Women's Studies: Gender Studies Programs and Websites

The program in Gender and Sexuality is an interdisciplinary Bi-College program that can be integrated with certain majors or pursued independently. Students graduate from the program with a high level of fluency and rigor in their understanding of the different ways issues of gender and sexuality shape our lives as individuals and as members of larger communities, both local and global.

Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary field drawing from scholarship in the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and business.

The objective of the program is to bring feminist and queer theory in conversation with new research methodologies in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies program welcomes students interested in an intersectional approach to gender, sexuality, race and other key identities and the consequences these intersections have in people’s lives. Our courses range from foundations in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies to gender violence to LGBTQ activism, literature and theory. As an interdisciplinary program housed in the College of Liberal Arts, we explore the many variables that contribute to women's experience as a social group, gender as an analytical category, and the social, political and cultural functioning of sexuality.

The Department of Women & Gender Studies offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the past and current status of women around the world and offers students the opportunity to learn about new and old formations of gender and its intersections with sexuality, race, class, nationality, religion, and age.

Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Penn is comprised of two separate but related entities—the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women, and the Penn Program on Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies—each with distinct but complementary projects. The Center and Program encompass faculty from more than 20 departments and schools at Penn, and provide vital opportunities and resources for research, learning, and practice in the areas of gender and sexuality.

Because gender and sexuality are fundamental to the ways humans understand themselves, a major or minor in Gender and Women’s Studies can enhance practically any other field of study. It is a discipline that continually asks us to rethink history, culture and identity, and in the 21st Century it continues to transform scholarship and fundamental assumptions in all areas of the humanities, social and natural sciences, and the professions.

Women's Studies is a way of looking at the world that questions historical and current gender arrangements. It is also an interdisciplinary field of study that examines how the social constructions of gender, race, sexuality and class affect our lives. West Chester University offers both a major and minor in Women’s Studies.