About
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program offers an undergraduate interdisciplinary minor, guides graduate work in cooperating disciplines, and sponsors diverse speakers and events on campus that engage the Boston College community in a meaningful way.
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program is student-centered and holistically informed. Employing a transnational feminist pedagogical model, the WGS curriculum enables students to analyze gender and sexuality through lenses of identity and intersectionality. Students learn how to critically explore issues of inequality and power in the classroom, while also gaining the tools to prudently engage with these topics outside of it.
By successfully completing the program, students cultivate skills invaluable to their professional and personal success. Past alumni have gone on to illustrious careers in public policy, healthcare, law, and higher education.
Our Mission
The Women’s Studies Program has been a central space for students to explore issues of gender at Boston College for more than 25 years. The creation of the program in the early 1980s correlated with the height of a women’s liberation movement that took hold across the world, culminating in achievements of equality and power that were desperately needed.
Our mission is to expose the limits of traditional education resulting from the exclusion of women and other marginalized groups in the creation of knowledge. We seek not only to highlight these limits, but to create new knowledge, discourse, areas of research, and values from women’s experience. We establish gender and sexuality as fundamental categories of analysis and emphasize a global perspective on feminism.
We seek to highlight the interaction of sexism with other axes of inequality such as racism, heterosexism, ageism, ethnocentrism, classism, and ableism by examining feminist genres, methods, theory, structures, aesthetics, criticism, analytical tools, contemporary issues, and pedagogy across history and culture. We do this work within an interdisciplinary community of scholars that spans disciplines to connect the academic work of our students and faculty with the social, political, and personal world outside their departments, outside the University, and towards the promotion of social justice and human rights.
- 34 Terrific Gender Studies Jobs That Prove the Doubters Wrong | Trade-Schools.net—Lists 34 jobs you can get with a gender studies education at the bachelor's and graduate level and explains why gender studies issues remain relevant to personal success.
- Transform the World: What You Can Do With a Degree in Women's Studies | University of Colorado Boulder—Answers the ever-present question, “What can you do with a women’s studies education?”
- 5 Reasons You Should Major In Women’s Studies | Thought Catalog—A women’s and gender studies grad makes a compelling case for why women’s studies matters today.
- From Study to Skills | University of Michigan—Lists employable skills and abilities developed from taking women’s and gender studies courses.
- Job Board | Feminist Jobs—Promotes the latest opportunities at leading feminist and progressive organizations.