What WGSS Actually Is
Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines how gender, sexuality, race, power, and identity shape our world. It’s not just about women, and it’s not just about gender - it’s fully about understanding how systems of power operate, who benefits from them, who’s harmed by them, and how we might change them.
WGSS draws from history, sociology, literature, political science, philosophy, psychology, and more. You’ll read feminist theory, study queer activism, analyze policy through an intersectional lens, explore how media shapes identity, and examine global movements for gender justice. You’ll learn to ask questions like: Who has power here? Whose voices are missing? How did this system come to be? What would a more just version look like?
These are tools for understanding the world you’re living in right now - the workplace you’ll enter, the communities you’ll be part of, the systems you’ll navigate and hopefully change.
What You Actually Learn: WGSS students develop skills that matter in every field.
You learn how to examine ideas carefully, question assumptions, and understand how power operates within texts, policies, institutions, and everyday interactions. These skills help you think more clearly in any field - whether you’re analyzing a legal argument, evaluating a business strategy, or interpreting current events
WGSS courses emphasize careful reading, thoughtful research, and clear, persuasive writing. You’ll write papers that develop complex arguments, bring together multiple sources, and communicate ideas effectively. These skills go far beyond the classroom - they’re the same abilities used when writing policy memos, grant proposals, legal documents, research reports, and other forms of professional communication. Learning how to build a strong argument supported by evidence is a skill that every field values.
WGSS centers voices and experiences that are often marginalized in other academic spaces. You learn to listen across differences, understand how identity shapes experience, and work effectively with people whose backgrounds differ from your own. In our increasingly diverse world, this is essential. Whether you’re working on a team, serving patients, teaching students, or designing products, you need to understand how different people experience the same systems differently.
Rather than seeing problems as individual failures, WGSS teaches you to analyze systems and structures. Why do certain patterns keep repeating? What historical decisions created the situation we’re in now? What assumptions are built into this policy or practice? This kind of thinking is invaluable whether you’re designing policy, leading a team, providing healthcare, building technology, or working in education. You learn to see the bigger picture and understand how change actually happens.
WGSS doesn’t just teach you to critique, but also how to imagine and work toward change. You’ll study social movements, learn advocacy strategies, understand how policy gets made, and think about how to create more equitable systems in whatever field you enter. This isn’t about becoming an activist (though some students do) - it’s about understanding how to make things better in your sphere of influence, whatever that looks like.
Why This Matters in the World We Live In
We live in a diverse and complex world. Every day, we interact with people of different races, genders, sexualities, religions, abilities, and backgrounds. We also navigate institutions that were built on certain assumptions about whose voices matter and whose do not. At the same time, we face global challenges - climate change, economic inequality, public health crises, and political polarization - that require thoughtful collaboration across differences.
WGSS helps prepare you for this reality. It doesn’t tell you what to think, but ultimately teaches you how to think critically about power, identity, and justice. It gives you the tools to understand why the world works the way it does and how we might work toward improving it.
No matter what field you enter, you will be working with people, navigating systems, and making decisions that affect others. In healthcare, understanding how gender, race, and class shape health outcomes and access to care is essential. In business, building inclusive workplaces and equitable practices matters. In education, recognizing how systems reproduce inequality - and how they can be changed - is critical. In law, it is important to examine whose voices are centered in legal systems and whose are left out. In technology, design decisions can affect users differently depending on their identities and experiences.
WGSS provides frameworks to approach these questions thoughtfully and responsibly. Ultimately, we all share the same world and communities. If we want to build a society where people are genuinely valued and understood - not despite our differences, but with full recognition of them - we need the tools that WGSS helps develop.
It’s Not What You Think: Let me address some common misconceptions I hear all the time.
I get why people think this, but it’s just not true. WGSS alumni work everywhere - law firms, hospitals, tech companies, schools, nonprofits, government agencies, media organizations, consulting firms, and more. The analytical and communication skills you develop in WGSS apply in literally every field. As you’ll see in the letters on this site, WGSS graduates pursue incredibly diverse, meaningful careers. The critical thinking skills you learn are exactly what employers are looking for.
WGSS is for anyone interested in understanding power, identity, and social systems. Students of all genders take WGSS courses because these questions matter to everyone. Understanding how gender shapes society benefits all of us, regardless of our own identities. Some of the most thoughtful contributions in my WGSS classes have come from men who are grappling with masculinity, privilege, and how to show up differently in the world.
WGSS is incredibly rigorous, theory-heavy, and intellectually challenging. You’ll engage with complex philosophical texts, conduct original research, write sophisticated analytical papers, and develop advanced critical thinking skills. It’s both academically rigorous and practically relevant - you learn to think deeply and act meaningfully. The reading load in my WGSS courses was honestly some of the heaviest and most telling I’ve had at Lehigh, and the concepts we grappled with were challenging in the best way.
I thought this too before I took my first WGSS course. WGSS goes way beyond what most people think they know. Even students who identify as feminists are often surprised by how much they learn about intersectionality, queer theory, global feminisms, structural analysis, and the complexity of identity and power. WGSS will challenge what you think you already understand - in ways that are uncomfortable sometimes, but ultimately really valuable.
Why I Created This Project
I came to Lehigh having no idea WGSS existed. My first course was completely accidental, as I was just trying to fulfill a distribution requirement. I never expected that one class would end up changing everything about how I think, but it genuinely did. I went from stumbling into WGSS by accident to declaring it as my second major alongside English. That’s how transformative it was.
WGSS helped me understand so many different aspects of the world I truly didn’t know I was missing. Before these courses, I couldn’t articulate why certain voices seemed to dominate every conversation while others were constantly dismissed as “too political” or “not universal enough.” I didn’t have language for why systems that claimed to be neutral actually served some people while marginalizing others. I didn’t understand how power operates in ways that feel invisible until you learn to see it. Learning these frameworks felt like someone finally gave me tools to ask the questions I’d been circling around my whole life without knowing how to name them.
And what I didn’t expect was how these ideas show up constantly in my actual life. They show up constantly in my actual life. When I’m doing research on historical documents, I’m asking who got to write history and whose stories were deliberately left out. When I’m editing submissions for our literary magazine, I’m thinking about whose voices we’re centering and whose we might be overlooking without even realizing it. When I’m teaching kids at Sunday school about justice and compassion, I’m drawing directly on what I learned about systems and power and how change actually happens. Even in regular conversations with friends about current events or what we’re watching or reading, WGSS has made me think more carefully, listen more closely, and honestly just engage more thoughtfully with the world.
But I kept meeting students who had no idea WGSS existed at Lehigh. Or students who’d heard of it and immediately dismissed it based on assumptions - that it’s not practical, that it’s only for women, that you can’t do anything with it. Meanwhile, I’m watching WGSS students and alumni work in law, healthcare, policy, education, tech, advocacy, all over the place, using these critical thinking skills every single day. The gap between what people assumed and what WGSS actually is was so huge that I started getting genuinely frustrated.
I realized students were making decisions about their education based on stereotypes instead of reality. They were graduating without ever knowing this program existed, or they were dismissing it without ever talking to someone who’d actually taken the courses. And I kept thinking, why doesn’t everyone know about this? Why are we letting misconceptions shape people’s choices when the actual experience is so different from what they’re imagining?
That frustration is what led to this project. I wanted to close that gap by letting WGSS students and alumni speak for themselves. Not through statistics or promotional materials, but through real voices sharing honest experiences. What did they learn that surprised them? How did it change their thinking? Where did it lead them? What would they tell someone who’s curious but unsure?
The revision process for this project taught me something important, similar to what I learned about public writing this semester. I initially wanted to include everything: extensive career research, multiple events, complicated data analysis. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was the letters themselves. The authentic voices. The real stories. Learning to cut what didn’t serve that central purpose was harder than I expected, but it made the project so much stronger. I also learned that I can’t just assume people will understand why this matters. I have to be clear about it. WGSS isn’t just another major or a few interesting courses. It’s a completely different way of understanding how the world works - how power operates, whose voices get heard, whose experiences are treated as universal and whose are dismissed. It’s tools you’ll use regardless of what career you choose. It’s a community of people asking hard questions about how to make things more just.
If you’re reading this because you’re even a little bit curious, I really hope these letters show you what I discovered by accident. I never expected to care this much about gender studies. I never expected it to shape literally everything I do - how I read, how I write, how I teach, how I think about the world. I never expected to go from one accidental course to declaring WGSS as a full major. I never expected to be the person creating a whole website about why WGSS matters. But here we are.
And that’s exactly why this project exists. Because I almost missed this entirely. I stumbled into WGSS by accident, and it became one of the most valuable parts of my education. How many students are missing it because they don’t even know it’s an option? How many are dismissing it based on assumptions that aren’t true? How many would absolutely love it if they just had accurate information instead of stereotypes?
I want students to know what WGSS actually is before they decide whether it’s for them. Not the watered-down version or the stereotype version, but the real, challenging, transformative thing it actually is. Read these letters. See what people who’ve experienced it have to say. Then decide for yourself, but at least you’ll be deciding based on reality.
This project has been one of the most meaningful things I’ve done at Lehigh. Getting to collect these letters, hearing people’s stories about how WGSS changed their thinking or led them to careers they love or gave them tools they use every day - it’s reminded me why I care about this work. The community of WGSS students and alumni I’ve gotten to know through this project feels like something I want to stay connected to beyond this semester.
I’m genuinely excited for this website to exist as a resource for future students. I won’t be able to get back the experience of discovering WGSS for the first time, but maybe I can help make that discovery easier for someone else. Maybe the next curious student won’t have to stumble into this field by accident like I did. Maybe they’ll read these letters and think “this is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” and they’ll know from the beginning what took me months to figure out.
That’s what this is really about. Making sure students have the information they actually deserve. Making sure they can make real choices about their education instead of choices based on misconceptions. And making sure WGSS gets recognized for what it truly is, not what people assume it is.
Thank you for taking the time to explore this archive. I hope these letters help you see what I see: that WGSS isn’t just worth knowing about. It’s worth experiencing.