The Women and Gender Studies Program is an interdisciplinary minor and certificate program designed to provide students with a women-focused curriculum that full incorporates the concept of gender and is responsive to the issues, experiences, research, and discourse of women in Guam, throughout Micronesia, and across cultures.

The program has five main objectives:

1. To offer an interdisciplinary program that will broaden understanding of the significance of gender in the lives, identities, activities, opportunities, and concerns of women in Guam, in other areas of Micronesia, and across cultures.
2. To provide degree students with a women- and gender-focused curriculum that will enhance their major field or study by highlighting issues, experiences, research and discourse relevant to women locally, throughout Micronesia, and in a global context.
3. To offer non-degree seeking students the opportunity to gain knowledge of women- and gender- centered teaching and research that is responsive to the needs and interests of women in the multicultural community of Guam and culturally diverse Micronesian region within a comparative framework.
4. To provide professional women as well as non-professional community-based women with a series of female-oriented courses and workshops that will empower and enrich their own lives and sense of identity as well as that of their families and communities.
5. To establish a research program that will investigate the needs and issues critical to women in Guam and throughout Micronesia, and which will serve to increase women’s visibility locally and internationally.

Upon the completion of the WG minor students will demonstrate the ability to:

• Understand and critique the significance of gender in the lives, identities, activities, opportunities, and concerns of women and men locally, regionally and transnationally.
• Analyze how gendered identities intersect with race, class, and sexual orientation and how systems of inequality and oppression operate and are sustained.
• Examine theoretical and practical connections between feminist studies and their major field of study by highlighting issues, experiences, gender research and discourses relevant to Guam, Micronesia, and the global community.
• Engage in research mindful of the needs and issues critical to women in Guam and throughout Micronesia, which will increase regional feminist scholarship.