Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

PROGRAM UPDATE: March 2023

This spring, we are thrilled to launch two related curricular developments: our new Department Partnership Initiative and revised requirements for both the Major and Minor! Both bring more flexibility and diversity to our program of study, helping to ease the way for students across the university (and with majors as diverse as Microbiology, Nursing, and History) to more easily pick up a WGS minor or double-major. Keep reading if you want to learn more!

Welcome to WGS!

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary program with contributions from faculty across campus and beyond. Our alumni are employed in social service work, health services occupations, business, law, education, and government at all levels.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is also an excellent second major or minor for students in a wide variety of disciplines, such as anthropology, biology, mathematics and statistics,  nursing, political science, psychology, political science, sociology, English, social work, and history.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students gain a more complete understanding of how the social construction of gender has influenced the roles, contributions, and experiences of both women and men in many different cultures, now and in the past.  Such awareness can help them better understand our contemporary world with its changing roles for all.

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies helps orient students to:

•   better understand our contemporary world with its changing roles for all;

•   appreciate the complexity of how gender interacts with race, social class, sexual orientation, and other forms of diversity;

•   draw connections between Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and other disciplines across the university;

•   appreciate how scholarship in WGS Studies informs activism and social change, historically and in the present;

•   develop the critical intellectual capacity and communication skills to work with, value and improve the lives of others in whatever public or private spheres they choose.

Upcoming Events

WGS @ Work Series Past Events/Discussions

“Feminism is for everybody.”
–bell hooks