Gender dimensions in energy justice and just energy transitions: mapping the field and its gaps in a global literature review

The widespread assumption that energy systems and policies are technologically and economically neutral, or apolitical, obscures the ways in which they reproduce and reinforce structural gender inequalities. Despite the growing prominence of energy justice and just energy transition frameworks, gender remains unevenly integrated into both academic research and policy debates. This study provides a comprehensive global analysis of 2505 academic publications addressing gender within the context of energy justice and just energy transitions. Using a mixed-methods approach combining bibliometric analysis, BERTopic modelling, and qualitative narrative analysis with T-Lab, the study maps the intellectual structure of the field across 15 thematic clusters, alongside emerging theoretical and methodological dimensions. The findings show that the literature is primarily concentrated around themes of justice and equity (11.2%), energy communities (9.1%), acceptance and perceptions (8.7%), and innovation (8.6%). In contrast, critical areas such as mineral resources (3.6%) and Indigenous perspectives (4.1%) remain marginal, revealing important blind spots related to gendered aspects of extractivism, territorial conflicts, and the material foundations of low-carbon transitions. Across the literature, gender is most often addressed through issues of access, participation, and vulnerability, while there are fewer analyses of structural power and political economy. Relatedly, gender is frequently treated as an instrumental or descriptive variable, rather than as a transformative analytical lens. Although feminist and intersectional approaches are increasingly present, they are still relatively under-represented, and new methods of advanced data analysis often remain descriptive and weakly connected to theoretical debates. This review argues that advancing a just energy transition requires moving beyond assumptions of neutrality and technocratic approaches toward more intersectional and feminist frameworks, applied to the institutional, cultural, and material dimensions of energy systems, in order to address persistent inequalities and transform the power relations that shape energy transitions.