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Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

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Filmmaker Claire Sliney heads to Paris with a Nat Geo Storytelling Fulbright
Student standing outside wearing graduation cap and gown

Claire Sliney graduated in May from the College of Arts and Sciences. She was the first Penn undergraduate to win an Academy Award, when she was a sophomore. As a senior, she was the first to receive a National Geographic Storytelling Fulbright Fellowship. (Image: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania Communications)

Filmmaker Claire Sliney heads to Paris with a Nat Geo Storytelling Fulbright

May graduate Claire Sliney is the first Penn undergrad to receive an Academy Award, and to receive a Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship. She heads to Paris to shoot a documentary about how female immigrants in France are portrayed in film.
Sex, taboo, and family conversation
A flat lay of bIrth control pills, IUDs, condoms, and other contraceptives against a blue background

Simran Chand’s double award-winning senior honors thesis explores familial sexual education among second-generation South Asian American students. (Image: @rhsupplies via Unsplash)

Sex, taboo, and family conversation

Simran Chand's thesis, “Familial Sexual Education for South Asian American Undergraduates and its Implications on Sexual Wellbeing,” used qualitative and quantitative analysis to determine the experiences of parental sexual communications among second-generation South Asian American Penn students.

Kristina García

What’s size got to do with it? Mocking a man’s manhood spurs a reverse #MeToo in South Korea

What’s size got to do with it? Mocking a man’s manhood spurs a reverse #MeToo in South Korea

Jinsook Kim, a postdoc in the Annenberg School for Communication, spoke about the backlash against feminist activism in South Korea. “The younger generation suffers from frustration and economic precarity,” Kim said. “The problem is, these young Korean men, they ascribe their sense of victimhood or precarity not to government or policies but to women who they see as preventing them from receiving their due.”

More transgender people are hiding their identity at work in the UK. Why?

More transgender people are hiding their identity at work in the UK. Why?

Sophie Lewis of the School of Arts & Sciences weighed in on how the current political climate has made life more challenging for transgender people. “The combination of nativist, reactionary politics around Brexit and Trump along with the conditions of a pandemic would, I think, contribute to people being more afraid to be out as trans,” she said.

Where caregiving and gender intersect

Where caregiving and gender intersect

The Perelman School of Medicine’s Eve Higginbotham spoke about how the pandemic has affected women caregivers working in academia. The results of a survey on the matter emphasize “the need for institutional acknowledgment and response to these stressors—and the unintended consequences that some policies have on the academic vitality of faculty that may differ between men and women,” she said.

Alice Paul’s mysterious manuscript
Alice Paul in her graduation gown and a handwritten page from her dissertation.

Alice Paul received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912. Professor Heather Sharkey and three students have spent the past year transcribing a manuscript of Paul’s doctoral dissertation that is held in the Penn Libraries collection. (Left image: Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute, and the Alice Paul Centennial Foundation, circa 1912) (Right image: Courtesy of the Penn Libraries)

Alice Paul’s mysterious manuscript

Heather J. Sharkey and three students transcribed a hand-written manuscript of the doctoral dissertation by Alice Paul, who earned her Ph.D. from Penn in 1912. As part of a virtual symposium, they joined John Pollack of the Libraries to discuss their efforts.
COVID-19 and women in the workforce
teacher leaning on desk speaking to student

Homepage image: During Women’s History Month, researchers across the University examine what we know today about how COVID-19 has affected women in the workforce, from education to STEMM fields.

COVID-19 and women in the workforce

Experts across Penn explain how the pandemic has exacerbated gender inequality and challenged female career advancement in the STEMM fields, education, and business.

Michele W. Berger, Kristina García, Dee Patel, Louisa Shepard

Many Americans opposed the suffrage movement—even women

Many Americans opposed the suffrage movement—even women

Kathy Peiss of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about women who opposed the suffrage movement. “The anti-suffragists were opposed to the idea of women having the right to vote largely because they saw it as a violation of women’s true gender nature—that they were mothers and wives—and that it might distract them from not only the duties of the home, but also their sense of women’s privileges to be in the home,” she said.