Carnegie Mellon University

Gender Studies Program

The Gender Studies program allows students to develop a deeper understanding of how gender operates across cultures, and to transfer those analytical skills to other courses, personal life choices, and professions.


Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates how gender is embedded in social, cultural, and political relationships. The work understands gender as a category of power that intersects with other power relations, including race, class, and sexuality.

The Gender Studies program offers a minor that merges coursework in some combination of the following fields: English, history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, economics, and modern languages.

Declare Gender Studies as a Minor

Spotlight: Marian Aguiar

Marian Aguiar Aims to Rearrange How We See Traditional Unions in Arranging Marriage

Some years ago in a London bookstore, Associate Professor of English Marian Aguiar made a simple observation. She noticed shelves filled with books about arranged marriage— there were paperback romances, memoirs, self-help, and novels by South Asian feminist authors.

This preponderance of material led Aguiar to eventually author Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora, a cultural studies book which examines the transnational discourse around arranged marriage as it appears in literature, film, pop culture, policy, and the law. Since she started her research for the book, Aguiar says arranged marriage has only become more ubiquitous.

Read more about Aguiar's work.

Marian Aguiar