Women & Gender Studies

The American Association of University Women, officially founded in 1881, is a non-profit organization that advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, and research.

Exploring African American women as a potent force within American politics, culture, and society, this new series serves as a platform where visionary black female leaders can discuss their work and how the country might move forward in these complicated times. We begin with higher education, welcoming Valerie Smith, president of Swarthmore College, who speaks with Robert Reid-Pharr, distinguished professor of English at the GC and director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.

Gender issues have fascinated an confounded people for ages. That certainly holds true in academe these days. In this special report devoted to gender, we look beyond the data. Not long ago, women were the focus of most gender discussions in academe. But now it’s more complicated, with each sex drawing attention for different reasons. It’s well known, for example, that female undergraduates outnumber their male counterparts. But why do they behave so differently, and what can colleges learn about their diverse ways in which men and women engage on campus? In this special report, learn how what attracts men to certain fields, read about the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, and other issues related to gender in academe.

GLSEN works to ensure that LGBTQ students are able to learn and grow in a school environment free from bullying and harassment. Together we can transform our nation's schools into the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve.

This article addresses the problematic deficiency in research and scholarship
that centers Indigenous women’s voices in educational leadership. As Indigenous women scholars, we engaged a qualitative study that involved Indigenous women leaders from across the United States, and our discussion
in this work focuses on the perspectives of Indigenous women working in education. We first provide a current snapshot of Indigenous women in postsecondary education and review preliminary theories on Indigenous
leadership. We highlight cultural, social, and political factors that influence Indigenous women educational leaders, and we conclude with recommendations for the cultivation of future Indigenous women leaders.

Far too many LGBTQ youth are sitting in classrooms where their teachers and textbooks fail to appropriately address their identities, behaviors and experiences. Nowhere is this absence more clear, and potentially more damaging, than in sex education.

From an early age, kids understand both simple and complex ideas of gender identity. They learn and absorb the categories we teach them, and then eventually find their place within, or beyond, these categories. The surprising truth is that we all know who we are from a very young age, including the truest expressions of our gender identity, and we then spend most of our lives searching for the words, tools, safety, and agency to share ourselves with the world. In recent years, we have seen more transgender and gender diverse kids exploring new words and models to describe their identities. In this talk, you'll hear about this gender evolution, including how to talk to and support the young kids and teenagers in our lives, as they lead the way toward a more expansive and inclusive future. Filmed September 20th, 2020 at Mia in Minneapolis.

When the modern women's movement emerged in the 1960s, many scholars began to explore the lives of women who had come before. As a result of this great upsurge of interest, the Library of Congress collections on women's history have grown enormously in the past three decades. Even before, however, many primary and secondary sources for research on this “newly discovered” topic were already housed at the Library.

Episodes from DIG History Podcast on questions of gender and identity in history.

Contains medieval sources on gender and sex.

The Lavender Scare is the first documentary film to tell the little-known story of an unrelenting campaign by the federal government to identify and fire all employees suspected of being homosexual.

Among the first lessons instructors teach in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) history classes is about the changing definitions and uses of the word queer. Up through the nineteenth century the word was primarily used to mark individuals considered odd or outside social norms. Queer carried particular currency in scandal from the lingo of newspaper exposés and gossip columns to private epistolary speculation. It was often but not always offered as epithet and ascribed to others rather than claimed for oneself; and by the twentieth century it was most commonly used for reasons of perceived sexual or gender non-conformity. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new social movement called for the rejection of labels such as queer and even homosexual (itself seen as pejorative and medicalizing) in favor of proud proclamations like “Gay Is Good.”

Women’s History Month had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as “Women’s History Week.” Throughout the next five years, Congress continued to pass joint resolutions designating a week in March as “Women’s History Week.” In 1987 after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9 which designated the month of March 1987 as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, presidents have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.” These proclamations celebrate the contributions women have made to the United States and recognize the specific achievements women have made over the course of American history in a variety of fields.

The struggle for women to gain acceptance, recognition and equal rights in society has been a long process. In recognition of the contributions of American women, ALIC presents a listing of web sites relevant to women in the United States.

The African American Women Writers of the 19th Century Guide originated from the Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century site that included fully accessible published works, writer biographies, and citations for these works.

March 8th is International Women’s Day, the perfect time to start reading works written by and about women. Spend some time this March browsing the stacks for these inspiring, intelligent, and wonderful works.

From the stage to everyday life, theater educator Jo Michael Rezes studies queer identity and the spectrum of gender performance — in its success and failure. Aided by a delightful introduction of campy charm, Rezes explores the freeing potential of playing with gender to better understand ourselves, each other and the spaces we inhabit.

Resources from Credo Reference

The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.

GLAAD is an American non-governmental media monitoring organization, founded as a protest against defamatory coverage of gay and lesbian people. Its agenda has since extended to LGBT and the entertainment industry and its portrayal of these groups.

Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences, but they're becoming increasingly harder to track online, says media researcher Johanna Blakley. As social media outgrows traditional media, and women users outnumber men, Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media.

The purpose of the journal is to encourage and promote an understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, social units, and social class.

How do you tell women’s stories? Ask women to tell them. At TEDxABQ, Megan Kamerick shows how the news media underrepresents women as reporters and news sources, and because of that tells an incomplete story.

Some transgender and gender nonbinary individuals seek gender-affirming medical care (e.g., hormone therapy, surgery) while others do not. Similarly, some transgender and gender nonbinary individuals seek to change their gender marker and/or their name on legal documents, while others do not. In this resolution, we strive to be inclusive of all gender diversity regardless of a person’s pursuance of social, medical, or legal transition.

When you are writing, you need to follow general principles to ensure that your language is free of bias. Here we provide guidelines for talking about gender with inclusivity and respect.

Terms related to sexual orientation and gender diversity have been defined in several APA documents. Due to the developing understanding of constructs,
shifting usage of terms, and contextual focus of these documents, the definitions vary somewhat. This resource provides definitions and their sources.

In popular media, borderline personality disorder has become linked in particular to beautiful, unstable, and ultimately dangerous white women, most famously Glenn Close’s character in the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction. As a diagnosis, borderline personality disorder went through various iterations before being declared a personality disorder enshrined in the DSM-III in 1980. Psychiatrists described borderline personality disorder, or BPD, in broad terms, with symptoms including intense emotions, fear of abandonment, instability in relationships, impulsivity, distorted self-image, uncontrolled anger, and dissociation. The diagnosis is very commonly used – more than half of those hospitalized with mental illness have been diagnosed with BPD. But another statistic about BPD is more revealing: between 70 and 77 percent of all people diagnosed with BPD are women. BPD is a troubled and troubling diagnosis, one that’s been criticized and theorized and analyzed by feminists, disability scholars, and so-called “borderlines” themselves. In this episode of our ‘borders’ series, we explore the complicated history of a different kind of border: borderline personality disorder.

Gender is one of the critical determinants of mental health. It determines the power and control men and women have over the socioeconomic determinants of their mental health and lives, their social position, status and treatment in society.

For centuries, psychiatrists searched for the cure to mental illness, frustrated that medical doctors seemed to be able to find the “magic bullet” medications to fight disease and infection. In the mid 20th century, though, a series of new major and minor tranquilizers revolutionized the world of psychiatry. Doctors doled out Miltown, Librium, and Valium to stressed businessmen and frazzled housewives, using ad men to market these psychiatric wonder drugs to just about every ailment imaginable. In the process, psychopharmaceuticals became intertwined with the women’s rights movement, enflamed mid-century gender politics, and changed the way Americans thought about mental illness.

Advancing the creation, communication, and application of psychological knowledge on gender identity and sexual orientation to benefit society and improve lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's lives.

Approaches for before, during, and after a difficult conversation to make sure the dialogue – and your mental health – stays safe.

At YW Boston, we work to create inclusive environments where women, people of color, and especially women of color can succeed. Through our work, we partner with individuals and organizations to understand not just racial equity and gender equity, but the ways in which gender and racial equity intersect in the workplace and in our communities. In order to identify areas to make change, we must first understand what gender is. In this blog post, we will look closer at the concept of gender, identify ways in which gender discrimination shows up in our society, and examine how gender intersects with race.

The National Archives holds rich collections of records on nineteenth-century Southern African American women. Two of the most important collections for the study of formerly enslaved African American women are the Civil War soldiers pension files and the Freedmen's Bureau records. These sources allow an exploration of the changes and continuities from slavery to freedom for women, men, and families.

Intersectionality theory, a way of understanding social inequalities by race, gender, class, and sexuality that emphasizes their mutually constitutive natures, possesses potential to uncover and explicate previously unknown health inequalities. In this paper, the intersectionality principles of "directionality," "simultaneity," "multiplicativity," and "multiple jeopardy" are applied to inequalities in self-rated health by race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in a Canadian sample.

Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.

In December 2019, Cushwa Center director Kathleen Sprows Cummings received a grant within the University of Notre Dame’s Church Sexual Abuse Crisis Research Grant Program for the project “Gender, Sex, and Power: Towards a History of Clergy Sex Abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church.” Cummings led the project along with Peter Cajka (Notre Dame), Terence McKiernan (BishopAccountability.org), and Robert Orsi (Northwestern University), who joined the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study as a faculty fellow for 2020–21.

Gender is central to most religious orders. In turn, religions have a significant impact on gendered relations. The study of gender and religion stems from a broader interest in feminist anthropology, and multiple approaches to the study of gender and religion have been developed.

Women earn a substantially smaller share of degrees in religion than in the humanities field as a whole (at both the bachelor’s and advanced-degree levels), but the percentage did increase at all degree levels from 1987 to 2014.

Gender has played a critical role in many of our episodes over the past decade from discussions of sexual ethics and queer studies to eco-spirituality, corporeality, violence, religious affiliation, and the occult. Please enjoy this selection of episodes that frame the challenges and rewards of the critical framework of gender for religious studies scholarship.

An article from Religion Dispatches covers a recent interview given by seven female scholars including Nancy Ammerman PhD, professor of sociology of religion at the School of Theology. Women involved in a variety of religious studies reflect on past experiences as well as thoughts about the current gender divide. The scholars, celebrated for their involvement with religious study, talk about women in religion, why they study religion, and what to do about the gender divide in academia.

On February 21 2019, a full house packed the ISSR lab to explore research on how gender affects the conduct of research and professional life more broadly for social scientists. This event featured four panelists, Joya Misra (Professor of Sociology, UMass Amherst), Mala Htun (Professor of Political Science, University of New Mexico) Sarah Jacobson (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Williams College), and Laurel Smith-Doerr (Professor of Sociology and Director, ISSR, UMass Amherst). Each panelist offered a range of empirical evidence on how gender dynamics affect their prospective field or fields, with an emphasis on sociology (Misra), political science (Htun) and economics (Jacobson), with Smith-Doerr offering evidence from diversity dynamics within US government agencies.

The term gender refers to the cultural and social characteristics attributed to men and women on the basis of perceived biological differences. In the 1970s, feminists focused on sex roles, particularly the socialization of men and women into distinct masculine and feminine roles and the apparent universality of patriarchy. More recent work has critiqued the idea of two distinct genders, calling into question the notion of gender dichotomies and focusing attention on gender as a constitutive element of all social relationships. Gender has been described as a social institution that structures the organization of other institutions, such as the labor market, families, and the state, as well as the social relations of everyday life. In addition, scholars have pointed to the ways in which gender is constructed by organizations and individual interactions. Gender not only differentiates men and women into unequal groups, it also structures unequal access to goods and resources, often crosscutting and intersecting with other forms of inequality, such as class, race, and ethnicity.

Feminist intellectual work of the second wave began with high theoretical hopes, seeking to understand why there is gender and why gender so often means inequality, domination, and difference. Gender scholars in the social sciences were at the forefront of these feminist intellectual projects, and led the way within their disciplines for thinking anew about what counts as theory, evidence, and methods.

This page is a resource explaining general sociological concepts of sex and gender.

The article attempts to answer the question why females prefer humanities/social studies, whereas males opt for technology/science