The Women's and Gender Studies Program offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex role gender plays in shaping the world around us. It enables students to understand how gender impacts their everyday lives as well as its role in society, institutions and practices both locally and globally. Coursework addresses important topics that are traditionally underrepresented in academic studies, such as the lives and works of women, gays, lesbians and peoples of color. Through its innovative pedagogies, the Program's encourages students to develop their own analytical skills to evaluate how gender is imagined and practiced throughout the world.

Women and Gender Studies draws upon coursework in fields such as Anthropology, English, History, Latin American Literature and Culture, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, and Sociology. Drawing up transnational and intersectional approaches, students investigate gender through its connections with race, class, cultural identity, sexuality, nationality, and religion. This holistic approach enables us to interrogate essentializing categories of identity and static notions like "traditional vs. modern," "West vs. East," "heterosexual vs. homosexual," which distort significant gendered differences across the globe.