewed to identify points of linguistic friction. Finally, an experimental framing survey was conducted with 100 stratified Algerian participants to test the "Acceptability Quotient" (AQ) of newly "Grafted Metaphors" compared to traditional restrictive frames. Corpus findings revealed a dominant mapping of "Woman as a Closed Container," which correlated with high social resistance to female mobility. However, the experimental phase demonstrated that "Grafted Metaphors," which re-mapped cultural values like H'urma (Honor) from "Spatial Enclosure" to "Bodily Integrity", achieved a significantly higher AQ (p < .05). Participants exposed to engineered agentic frames showed a 40% increase in the social acceptance of women's autonomy in professional and public spheres compared to those exposed to traditional frames. The results confirm that the "Failure of Importation" of Western feminist terms can be bypassed through indigenous conceptual refinement. This study concludes that "software-level" linguistic intervention is a prerequisite for the efficacy of legal "hardware" reforms. This research provides a scalable framework for normative linguistics in post-colonial contexts, proving that re-engineering the conceptual lexicon can effectively expand the boundaries of social imagination.

Introduction

The contemporary Moroccan economic landscape positions gender functions as a dynamic force at the intersection of neoliberal aspirations and deep-seated patriarchal structures. While legislative milestones and digital initiatives have ostensibly paved the way for feminine economic participation, the entrepreneurial arena remains a contested site of power. This study examines how Moroccan women navigate the paradox of progress, where institutional visibility often conceals the persistence of traditional reproductive governance and socio-economic exclusion.

Methods

Adopting a qualitative relational framework, this research utilized semi-structured interviews with 17 women entrepreneurs across varied sectors in three Moroccan regions. The authors employed intersectional thematic analysis to explore how variables of financial autonomy, family obligations and digital literacy influence women’s ability to bridge the gender divide and establish professional legitimacy.

Results

The findings indicated a progressive increase in Moroccan female-led startups and cooperatives. Entrepreneurship-promoting programs have contributed to reinforcing women’s economic contribution and enhancing their social status. Nevertheless, this study highlighted the persistence of several barriers that undermined the newly forged avenues for autonomy. These barriers included disproportionate burdens of domestic care, systematic skepticism from society, and a glass labyrinth of informal male-centric business networks that dictated and managed market access.

Conclusions

This study concludes that women’s entrepreneurship in Morocco is not merely an economic activity but a form of social activism that challenges the gendered status quo. The Moroccan entrepreneurial ecosystem needs to reflect on means to operate a genuine social transformation that transcends mere inclusion mechanisms. Women’s entrepreneurship requires a radical restructuring of their intersectional realities to dismantle the structural inequalities that remain embedded in the routines of their everyday economic life.

This study aims to explore gender and familial relations in the power structure in Chinese Pentecostalism. Since its emergence in North America in the early twentieth century, Pentecostalism, a form of Christianity with a distinctive emphasis onSpirit-filled/empowered religious experiences, has rapidly grown in the Global South. What surprises scholars is the formation and development of the interdisciplinary study of Pentecostalism worldwide, which is now known as Pentecostal studies. In particular, gender has long been a debated theme in global Pentecostal scholarship.

One of the dominant discourses is Bernice Martin’s thesis of the Pentecostal gender paradox, which points out an ambiguity of gender’s role in shaping patriarchy, empowerment, and domestication in the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power relations, particularly evident in the Global South. However, the theoretical transferability of this thesis to the case of Chinese Pentecostalism remains doubtful. The question of how Chinese sociocultural contextuality shapes and reshapes gender and familial relations in Chinese Pentecostalism remains ambiguous and thus needs to be addressed.

This study adopts a five-year ethnography of Chinese Pentecostal churches in Hong Kong through participant observation, formal interviews, casual conversations, and the collection and analysis of literature. The study is grounded in the interpretative sociological framework of social Confucianism, informed by Ambrose Yeo-Chi King. The author argues that this sociocultural contextuality plays a critical role in shaping the power relations in Chinese Pentecostal churches. This study also challenges the inherent interpretation of the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power structure through the lens of gender and argues for a contextual interpretation of the Pentecostal ecclesiastical power relations that emphasizes symbolic paternalism through a symbolic familial lens. This study envisages contributing to the social scientific study of Pentecostalism by revisiting the existing Pentecostal theory and adopting the Chinese sociological theory that sheds light on the possibility of a new interpretation.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious social issue that affects many women and creates significant challenges in their married lives. Several factors contribute to IPV, including substance abuse, poverty, economic stress, gender inequality, patriarchal cultural norms, changing gender roles, a history of violence, aggressive behavior, and personality disorders. Among these factors, economic dependency plays a significant role in limiting women’s ability to resist or escape abusive relationships. This study focuses on the economic factors—such as lack of job opportunities, unemployment, and financial instability—that contribute to women’s economic dependency in Turbat, Balochistan. The research adopts a qualitative approach, using a descriptive research design to explore women’s lived experiences of intimate partner violence. Data were collected through in-depth interviews using open-ended questions with married women aged 18 years and above. The findings reveal that many women in Turbat experience IPV due to a patriarchal social structure that reinforces women’s dependency on their husbands. Economic dependency, combined with limited social support systems, prevents many women from speaking out against abusive behavior. The study highlights that many Baloch women remain in abusive relationships because financial insecurity restricts their ability to leave. The findings emphasize the need for initiatives that promote women’s economic independence, raise awareness through digital platforms, and provide confidential reporting mechanisms for victims of IPV. Additionally, there is a need for programs that challenge harmful gender norms and promote equal power dynamics in relationships.

The emergence of social media as a dominant platform for communication and information sharing has profoundly influenced the ways individuals interact, express opinions, and construct social identities. However, these platforms have also become sites for the proliferation of hate speech, including gendered forms of verbal abuse that target both women and men. Historically, research on gendered hate speech has overwhelmingly focused on women as primary victims, often overlooking the experiences of men as targets of similar discursive attacks. This gap highlights the need for a critical discourse analysis that explores the discourse strategies underpinning gendered hate speech against men. The theoretical framework used in the analysis of this study is Teun A. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis uses both quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis. The data were collated from selected social media platforms in Nigeria, like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and TikTok, between January 2020 and December 2025. Using purposive sampling, a total of one hundred and fifty-five (155) posts, comments, and videos containing explicit hate speech against men were selected through keyword searches and the manual browsing of content. This study identified 17 discourse strategies used in constructing gendered hate speech, and they include explicit hostility, blame shifting, dehumanization, evidentiality, victimization, positive self-representation, denial, etc. In conclusion, this study provides insights into how gendered hate speech against men is constructed, circulated, and legitimized on social media in Nigeria.

Introduction: Ageing is a biological process, but its meaning is socially constructed through cultural narratives that assign value and visibility. In contemporary societies, the "positive ageing" paradigm coexists with a coercive demand for eternal youth. This study examines The Substance (2024) as a cultural case study of gendered ageism and the social regulation of ageing female bodies.

Methods: A qualitative sociological analysis was conducted through a critical close reading of the film. The interpretation is guided by narrative gerontology, the notion of erotic capital (Hakim) to address the market value attached to female appearance, and the concept of abjection (Kristeva) to analyse the ageing body as a site of cultural anxiety. Analytical attention focused on four dimensions: (1) ageing as cultural construction, (2) the metanarrative of decline, (3) the individualisation of "positive ageing", and (4) gendered invisibility and aesthetic labour.

Results: The film depicts ageing not merely as a loss of status, but as the devaluation of the female body within appearance-centred cultural industries. It illustrates how "positive ageing" operates as a moralised form of self-management in which later life is framed as a personal failure to maintain desirability. A gendered double standard is intensified: while older men remain culturally legible, older women are rendered invisible unless they conform to restrictive youth norms through continuous bodily intervention.

Conclusions: The Substance foregrounds ageism as a structural form of gendered inequality. Challenging it requires deconstructing the narratives that equate ageing with a loss of value and expanding social spaces where growing older does not imply exclusion or the rendering of the ageing female body as monstrous.