Women’s and Gender Studies Minor

What you’ll study

Drawing on cross-cultural and transnational perspectives, the minor invites students to critically explore a range of topics, including women’s religious lives and leadership; women’s lives, labor, and arts; approaches to primary sources on women’s history; the intersectional and historical meanings of gender; gender in international relations and diplomacy; the history of gender roles and performances; structural violence, social justice, and gender activism; the gendered politics of knowledge production; and media and other representations.

What you’ll gain

As an interdisciplinary minor, WGS draws simultaneously on sociology, history, literature, philosophy, economics, religion, and more. It makes often-invisible systems visible, trains students to think across disciplinary borders, and addresses gaps that other disciplines have historically left unexamined. The minor doesn’t replace a major — it completes it, preparing students for a world in which questions of gender equity, representation, and justice are active debates in nearly every field.

Career Paths

Beyond making students more aware of gender issues around them, it prepares them for careers in academia, international diplomacy, economics, NGO and nonprofit work, public policy, journalism, and research. It is especially aligned with students interested in global governance, social justice, human rights, development, media, intersectionality, social movements, and identity-based analysis, complementing existing coursework across all five majors.

Program Goals

• Train critical thinking across fields. Students learn to ask who is centered in any body of knowledge, whose experience is treated as universal, and whose is treated as exceptional — a skill that transfers to law, medicine, journalism, history, and business.
• Make invisible systems visible. Students gain the vocabulary and methods to examine assumptions about gender, work, family, and power that often go unquestioned.
• Build genuinely interdisciplinary skills. The minor trains students to think across disciplinary borders, an ability employers and graduate programs consistently seek.
• Prepare students for the world they’ll work in. Questions of gender equity, workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, care work, and representation are active policy and professional debates across fields; the minor equips students to analyze them rigorously.