What Is Gender Studies? A Field Guide

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines how gender, sex and sexuality are understood, organized and contested in societies, and how they intersect with race, class, nationality, disability and other axes of social difference. In many universities it goes by a longer name — women’s studies, women’s and gender studies, or women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS) — and the choice of name usually reflects the department’s history and emphasis rather than a different subject. The field draws on history, sociology, anthropology, literature, philosophy, political science, law, psychology and the life sciences, and it is characterised less by one method than by a shared set of questions about power, difference and knowledge.

This page is a neutral, descriptive orientation for researchers, students and research administrators: what the field covers, its key concepts and methods, its history, the professional societies and journals that anchor it, the kinds of funders that support work in it, and how sex and gender variables are handled in health research, where gender-studies thinking meets funder policy. It describes the field as scholars within it describe themselves; it does not adjudicate the debates that scholars inside and outside the field have about its claims.

What gender studies studies

Gender studies treats gender as an object of analysis rather than a background variable. Typical questions include how gender norms are produced and enforced, how they differ across cultures and historical periods, how institutions such as families, labor markets, schools, medicine and the law distribute resources and risk along gendered lines, and how people experience, negotiate and resist those arrangements. Work in the field can be historical, textual, ethnographic, statistical or philosophical, and often moves between them.

The field is usually described as having several overlapping strands:

Women’s studies. The earliest institutionalised strand, focused on women’s experiences, contributions and subordination, and on recovering voices and evidence that earlier scholarship had omitted.
Gender studies. A broader frame that treats masculinities, femininities and non-binary identities as socially and historically situated, and examines gender as a system rather than a property of women alone.
Sexuality studies and queer studies. Scholarship on sexual identities, desire, kinship and regulation, including queer theory, which interrogates how categories of sexual and gender identity are produced.
Feminist theory and feminist science studies. Philosophical and critical work on knowledge, objectivity and power, including how scientific questions get framed and who counts as a knower.
Transnational and postcolonial feminisms, critical race and Black feminist thought, and disability studies. Strands that foreground how gender is lived differently across geography, race, colonial history and bodily difference.

Key concepts

A handful of ideas recur across the literature. They are best understood as tools that different scholars use, extend and criticise, not as settled doctrine.

Sex and gender. A common working distinction treats “sex” as referring to biological attributes (chromosomes, hormones, anatomy) and “gender” as the socially and culturally shaped roles, expectations, identities and relations associated with them. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), with its line that one is not born but becomes a woman, is widely cited as an early statement of the idea that womanhood is socially made. Scholars in the field also debate whether the distinction itself holds up, since biological categories are described and measured through social and historical frameworks.
Performativity. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) argues that gender is performative: it is sustained and made to appear natural through repeated acts and speech rather than expressing a fixed inner essence. The book is a foundational text for queer theory.
Intersectionality. The term was introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, which examined court cases in which Black women’s claims of combined race and sex discrimination were not recognised. It is now used far beyond law as a framework for analysing how overlapping systems of disadvantage and privilege combine.
Patriarchy, gender regimes and the gender division of labor. Concepts for describing structural arrangements, such as who does paid and unpaid work, who holds authority and who bears care responsibilities.
Situated knowledge and standpoint theory. The argument that knowledge is produced from particular social positions, and that analysing those positions is part of doing rigorous research. This connects gender studies closely to broader debates in the philosophy of science and to the idea of a research paradigm.
Heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Terms for assumptions that treat heterosexual and cisgender arrangements as the default, and for the institutional consequences of those assumptions.

Methods

Gender studies does not own a single method; it applies the methods of its home disciplines and adds a set of methodological commitments. Four are especially visible.

Qualitative and humanistic methods

Interviews, life histories, focus groups, archival research, close reading and discourse analysis are staples. Researchers working this way often draw on the same traditions that structure sociology and anthropology, including ethnographic research, grounded theory and discourse analysis. Reporting standards for this kind of work, such as the COREQ and SRQR checklists, are useful for describing sampling, analysis and researcher role transparently.

Feminist methodologies

Feminist methodology is less a toolkit than a set of questions about the research relationship itself: whose problem is being studied, who benefits, how power between researcher and participant is handled, and how findings are returned to the people studied. In practice this often means reflexivity (documenting how the researcher’s own position shapes the work; see the reflexivity statement guide), participatory and community-engaged designs, and attention to ethics beyond formal review. Participatory methods such as photovoice, in which participants document their own circumstances with photographs, are used in some feminist and community-based projects.

Intersectional analysis

Intersectional approaches ask researchers not to study one social category in isolation. In qualitative work that can mean purposive sampling across several dimensions of difference (see maximum variation sampling); in quantitative work it can mean interaction terms, stratified analyses or multilevel models that let patterns differ across combinations of categories. Methodologists continue to discuss how best to operationalise the concept in statistics, and there is no single agreed procedure.

Quantitative and mixed methods

Survey research, demography, economics and epidemiology contribute substantial gender scholarship, including work on wage gaps, time use, health disparities and political participation. Careful question wording matters: how a survey asks about sex, gender identity and sexual orientation affects who is counted and how (see survey question types). Mixed-methods designs that pair statistical patterns with interviews are common.

A short history

The intellectual roots of the field are older than the academic departments. Writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and, in the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir produced work now read as foundational. The modern academic field emerged from the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when courses and then programs in women’s studies were established at U.S. universities, alongside feminist scholarly journals. Feminist Studies, for example, was founded in 1972, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 1975. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) was founded in 1977.

From the 1980s, critiques from Black feminist, Chicana, Indigenous, postcolonial and lesbian scholars pushed the field away from treating “women” as a single category, which fed the development of intersectional frameworks. From the 1990s, queer theory and later transgender studies broadened the field toward sexuality and gender diversity, and many programs renamed themselves to reflect this. The field is international, with substantial scholarship and institutional programs in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, and it continues to evolve in response to both internal critique and outside debate.

Professional societies

National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Founded in 1977, a U.S.-based association of scholars and practitioners in women’s studies and related fields. It holds an annual conference and offers book prizes and other awards.
Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS). A professional association that publishes the journal Gender & Society.
Disciplinary associations. Many gender scholars also work through the committees, sections and caucuses on gender within their disciplinary home (for example, history, sociology, anthropology or literature), which run their own prizes and sessions.

Major journals

The following are widely recognised venues in the field; this is a representative list, not a ranking.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society — founded 1975, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Feminist Studies — founded 1972; described by its publisher as the oldest continuing scholarly journal in women’s studies in the U.S.
Feminist Formations — established in 1988 as the NWSA Journal and renamed from 2010; publishes interdisciplinary and multicultural feminist scholarship in women’s, gender and sexuality studies.
Gender & Society — founded 1987, the journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, publishing feminist social science.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies — published by Duke University Press, offering queer perspectives on topics touching sex and sexuality.
Journal of Women’s History — established 1989, devoted to the history of women internationally.

Publishing in this field follows the same norms covered elsewhere on this site, including authorship, peer review and data-sharing expectations; authors working with interview or ethnographic data should plan early for consent, confidentiality and, where relevant, restrictions on sharing sensitive material.

Training paths and careers

Undergraduate majors and minors in women’s, gender and sexuality studies are offered by many universities, and graduate programs exist at the master’s and doctoral level, as do graduate certificates and “designated emphasis” options that let students in another discipline earn a credential in gender studies. Many scholars are trained in a home discipline, such as history, sociology, anthropology, English, political science or public health, and work across departmental lines. Graduates and researchers work in universities, research institutes, government and non-profit policy roles, advocacy and community organisations, public health, human-resources and diversity work, and the arts and media. Specific career outcomes vary by country and program, so prospective students should check program-level data rather than rely on general claims.

Funding

Because the field spans the humanities and social sciences, support comes from the same families of funders that serve those areas, rather than from a gender-studies-specific program in most cases. Check each funder’s current programs, eligibility and deadlines directly, as priorities change.

U.S. federal agencies. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) fund humanities and social-science research respectively, and projects on gender can be competitive in either depending on their approach. Health-focused gender research may be eligible at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Private foundations and scholarly societies. Fellowship and grant programs for humanities and social-science scholars, including those run by learned societies, often support gender scholarship.
Canada. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and, for health research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) fund relevant work; CIHR has an Institute of Gender and Health.
United Kingdom and Europe. National councils such as the UK’s ESRC, and the European Research Council’s social-sciences-and-humanities panels, fund gender research alongside other work in those areas.

Grant applications benefit from the practices described in the site’s coverage of NIH inclusion policies and the NIH inclusion enrollment report when human participants are involved, and from clear, advance planning for ethics review and data management.

Sex and gender variables in health research

Gender-studies concepts have a direct practical counterpart in biomedical and public-health research, where funders and journals now expect sex and gender to be handled deliberately instead of ignored or conflated.

NIH: sex as a biological variable (SABV). NIH notice NOT-OD-15-102, effective for applications submitted for the January 25, 2016 due date and after, set the expectation that sex as a biological variable will be factored into research design, analysis and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies. Applicants proposing to study only one sex must provide strong justification from the scientific literature, preliminary data or other relevant considerations. SABV is a policy about biological sex; it does not by itself address gender identity or gender as a social construct.
NIH rigor and reproducibility. SABV sits within NIH’s wider rigor expectations; see the NIH rigor and reproducibility policy.
CIHR: Sex and Gender-Based Analysis Plus (SGBA Plus). The Canadian Institutes of Health Research has an action plan to integrate sex and gender considerations systematically into the research it funds, and the scientific director of its Institute of Gender and Health serves as a co-champion for GBA Plus implementation.
Reporting guidance for authors. The SAGER guidelines recommend how authors, editors and reviewers report sex and gender in research; see the site’s guide to the SAGER guidelines.
Institutional gender equality. Separate from research content, some funders and institutions require or reward organisational gender-equality measures, for example Gender Equality Plans under Horizon Europe and the Athena SWAN charter in the UK.

Practically, a health study that collects sex and gender data should define each variable, say how it was measured (self-report, administrative record, clinical assessment), justify its response categories, and state any analysis planned by sex or gender. Treating the two as interchangeable is a frequent reporting problem that gender-studies scholarship has long pointed out.

Gender studies and research administration

For research offices, gender studies projects raise familiar administrative questions with some specific features. Human-subjects review often involves sensitive topics such as sexuality, violence or identity, which can call for careful consent language, confidentiality protections and plans for data that could re-identify small or marginalised groups. Community-partnered and participatory designs raise questions about compensation, co-authorship and ownership of outputs. Multi-country and transnational projects bring budgeting, subaward and compliance issues. Internal policies on equity and inclusion, including the institutional gender-equality plans noted above, are a separate administrative track from the research itself. See the NIH inclusion policies entry for one example of how inclusion expectations enter grant compliance.

Frequently asked questions

Is gender studies the same as women’s studies?

The two overlap and share a history. Women’s studies is the earlier name and focus; gender studies broadens the frame to include masculinities, non-binary and transgender identities, and gender as a system. Many programs use a combined name such as women’s, gender and sexuality studies.

Is gender studies a science or a humanities field?

It is interdisciplinary. Some contributors work with quantitative social-science and biomedical methods, others with humanistic and interpretive methods, and the field also includes critical study of science itself.

What is the difference between sex and gender in research?

In the common working distinction, sex refers to biological attributes and gender to socially shaped roles, identities and relations. Funders such as NIH use “sex as a biological variable” for the former, while guidance such as SAGER and CIHR’s SGBA Plus addresses both. Scholars within the field also debate how clean the distinction is.

What is intersectionality, in one sentence?

A framework, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, for analysing how overlapping social categories such as race and gender combine to produce distinct experiences of advantage and disadvantage.

Who funds gender studies research?

Mostly the general humanities and social-science funders (for example NEH, NSF, SSHRC, ESRC, the European Research Council), plus health funders such as NIH and CIHR for health-related questions, and private foundations and learned societies. Programs and eligibility change, so confirm with the funder.

Which journals should I read first?

Signs, Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, Gender & Society and GLQ are widely recognised starting points, alongside the leading journals of your own home discipline.

What Is Gender Studies? Research Areas, Funding, and Careers