Women's and Gender Studies Minor

Offered at: San Luis Obispo Campus

The Women’s and Gender Studies minor promotes intersectional and interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, education, and activism that that emphasizes how constructions, experiences, and expressions of gender change over time and are lived in relation to interlocking systems of sexuality, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class status, disability, national origin, religion, size, and age (among other factors). Areas of exploration include gender identities, social movements, reproductive justice, care work and labor, media representations, and technologies, considered via active student learning and by exploring the vital contributions made to history, knowledge, and contemporary life by communities marginalized on the basis of gender in the United States and around the world. 

Students completing the WGS minor will acquire intellectual and practical skills necessary to contribute to scholarship, activism, creative production, policymaking, and innovation in Women’s and Gender Studies, and to contribute to creating a more inclusive, just, and equitable world for all.

Program Learning Objectives

1. Students will identify and explain foundational and contemporary research and theoretical literature in the interdisciplinary field of Women’s and Gender Studies.
2. Students will define and summarize the ways that foundational and contemporary research and theoretical literature in the interdisciplinary field of Women’s and Gender Studies draws upon and utilizes perspectives from the humanities, sciences, arts, and professions to expand existing and create new knowledge.
3. Students will review and analyze the historical and contemporary dynamics and impacts of sexism, patriarchy, and hegemonic white feminisms, with particular attention to the ways that norms and ideologies constitute and reproduce intersecting inequities within local, regional, national, and transnational contexts.
4. Students will examine and evaluate, via intersectional frameworks, the ways that constructions, experiences, and expressions of gender, shape and are shaped by social, political, ethical, institutional, economic, legal, cultural, scientific, and technological factors in the past and present.
5. Students will reflect upon and critique their own beliefs, attitudes, and potential biases related to gender as well as personal, policy, and community efforts for social change.
6. Students will employ and synthesize key concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies to contribute to scholarship, activism, creative production, policy, the professions, and/or innovation.
7. Students will apply intellectual and practical skills to engage with issues of social justice and contribute to efforts to forge a more inclusive, just, and equitable world for all.

Minor Requirements and Curriculum

• At least half of the units must be from upper-division courses (3000-4000 level).
• At least half of the units must be taken at Cal Poly (in residence).
• No more than one-third of the units will be taken with credit-no credit grading (CR/NC), not counting courses with mandatory CR/NC. Departments may further limit CR/NC grading if desired.
• A minimum 2.0 GPA is required in all units counted for completion of the minor.

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Required Courses not taken to satisfy a requirement listed above can be used to satisfy Core or Approved Elective requirement.

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Repeatable up to 6 units. Credit may be earned more than once when course is taken with different subtitles or topics.

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Core Courses not taken to satisfy a requirement listed above can be used to satisfy Approved Elective requirement. Half of Core Course units must be upper-division.

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Additional prerequisites may be needed depending on your major's curriculum requirements.

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Minor advisor approval required. Approval contingent on course subtitle. Contact the department for list of approved subtitles.