The Department of Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) offers students an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary course of study that explores how the intersection of gender with race, class, sexualities, and other social categories of difference affects the ways power works in local, national, and global communities.

At URI, GWS students examine both the processes through which norms, discourses, and policies emerge from gendered cultural, political, and economic structures—as well as their impact on human rights, workplace inequalities, national and global politics, health care, and environmental sustainability.