**9. Conclusions**

We found, first, that, while there was some variation in emphasis between universities, gender mainstreaming was introduced at Swedish universities in a version that was surprisingly radical in terms of its commitment to central identity-political ideas and claims when compared to the directives from the governmen<sup>t</sup> in its decree from 2016. Moreover, the form of gender mainstreaming that was adopted by many universities seems to exclude biological perspectives on sex di fferences and hence potentially has a chilling e ffect on inquiry and speech regarding biological sex di fferences (the actuality of which was confirmed in one of our case studies). Second, gender mainstreaming was introduced "from above", through a special national unit placed by the governmen<sup>t</sup> at one of the universities acting much like a Trojan horse in the academic system, in a way that posed a direct threat to the universities' institutional autonomy. As we observed, the higher education system in Sweden is particularly vulnerable to this kind of threat due to documented weaknesses in the organizational autonomy of Swedish universities. Lastly, we provided two case studies illustrating how gender mainstreaming, once in place, had negative e ffects on some scholars' freedom to teach. In particular, we observed that there is an obvious tension between the way the university in question acted in the two cases and the UNESCO articles protecting *Lehrfreiheit*. Our findings may be taken into account when evaluating the outcome of gender mainstreaming at Swedish universities all things considered.

**Author Contributions:** Both authors have made substantial contributions to all parts of the article in all stages, including conceptualization, method, empirical analysis, interpretation, editing and proofreading. Both authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** No funding was received for this study.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors wish to thank the three viewers for their very valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

<sup>14</sup> The study found that males had 64–80% more scientific publications that had attained 42–260% more citations, resulting in a 72–83% larger h-index ([49], p. 13).
