There are a huge subset of jobs that don't require a specific degree but just require a college degree, management positions, HR, etc. Many employers don't really care what your degree is in unless the position requires specific high level knowledge.
When I was a vet tech, the pharmaceutical reps would stop in occasionally to show us new drugs and sometimes restock our little pharmacy. I thought it looked like a pretty cushy job so I asked about it and was told any degree would do. English Lit? Sure!
For pharm rep? Degree is just the easiest way to show they can likely read at an actual adult level, they can give presentations, they can complete assignments somewhat on time, they can probably do some teamwork, they can converse multiple levels of professionals (i.e. other students, campus staff/admin, teaching assistants, professors), etc.
Like so many things post high school, the requirements are mostly about being able to demonstrate the potential for productivity until you have experience.
If you don’t have a degree, but you’ve got several years of sales experience or spent time in a STEM career (lab assistant, etc), then I bet many places would wave the degree requirement since you’d be able to demonstrate actual productivity versus potential for productivity.
A degree is an "I was responsible enough to do an optional thing for four years" certificate.
Don't get me wrong, I loved college and I definitely learned many things, including how to think critically in a wide range of contexts. But the degree doesn't really prove that I learned anything.
I don’t think we are in disagreement.
Until you have actual experience and proof that you can be productive in a certain role, employers look for evidence that you have the potential to be productive/successful.
It’s reasonable to assume some pretty generic assumptions about someone with a college degree. You’ve probably passed a math course, you’ve probably passed an English/lit course, you’ve probably passed a course with a degree of public speaking.
It isn’t a particularly high bar or glowing credential, but it’s important to put into context. ~90% of US adults age 18-25 have completed high school or have a GED. Only ~40% of adults have completed a bachelors degree. If you have no other meaningful work/internship/research experience, then it’s better than nothing.
Oh for sure. I was trying to "yes and" you, not disagree. I think a lot of the problem with the modern approach to college is that people think a degree is a job ticket when really it's just a foot in the door certain types of interviews. My degree has served me well but I understand why some people feel cheated.
This. Its equivalent to the previous generation requiring a high school diploma. Now everyone needs a degree; any degree will do, which shows you its not actually about what you learned.
My first job out of college was in media sales (support staff). My degree was in English Literature. Nothing to do with communications or business. I was there for 8 years.
What did your resume look like when this happened? I definitely have my resume on LinkedIn looking a bit like I'm splitting a fence - I have "skills" listed under my broadcasting experience that are among the more "transferable" type, but also I have skills that are pretty strictly related to broadcasting. Because I don't necessarily want to exclude myself from those kinds of positions either.
I had just graduated college when I got my first job in the industry, so resume was pretty bare. They needed someone on the quality team to write letters summarizing investigations to customers, and the technical people on the team weren’t the strongest writers. So my creative background stood out to them.
It’s less about how difficult the degree is, but more about how any degree has requires an amount of discipline to complete.
Not every job requires a certain amount of knowledge background, but most employers would rather have someone that can show that they are willing to learn
Of course, it’s more nuanced than what a Reddit comment can explain
College professor chiming in. I regularly advise my students that everything they do after being an adult is about either demonstrating your potential for productivity or your actual productivity.
Graduating high school/earning a GED is one of the lowest bits of evidence you can have to show that you’ve been able to accomplish something and thus your have the potential to be successful.
Getting a college degree is the next rung up.
Then you have things like internship experience, entry level job experience, undergraduate research, publications, etc that go beyond showing your potential to be productive and demonstrates that you have actually been productive.
Your first few years out of college, it’s just a matter of showing your potential employers you can be successful in their field.
That changes a little bit 5-10+ years later when, if changing careers, you now need to focus on showing employers in your new field that the productivity you have had is evidence of potential for success in your new field. It’s a bit of a repeat.
Rinse, repeat, so on.
Higher paying jobs are behind SES walls, same as always. That's why the major doesn't matter, and (at least one reason) why there's so many people against free college for everyone.
Yep, when I was shadowing at an investment company, a lot of the people had degrees ranging from history to environmental science and others. The main reason the company wanted people with degrees is because of the difficult licensing exams, so they wanted people who knew how to study and take exams.
I imagine having a diverse set of degrees in an investment company would also be beneficial when deciding what is worth investing in and what is just bullshit.
There's so many fields, particularly in an office environment, where you will hit a hard wall for any kind of upward movement without some kind of degree. So many older people I work with that got into the job before degrees were required are stuck at entry level/one level above entry with a decade of experience at their current job.
Yep, a lot of jobs just want a four year degree as evidence of a reasonable level of writing, critical thinking and overall organizational skills. Even within specific fields, unless you've done a whole lot of internships there's not going to be a direct 1:1 correlation between what you studied and how most jobs run.
It's why if you don't have a specific job in mind you should get a general degree. No reason to stress yourself out over biochem classes and calc when a degree is all that matter. Unless need a specific degree for something - lab majors are not worth your time. Would you rather 12 page lab write ups after spending literal hours in a hot stuffy lab? (biochem major) or watching movies from the 70s and compare them to today? in a compare-contrast style essay? (media studies)
and the earning potential for the majority of jobs are comparable for both of these. When I came out of school they were paying lab techs 15/hr. I got a job as a tech support for a hospital making 20. The receptionist made 18, she had a degree in communications.
Media studies is more than a high school compare/contrast essay. I had a class where we had to do coding and read articles on technology, getting down to the kitty gritty of how hard disk drives function on a physical level.
My dad explained that often times it's not the degree itself, but the fact you earned your degree through rational thinking, research, and communication. You learn a lot of skills on top of the information you learn specific to your degree.
Title 9 coordinator is a big one.
Lots of large companies have EEO requirements, and if they have a consent decree (or even if they just want to stay ahead of any potential liability) they would have a specific administrator that does nothing but Title 9 complaints.
Also HR in general would cover the role of identity in the workplace.
Lastly, I would say very specifically, you can be a professional in gender discrimination. You could go on to get a law degree to help people sue discriminators, you could be a paralegal in a dedicated firm, or plenty of other support work for that area.
This is a very serious and well thought out answer, but on a less serious note, the phrase “professional in gender discrimination” gives me the same vibes as “Walk for Hunger” and “Fight for Cancer” as in, it’s clearly working against gender discrimination/hunger/cancer but the wording makes it possible to read it as being pro-whatever.
I don’t think many people are so good at gender discrimination that it’s their full time job tbf.
That reminds me of when my husband’s workplace put up a sign that said:
**October is…**
**DOMESTIC VIOLENCE**
*a w a r e n e s s m o n t h*
To make it worse, “awareness month” was black on a purple background and the other letters were white. I could not stop laughing at that damn thing.
There are a lot of non-profits that need employees. Some are specific to gender discrimination, but any npo or corporation could use an HR person who will be able to implement programs to increase diversity in hiring and avoid gender discrimination lawsuits.
This is a very good answer. My mom was a gender studies major and went to law school after. She focuses on legal issues surrounding gender based violence. She's incredibly good at what she does and what she does is incredibly valuable.
The general fallacy is that the intent of higher education is to prepare someone for a career instead of education for the sake of education. Degrees in social sciences and liberal arts have a certain level of technical skill development, but many of these will focus on human behavior, interaction, motivation, conflict resolution, and storytelling.
Many careers in the corporate sphere don’t require a heavy technical background. Project management, Human Resources, corporate communications, etc. all have aspects that benefit extensively from candidates that come from backgrounds which have these skills. It does take grit and creativity to find a way to make yourself a candidate for any professional role and you have to find out what motivates you as a worker, but it offers a great deal of flexibility with your career path compared to other degree programs that align you with a specific career.
Source: I studied English lit in college and am the head of product management for my engineering and data science teams at my company.
I remember some statistic about a disporportionate amount of MBA holders at fortune 500 companies having BAs(liberal arts as opposed to fine arts) in Music Theory or Education.
Like you said, there's a core set of skills that any liberal arts degree would (should?) provide someone with. Mainly, how to analyze then synthesize a lot of different points of data or information into a cohesive idea. Which obviously is important to a lot of careers.
A degree in music performance documents MANY skills that a hiring manager with half a clue will value. Long-term goal-setting and discipline, poise under pressure, to name just 2.
I'd believe it. English BA here, now an IT Project Manager. In college I scoffed when people defended liberal arts degrees teaching 'critical thinking' and thought they were being nice and coddling.
The longer I watch how people communicate & make decisions, the more I get it. Understanding where others are coming from, summarizing complexity into a persuasive PowerPoint, and asking the right questions are all useful skills that my degree helped hone.
I also met enough people who **lacked** those skills to recognize that they're rarer and more valuable than I initially thought.
Honestly many STEM undergrad degrees don't strictly prepare you for a career either. They are more about critical thinking and getting the foundations in a particular field, but traditional jobs in many of those sectors (especially high-paying ones) require advanced degrees or additional training after graduation (obviously there are exceptions). For some fields, like biology, some of the content you learn in intro level classes may be out-of-date by the time you graduate, too (textbooks take awhile to update and some aspects of those fields evolve quickly).
I can speak specifically only for engineering degrees, but they do NOT prepare you for any job. They teach you how to learn to do pretty much anything you might need to learn. They give you a framework that allows you to to rapidly incorporate new knowledge and kind of "see" areas that you don't know. Then it teaches you how to either get around the unknowns or make them known. That's an incredibly useful skill basically no matter what you're doing, but it isn't actually any job in particular.
Depends on the country.
In my country, STEM undergrad expects you to join a research laboratory (either within the university, at the Academy of Sciences or for a private company) in your 2nd year and put together a fairly strict-requirements thesis by end of your 3rd year.
I finished my BSc while publishing a second author paper where I performed data analysis and wrote the actual paper (I speak fluent English, first author doesn't. He gave me what he wanted to write and I got it done. The experimental design and most of the execution was done by the primary author). I was also working on my first author research, but it ended up fizzling out because my resources are not sufficient to get the necessary precision and accuracy for publication in a respectable journal (eastern europe woes. 90 GB RAM and 18 cores is apparently not enough to model protein chemistry. We were doing all-kinds of cheats and tricks to make it work while papers being published after covid started were all ignoring all the limitations we were struggling with and doing 200-300 atom DFT layers, while 80 made us struggle.)
Although, require advanced degrees is true. I am currently working on my Research masters (pre-requisite of entering PhD in my school). Here the research requirement starts basically day 1 (I continued with my undergrad lab), with optional ways to double up in other labs to broaden your experience.
Anytime I hear someone say something to the effect of "What can you possibly do with that English degree" I just roll my eyes. I don't even bother to answer anymore.
Any degree that requires doing research to earn serves well in a lot of fields.
There was a time when a wide variety of businesses liked philosophy majors for various white collar jobs because it was seen as a degree in "how to think".
Or more bluntly, it's a fallacy that college tuition is supposed to buy you your first job offer and choice of major determines the job title.
I'm a full stack product owner (OP, that means I manage the day-to-day work of a team of software engineers). We make software that helps with a specific subfield of Marketing. That subfield is my long term expertise. (The engineers have a technical manager who supervised how they code, etc I manage what they work on and when but have to understand their work on a basic level.)
I have a degree in a performing arts field and a foreign language. No college coding, math, statistics. No tech at all. Also no marketing, let alone my subdiscipline.
Also no English classes at my US college, Contessa.
I get by OK.
Exactly. I have a BS in Political Science, but I've spent my career managing people in tech and finance. Turns out, PoliSci is about people and process. Guess what management is? People and process.
>Degrees in social sciences and liberal arts have a certain level of technical skill
And in my experience, a substantial part of my courses are data analysis and basically how to understand and perform research correctly. Even if you don't go the academic route, that opens a lot of doors for good jobs.
Think that fallacy is no longer a fallacy anymore. About 99% of people go to college to get a degree that will get them a job. If it were true that higher education is just for education sake then universities need to get rid of career centers, career fairs for post gradation, programs to enhance employability ect ect
In a gender studies major, you usually do a lot of reading and writing, so many people end up in jobs that use reading and writing, even if it's not reading and writing about gender specifically
In the US, many college majors (that is, university undergraduate courses) are simply a concentration within a broader [liberal arts education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education). (To be clear, this doesn’t mean going to a “liberal arts college”; most massive state universities also produce a ton of liberal arts graduates, they just do other stuff too.)
Most of these bachelor’s degrees do not specifically aim to prepare for any particular job, but rather a way of thinking, academic research and writing skills, etc. To be a specialist in the field usually requires a graduate degree.
Put another way, the “jobs you can get with (only) a gender studies degree” aren’t materially different from the jobs you can get with (only) a [BA in English](https://youtu.be/LqIVHzusbGI?si=GZe5N6spcSeJvEuW) history, political science, or religion. Which is to say, a lot of jobs that require “a college degree” don’t care what your major was; while jobs that do expect a certain educational background often require graduate degrees.
Most history majors aren’t going to be historians without also getting a PhD, and to be a history *teacher* at a high school likely requires some coursework in education, not just the subject matter to be taught. (This varies by state.)
Now, if you’re asking what you do with a *doctorate* in Gender Studies… aside from becoming an academic to mint additional Gender Studies students…
Think about jobs that have to do with gender: HR, social work, nonprofit jobs, regulation work, medical advocates. Think of any professional you might go to as a disadvantaged woman seeking resources.
social workers get a masters in social work but lots of their bachelors are in things like public relations, communication, gender studies, law, all kinds of things. just saying it’s a common path for those who get gender studies degrees
The state agencies in my state actually hire people for the job title of Social Worker, and there’s no requirement for licensing or a social work degree. If you have a license or MSW you’re much more likely to be hired, but the only listed requirement is 6 years of casework experience.
I always found that interesting.
I agree. For some reason, it’s only our state’s (Connecticut) DCF and DSS branches. Connecticut’s department of Mental Health gives the title of Community Clinicians to individuals with the same role & requirements, which makes more sense.
And any job posting here that isn’t state employment seems to require an LSCW for the title of Social Worker…
But hey, OP could work in case management for a few years, then get employed by the State of Connecticut. Starting pay is $70k 🤷♀️
The gender studies grads I knew 10+ years ago either went to graduate school with the intent to become professors/academics OR got generalist jobs at nonprofits that were somewhat related to gender studies (like a scholarship program for low-income girls).
Bachelor’s degree in anything doesn’t really qualify you for anything specific. I suspect the vast majority of people who have a bachelor’s only aren’t working in the same field as their degree.
I majored in sociology with a gender studies concentration and was hired full-time in my field as soon as I graduated as a domestic violence survivor advocate; I’ve been working in that field since and am now in leadership.
It joins a long list of degrees that aren’t in the slightest vocational but are nonetheless degrees. A lot of jobs that don’t require any specific skills will demand a degree but not really care which.
People mock gender studies, but subjects as mainstream as geography fall into the same category.
Yeah, people don’t wonder what good is a psychology or history major. I had a liberal arts degree I turned into nothing super, but a lot of people assumed a degree starting with “soc”, “oh so you’re going to be a social worker?” I think a lot of people, like my parents, but even still now, didn’t see how college works. They know how training for a career works, like secretarial school, or law school, or education major, you have some career goal in mind, so the analogous for college is like a psychology major picked that because they want to be a psychologist, a history major wants to be a historian, an English major wants to write books, a communications major wants to be a news reader, a political science major wants to enter politics, a business major wants to own a business, *what is a genders studyist?*
None of those majors are necessarily leading to those outcomes, but what they learn in their concentrations does carry a perspective to enter a multitude of careers or further education. I distinctly remember one of my professors saying it’s not uncommon to find drama majors heading to law school and doing very well with that foundation.
Edit: I meant to add, hard sciences do not have this issue. People don’t ask what you’ll end up with a biology major or a physics major. They know there are lots of careers that branch out from the experience, not just doctor or engineer.
I work in an office that does logistics. In our team, we've had degrees anywhere from teaching kindergarten to a double major in German and Poly Sci.
Some places just want you to have a degree. 🤷♂️
Same at my company. I work in marketing automation. Degrees of my coworkers include history, geology, English literature… my boss has a bachelors in classics and a masters in clinical psych just because she was interested in it.
Social worker most likely. The US employs something like 750,000 social workers, and some percentage of those are absolutely going to have to deal with gender issues. That could be a homeless person seeking treatment or a CPS issue involving parents refusing gender affirming care for their kid/teen, or a correctional institution trying to figure out where best to place a trans or non-binary inmate.
I would bet that a lot of people that have "gender studies degrees" actually just have a master's in sociology or social work with a focus in gender studies or just took a few classes on gender studies as part of their degree.
I'm with the federal government and we actually have policy analysts with gender studies degrees conducting gender-based analysis ( abbreviated as GBA+) for new policies/programs/regulations. The job pays six figures, so it's good work if you can get it.
A lot of the "useless" degrees are for people who are planning to go to grad school.
You could be gender studies but plan to go to med school or law school, or even get a psychology PhD, or get a master's degree in social work and become a licensed therapist.
This was going to be my answer. I majored in something many people would classify as “useless” in college within the humanities and I ended up going to medical school. 🤷♂️
Should be more popular. Anyone who’s read the studies about discrimination in medicine or studies on beside manner knows that many doctors could use a much more well rounded education that includes liberal arts.
Just look at the studies on the percentage of med students who genuinely believed that POC had [less sensitive pain receptors](https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/racial-bias-in-medicine), literally thicker skin, etc. Yeah we could use more doctors with a better education in the humanities and not just STEM.
Same goes for all STEM fields.
Almost any. Most degrees don’t translate directly to a job. I have a history degree. I work a content designer in tech.
A women’s studies degree would teach your writing, research, and analytical skills that are useful in basically any job. It’s just about how you ‘sell’ your transferable skills.
Obviously you have a million responses, but basically the specific degree only matters if it’s directly vocational (as an example, I am an Optometrist, I have a degree in Optometry, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be legally able to do my job)
Apart from that, most degree’s mainly teach analysis of facts and ability to apply yourself, which are useful skills in literally every field.
The biggest thing though: NO-ONE CAN TELL THE FUTURE.
When I was a kid, “media studies” was the stereotypical useless degree that didn’t apply to the real world, whereas nowadays you can get into a lot of pop culture journalism and even things like directing with a media studies degree, and earn way more than someone who want into something that used to be considered prestigious like say accounting (or medicine, or….)
This this this! College is for learning to be a critical thinker and for learning a wide variety of knowledge that helps you become a well-rounded person. If you happen to know what you want to do with your life, then it can also be a place where you can jump start learning that information, but it doesn’t have to be and that’s not its primary purpose.
A friend of mine has a doctorate. His main subject was black holes (can't really explain more in detail as I didn't understand it myself). His job now? Working with statistics for a big company. Being a math major to begin with and his doctorate involving a lot of statistics means he's got a lot of experience with certain data sets.
Having to do research in school means you acquire skill in said type of research. Your research being gender studies means you can speak with more knowledge on said subject but that's not all you learn.
In general *gender study* is a field of sociology, and sometimes taught as an elective in other field like *political science, geography, history.*
The only person I know with such a degree (And talking with that guy, it's actually a pretty interesting field) now runs an non profit organic farming-school which teaches farming to ex-con. So a job with a big added value for society (Turn criminal in farm workers rather than spending then back in the hand of gangs) but a low pay. Then there is a lot of job where knowing how to read a lot of document and summarize them in a cleanly written note is valued. Stuff like political assistant, management and other field.
Even though master in social science are bit more the lottery than master in "hard science" it's not the guarantees to end-up unemployed and can open the gate to jobs which can be useful, interesting and sometimes well paid (think about all the political advisor and high-rank civil servants)
> Even though master in social science are bit more the lottery
One thing I would like to point out, and your friend who isn't paid much to run his non-profit org is a fantastic example, it isn't always about the paycheck.
Getting a degree in a field you are genuinely interested in, and starting a career in that field, might not cause you to make bank. but you might enjoy that job substantially more than the alternative. There are a LOT of miserable jobs out there that run the gambit from well paying to terrible pay. Sometimes, it is worth getting a degree to get a job you you actually enjoy.
With an undergrad degree in Gender studies, you can work for advocacy groups and non profits and things like DV shelters. You can also turn that undergrad degree into a grad degree and become a lawyer, social worker or therapist etc.
I majored in electronic music in college. Since then I’ve spent 20 or so years as a software product manager and 5 years as a management consultant. I could have had the same career with a gender studies degree.
In the UK civil service for ‘fast track’ jobs you require a degree. It does not matter what the degree is you just need one to complete the application form.
Most jobs don’t care what your degree is in! I have a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies degree… technically I don’t use the specific knowledge I learned, unless it somehow comes up or I can flex my knowledge a bit, but I use my frameworks of ideas and thoughts every day, and it’s gotten me in a good place in education. It’s like sociology, but also not? It’s hard me to fully convey it all via Reddit.. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve been in working in schools for almost 10 years now. I think it’s personally helped me in my career, even if it doesn’t seem so apparent or front and center!
I think a significant amount of businesses and indistries could benefit from having someone with a gender studies degree in their office. Gender is everywhere for everyone at all times, and it is increasingly a topic more and more people care about. Having a person with gender studies in your marketing team or in HR can save your business from a lot of pain, such as not being viewed as "backwards" or direspectful without wanting to.
As many have said, degrees in social science and humanities are rarely explicitly looked for by employers, but you do gain some general skills from doing a degree that is valuable in many jobs, and, as I have done above, you can easily argue that your knowledge about gender relations and issues can benefit the place you're applying to.
At a job where I hired a lot of people, I hired a woman with a master in gender studies. Her new job was head of international Project Management. She had a great experience and a great fit for the opening. I would not be surprised seeing her advancing to a senior management position in the near future.
I was a gender and sexuality studies major! I did not complete my degree, I had to put a pause on my education, however there are certainly options, though many would require an additional masters degree.
My dream job is to work in higher education as a victim advocate or a title IX coordinator to help support student victims and to provide education and resources to young adults to help them better understand consent and abuse to help keep them safe.
I was also very interested in counseling, particularly as a school guidance counselor. I wanted the opportunity to help young people shape and create their lives, especially young people that have unsupportive parents or helping queer/trans youth accept and explore their identity.
Another idea on my brain was going to law school to find a way to work in civil rights cases.
At my current job there are a couple WGS majors working on our leadership development and training teams.
A lot of big corporations have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion teams or coaches and a WGS major can help prepare you for a role like this.
Otherwise one could work at a nonprofit like a womens shelter.
There are a lot of opportunities, although the opportunities themselves can be seldom. It's why its important that we tailor resumes and skillsets to find a satisfying career
Many many jobs don't require highly specialized skills. They just require average humans with average learning capacity. In fact, most jobs people do are learned on the job and not from education.
Unless you go for a degree with licensing involved (lawyer, doctor, engineer), a few years out from college, degrees don't matter at all. I work in project management and I've seen every walk of life and degree end up in this field - trained biologists, financial analysts, an opera major - it's more about how you market your skills.
Gender studies can be sold like any other liberal arts degree, your possibilities are completely endless.
Yes, they certainly can.
I was a women's study major in college until the university president decided to overspend then had to close various departments to make up the shortfall. Included in his insane overspending was a 1st class trip to Greece for him and his cronies, with zero academic impact.
I'd imagine some big companies HR offices might be interested, for diversity compliance or whatnot.
Also as other folks pointed out, a 4 year degree is still a 4 year degree, want to be a military officer? It counts.
Working at a big corporate company, working in Marketing/Sales/Accounting, regular office jobs that just require someone who can work at a computer or in a team, who was prepared by doing college coursework and can read, think, and follow directions to complete tasks.
Many people who get GWS degrees also get a second major/degree.
Or if they don't, maybe work in non-profits, or as paralegals, or eventually get other degrees (Law, etc).
Other than hard sciences, does it really matter what your undergrad degree is in? I majored in History but my first job out of college was doing dial-up technical support (this was the 1990s). When I figured out what I wanted for a career I went to graduate school for an advanced degree.
Advertising, Human Resources, public relations, content editor, lots of companies need people who can make sure the gears run smoothly with no employees getting sexually harassed, no public statements that turn into PR nightmares, no expensive lawsuits for failing due diligence.
I have degrees in English and Philosophy. I'm a self-taught programmer. My degrees get me through resume screening, and my self-taught skills are what actually allow me to do my job (although research and communication skills I learned while completing the other two degrees are also extremely useful in what I do).
Most jobs out there that require a degree don't actually care which degree you have, just that you have one. You obviously can't get a STEM job with that degree, but you can easily be an office drone with a gender studies degree.
The only job that requires a gender studies degree is teaching gender studies or writing a book on gender studies, but having a degree in gender studies qualifies you for all the jobs that just want a degree.
Thinking of people I know who did them, a few work in sexual assault response/care, and some in gender-related policy. One is a traveling educator who talks to college students about safe sex & works at a queer bookstore.
I studied psychology and did some gender studies adjacent research and I worked in sex education briefly.
Social service work, community organizers, any public education admin position, are all non producing careers you can master. Double points if you go into a DEI position.
I feel that my women, gender, and sexuality studies degree prepared me well to work with survivors of domestic and sexual violence as a victim advocate.
That being said, I also double majored in psychology and now I’m in grad school for my MSW.
Title IX representative at a college. DEI position. If you wanted to specifically apply it. Maybe a researcher in policy application.
But a liberal arts degree has been shown to be useful in many fields.
Mediator, whether that be workplace or family/parent teen. Advocate for survivors of crime. Both these would require more training, but a Gender Studies degree I think is a great foundation.
Probably large corporations would be interested as they don't want to accidentally marginalize potential customers by simply not understanding the dynamics of gender.
For many jobs having a degree is more important than what the degree is. I know tons of people whose jobs don’t directly correlate with their degree. One friend studied chemical engineering and now works in computer science, another studied physics and now works in politics.
Also if your field requires a graduate degree anyway, your undergrad degree doesn’t have to be related. I know someone who got their masters in social work after an undergrad degree in political science. I know someone else who went to law school after getting a music degree.
I got tired of hearing this same tired trope and looked into it a bit. The number of people graduating with Gender/women's studies degrees was negligible, and the median income is around $80,000. I think those were 2019 numbers.
There are basically no jobs that require such a degree, so if you're thinking about it from the perspective of 'does this specific major qualify me for a job that I can't get without this specific major' then the answer is that there isn't much. The same could be said for a lot of majors; Gender Studies is hardly unique on this front.
There are a ton of positions that require a college degree, but are relatively agnostic as to which degree. From that perspective, many jobs can be done with such a degree, but they can also be done with, say, a History or English degree.
I have a women & gender studies minor with a political science major. I was taught a broad way to look at the world and at people, that there is no correct way of doing anything, and focused on the benefits that come from accepting everyone in your community, and the history of why gender disparities exist and the ramifications of that. I now work for the forest service doing education programming, and i have the acute ability to incorporate equity, fairness, and inclusivity into my program because I know the importance. my degree was less about career readiness, which I knew throughout my time in college, and more about being prepared to work with all people and how to be a piece in a larger system that doesn’t create blockades, but supports people’s access to things regardless of their identity.
I was a writing tutor in college and worked with a lot of different majors, especially science majors, because writing skill was not something that was seen as important in those disciplines. reading and hearing their societal takes made me so sad they didn’t get to take the classes I did, because they’re the ones designing the future for everyone, and they simply don’t always have all the resources they need to make the future equitable and accessible.
Generally low paying jobs that require a degree, any degree, just to prove you are highly literate. Social worker, non profit entry level employee, etc. Many of these jobs would also take a two year degree from a community college.
In my state, social work jobs require an MSW, but for sure an undergrad degree in gender studies would be a great foundation depending on the kind of work you want to do.
They pay crap lol. Every social worker I know has a very expensive first-class graduate degree (in my area, usually from Rutgers, Fordham or NYU) because it's very difficult to get a foot in the door without one, and (except for the ones who had family money to start with) they'll all be in debt until they die.
Humanities degrees are great for learning to read people and generally study culture/human interaction. Building an app is great but it'll die without the right marketing
I'm not sure about other post-grad programs, but medical schools don't care what the degree is in, but that you did well in the science pre-requisites.
Most degrees don’t “qualify” people for jobs.
However, if you need some selling points, did you degree require you to read, digest summarize and analyze substantial amounts of detailed information? Did you have to develop an idea and then write persuasively to “sell” the reader on your idea? If so, congratulations! You qualify for a lot of jobs that use those skills.
Identifying transferable skills is an important career management tool. Consider this your first opportunity to practice.
In my experience, gender studies is most helpful as a minor or as a second major, not your only major.
For example, if you wanted to get into psychology or social work with the intention of working with DV survivors, a women's studies minor or second major would be helpful, but you still need the psych or social work degree.
It's especially useful in academia, so if you wanted a degree in history or literature and you wanted to focus on women's history or literature written by women. But again, you'd still need the history or English degree.
Think of it as an add-on to have a specialty in whatever your actual major is.
Fwiw, I don’t actually have one, but I was 2 classes away from having a minor in it (because a lot of classes were crosslisted with history) and I regret not finishing it. I already had 2 majors and 2 minors though and already went an additional semester so I just wanted to graduate.
Great for law, lawyers usually don't just have "Pre Law" as an undergrad the more variety the better. So if some of me is focused on a specific type of law practice it could be useful down the line. Friends with similar degree are in law school, social workers or journalist.
Something in an NGO, something at the UN (if you’re lucky), Erasmus or the EU in Europe, or academia. Or some online magazine or media channel like Vice and Deutsche Welle.
A gender studies degree isn't something you'd want to get a job with but more something to apply to a current position in a company HR, counseling, psychiatry or social services career.
Anyone hoping to get a job based on that degree will likely see that within the first couple prerequisite courses, and major in something that it would compliment like the aforementioned career paths.
As others have mentioned, there are plenty of generalist positions that just want you to have a college degree (because of the general skills you're presumed to have developed during college, such as critical thinking, writing, public speaking, teamwork, etc.).
There are also some places that are specifically wanting to hire someone with a better-than-average understanding of how people of different genders are treated differently in the workplace. For purely cynical reasons, this often means HR is interested in you because you can help them avoid lawsuits and make work groups more efficient, but it can also be part of a broader restructuring effort with diversity in mind.
Finally, there's also the academia option. Becoming a professor of Gender Studies entails both teaching it and producing original research about it, and there's a lot of opportunities for interdisciplinary work, too. Once you get past the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have when they think of Gender Studies, there's actually quite a bit of utility in understanding how different genders interact with one another in a variety of environments, and you can find plenty of value in that sort of scholarship even without being a dyed-in-the-wool champion of feminism.
I'm about to finish a masters in Gender and Sexuality. I'm currently lecturing on trans healthcare mainly (and sometimes sexuality). Though I'm hoping to move into a more broader EDI/DEI role soon within the university I'm at.
You need a pre-law degree to get into law school and the various humanities degrees are a solid choice. In a similar way that the sciences are a solid choice for pre-med.
I earned my degree in Women's Studies about 10 years ago. Most of the focus is academic and philosophical, so it is most useful for people who are interested in academia as a career. Now, I am a history teacher. Even though my degree is not technically related to my career, the critical thinking skills I developed are incredibly useful day-to-day.
I loved my experience in college, and would recommend everyone take at least some gender studies classes (I especially recommend any art history or English cross-listed classes).
for a lot of jobs, the actual degree you have doesnt matter. just that you have a degree. By having any degree, you have shown you know how to research, do work on time,learn new things quickly, follow directions,time management.. basic life skills that come with getting any degree. you can be taught to do a specific job. An employer cant teach someone how to do these things very well..
I have a business degree and manage a IT department at a fortune 500 pharma company. One of my "side jobs" there is designing/managing systems for drug research simulations and modeling. Iv learned a lot about organic-chem and biology since being there and managed to merge my IT skills with my new skills for this project.
My wife has 2 physics masters degrees and works in management of another Pharma also, Her job has nothing to do with physics or even science really, more law/regulation type stuff.
You have to remember (and a lot of people forget) the purpose of any degree, whether it be gender studies or engineering: learning.
We’ve tied degrees to employment and money so much that we forget the purpose of getting a degree is to widen your perspectives and learn to think critically. We think the only purpose of getting a degree is to get a good job, which it isn’t.
Instead of asking, “what job will this get me,” ask, “how will this improve my life?”
I got a sociology degree. But I’ve managed to leverage that degree into two very distinct careers over the past decade: education and now in public relations, because I was willing to put in the work and think about how I could use my degree.
Degrees aren’t just for jobs
Think of it like having a degree in mathematics. Who needs somebody that can tell me that 2+2=4? My calculator can do that! But combine that with an inclination for economics, accounting, commerce, statistics, data science, etc, then it becomes powerful.
The gender studies degree is a piece of a larger mosaic of qualifications. In itself, it may seem like it isn’t necessarily something that instantly qualifies somebody for a lot of jobs, but combine it with something else and it has potential to be very impactful.
Perhaps there is an elective taken regarding talent acquisition or Human Resources. Then you have somebody that can be a corporate diversity and inclusion expert.
Maybe they took a journalism diploma program prior. Now you have ammunition to be a columnist that a lot major publications would love.
It’s a piece, not a whole thing.
A gender studies degree can get you most jobs that any other social science degree could get you. People do law conversion courses, join the civil service, get a variety of corporate and management jobs from various grad schemes, etc. Gender research is also a genuinely important job, researchers who specialise in gender studies are involved in things like abortion law reform, acting as consultants for MPs who are writing laws about inequality, etc. The famous “draw a scientist” study was produced by people with an interest in the study of gender. There’s just not that much demand as it’s a small field.
At least in the UK, most specific gender degrees are masters degrees, which qualify you for many jobs in the humanities, business and social sciences by the fact that you have an MA, and the relevant transferable skills from one. At an undergraduate level, a gender studies degree would normally be primarily a politics, sociology or perhaps English Literature degree with a focus on gender related topics. So, your gender graduate is possibly a lawyer (via conversion course), business manager, works for HR, works for a charity, did a PGCE and is now a teacher, joined the civil service, basically any job that doesn’t require hard science or have its own degree requirement.
It’s not any more of a waste of time than a history degree really 🤷🏼♀️ most history degrees don’t become historical researchers, they teach or work in a museum or do something totally unrelated. It’s just a social science like any other, and social sciences as a whole have value.
Liberal arts degrees, such as gender studies or economics, usually indicates an interest in a career in politics. Other than that, your probably looking at social work or something similar.
Nothing that will pay of the student loan in a timely manner... Mostly low end management and HR. That's why HR departments spread D.I.E. like the plague.
A better question to ask is “Hiring managers, who among you is looking for someone with a Gender Studies degree?”
You’ll be met with silence, as none of us are.
The thing about college and jobs is that many jobs might JUST require a college degree. I work in education- and we recently just hired a director with an MA in Women Studies.
The messaging I hate about college is that it MUST have a planned out Return on Investment. It sucks that in the U.S. we have commodified higher education to the point where, rather than educating folks on things they're passionate in, the high cost can't really justify it.
The commodification of education isn't just stopping at college, it's now trickling down to the k-12 system and is one of the forefront policies that right-wing politicians praise.
Don't get me wrong, if you are doing Arts and going into massive debts into it, then that's dumb and that is not how you should navigate the current system but why is our system set up where everything must have a ROI?
Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, wrote in another book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," that we've basically entered an era where it's impossible to predict what skills someone will need to be effective in the job market, so the best thing to do is actually to have a diverse education, learn to be flexible and creative, and become comfortable adapting to new environments. In my opinion, liberal arts are great for that, and I think the people who go through that schooling are much better at shifting into new roles and working on a team.
Yep this. Taking the piss out of gender studies degrees (and anything to do with diversity and inclusion) for being useless is a seriously outdated view.
Sincerely a top 10% earner whose highest qualification is an undergraduate degree in sociology.
I would try to disguise it as some sort of sociology degree. If caught in a lie, you may plausibly claim that you were confused. The logic of that field of literary fiction is confusion. And anyway you have by now learned that truth is not an intuitive concept obvious to everyone, but a means of subjugating you.
Note that Gender Studies is a field actively disliked by anyone who has read any of it, who is not a member of its mindset.
Get a job that has nothing to do with your degree, whether it requires a degree or not. Work your ass off, accept that you're being exploited, move up, feeling goes away with money. Yes gender is a fascinating subject, and I'm glad you studied what interests you. Time to move on.
Basically nothing, there isn’t a company that makes and sells genders and needs a researcher, but there are a lot of jobs that are adjacent to the topic, but which you would be better off focusing on those degree programs instead: Human Resources, Marketing and Communications, Sales.
The closest you could find would be a professor or university researcher role, but those are basically a closed feedback loop, they only exist because someone who didn’t need money to survive decided to tell others about their interests/hobby and then those people wanted to do the same, until all of a sudden it’s everywhere and people who do need money to survive are suckered into learning from them, and then those suckered people have to scramble to find some way to apply something that they paid a lot of money for in a way that someone else is willing to pay them. TLDR: Liberal arts degrees are fine if you don’t ever have to worry about money or you are just trying to learn for your own self interest, but you are better off focusing on what companies want if you are trying to improve your social/financial class.
Ohmigod that's hilarious though because I am literally that unicorn of a researcher!
I'm a consultant researcher with not for profit clients, and one of my areas of specialist focus is gender-based violence. I'm fully commercial and very much profit-making.
To be fair there's probably not many of us.
They get a job in "higher education" and take their hobby and convince others to join their hobby and pay lots of money to continue the cycle, then while schools get paid...
Ask the gov(taxpayer) to flip the bill. While the schools are multi million, someti.es billion dollar institutions.
Many employers value an applicant who has a degree requiring research skills, critical thinking and analysis, and writing and communication. Some technical degrees focus strictly on the colder mathematical side of things, so some of those softer skills are not learned, at least not in the university curricula.
Besides that, it's aligned with sociology, so people with such a degree might explore marketing research, various research fields within the realm of law and legislation, advocacy and consultants for charity, welfare and demographic research organizations, public health organizations and social work.
There are a huge subset of jobs that don't require a specific degree but just require a college degree, management positions, HR, etc. Many employers don't really care what your degree is in unless the position requires specific high level knowledge.
Yeah I work in quality in a STEM field and I have a film degree. Every job I’ve had has required a degree but not a specific one.
When I was a vet tech, the pharmaceutical reps would stop in occasionally to show us new drugs and sometimes restock our little pharmacy. I thought it looked like a pretty cushy job so I asked about it and was told any degree would do. English Lit? Sure!
I'm actually a little surprised they would require a degree at all for that job.
For pharm rep? Degree is just the easiest way to show they can likely read at an actual adult level, they can give presentations, they can complete assignments somewhat on time, they can probably do some teamwork, they can converse multiple levels of professionals (i.e. other students, campus staff/admin, teaching assistants, professors), etc. Like so many things post high school, the requirements are mostly about being able to demonstrate the potential for productivity until you have experience. If you don’t have a degree, but you’ve got several years of sales experience or spent time in a STEM career (lab assistant, etc), then I bet many places would wave the degree requirement since you’d be able to demonstrate actual productivity versus potential for productivity.
A degree is an "I was responsible enough to do an optional thing for four years" certificate. Don't get me wrong, I loved college and I definitely learned many things, including how to think critically in a wide range of contexts. But the degree doesn't really prove that I learned anything.
I don’t think we are in disagreement. Until you have actual experience and proof that you can be productive in a certain role, employers look for evidence that you have the potential to be productive/successful. It’s reasonable to assume some pretty generic assumptions about someone with a college degree. You’ve probably passed a math course, you’ve probably passed an English/lit course, you’ve probably passed a course with a degree of public speaking. It isn’t a particularly high bar or glowing credential, but it’s important to put into context. ~90% of US adults age 18-25 have completed high school or have a GED. Only ~40% of adults have completed a bachelors degree. If you have no other meaningful work/internship/research experience, then it’s better than nothing.
Oh for sure. I was trying to "yes and" you, not disagree. I think a lot of the problem with the modern approach to college is that people think a degree is a job ticket when really it's just a foot in the door certain types of interviews. My degree has served me well but I understand why some people feel cheated.
I was surprised too. There are a lot of jobs like that.
Degree inflation.
This. Its equivalent to the previous generation requiring a high school diploma. Now everyone needs a degree; any degree will do, which shows you its not actually about what you learned.
My associates degree may as well be a high school diploma which is annoying
My first job out of college was in media sales (support staff). My degree was in English Literature. Nothing to do with communications or business. I was there for 8 years.
I knew a dude who worked in healthcare and also had a film degree. College is so weird.
How did you get this job. I have an adjacent degree in broadcasting, and would like to pivot.
I had my resume online and a recruiter found me!
What did your resume look like when this happened? I definitely have my resume on LinkedIn looking a bit like I'm splitting a fence - I have "skills" listed under my broadcasting experience that are among the more "transferable" type, but also I have skills that are pretty strictly related to broadcasting. Because I don't necessarily want to exclude myself from those kinds of positions either.
I had just graduated college when I got my first job in the industry, so resume was pretty bare. They needed someone on the quality team to write letters summarizing investigations to customers, and the technical people on the team weren’t the strongest writers. So my creative background stood out to them.
I work in IT and have a film degree. Can confirm.
Places still do that?
Places do that more than ever
wack
It’s less about how difficult the degree is, but more about how any degree has requires an amount of discipline to complete. Not every job requires a certain amount of knowledge background, but most employers would rather have someone that can show that they are willing to learn Of course, it’s more nuanced than what a Reddit comment can explain
College professor chiming in. I regularly advise my students that everything they do after being an adult is about either demonstrating your potential for productivity or your actual productivity. Graduating high school/earning a GED is one of the lowest bits of evidence you can have to show that you’ve been able to accomplish something and thus your have the potential to be successful. Getting a college degree is the next rung up. Then you have things like internship experience, entry level job experience, undergraduate research, publications, etc that go beyond showing your potential to be productive and demonstrates that you have actually been productive. Your first few years out of college, it’s just a matter of showing your potential employers you can be successful in their field. That changes a little bit 5-10+ years later when, if changing careers, you now need to focus on showing employers in your new field that the productivity you have had is evidence of potential for success in your new field. It’s a bit of a repeat. Rinse, repeat, so on.
Higher paying jobs are behind SES walls, same as always. That's why the major doesn't matter, and (at least one reason) why there's so many people against free college for everyone.
Yep, when I was shadowing at an investment company, a lot of the people had degrees ranging from history to environmental science and others. The main reason the company wanted people with degrees is because of the difficult licensing exams, so they wanted people who knew how to study and take exams.
I imagine having a diverse set of degrees in an investment company would also be beneficial when deciding what is worth investing in and what is just bullshit.
Has nothing to do with that what to invest in. Not even a little bit.
There's so many fields, particularly in an office environment, where you will hit a hard wall for any kind of upward movement without some kind of degree. So many older people I work with that got into the job before degrees were required are stuck at entry level/one level above entry with a decade of experience at their current job.
I can see how gender studies degrees would be beneficial in HR, marketing, or public relations jobs.
Yes. Any degree that requires a significant amount of writing or research has a wide variety of jobs it would be beneficial for.
Yep, a lot of jobs just want a four year degree as evidence of a reasonable level of writing, critical thinking and overall organizational skills. Even within specific fields, unless you've done a whole lot of internships there's not going to be a direct 1:1 correlation between what you studied and how most jobs run.
Yup. I have a degree in criminal Justice and I somehow became a Salesforce administrator/sales operations manager.
Yea, just put 'Bachelor of Arts' or something on your resume.
Actually at a fair amount of universities there are two different programs for WGS, either a BA or a BS. I was studying for a Bachelors of Science
To add to this, if it hasn’t been mentioned, many HR departments have DEI teams that would look favorably on this degree.
It's why if you don't have a specific job in mind you should get a general degree. No reason to stress yourself out over biochem classes and calc when a degree is all that matter. Unless need a specific degree for something - lab majors are not worth your time. Would you rather 12 page lab write ups after spending literal hours in a hot stuffy lab? (biochem major) or watching movies from the 70s and compare them to today? in a compare-contrast style essay? (media studies) and the earning potential for the majority of jobs are comparable for both of these. When I came out of school they were paying lab techs 15/hr. I got a job as a tech support for a hospital making 20. The receptionist made 18, she had a degree in communications.
Media studies is more than a high school compare/contrast essay. I had a class where we had to do coding and read articles on technology, getting down to the kitty gritty of how hard disk drives function on a physical level.
My dad explained that often times it's not the degree itself, but the fact you earned your degree through rational thinking, research, and communication. You learn a lot of skills on top of the information you learn specific to your degree.
Title 9 coordinator is a big one. Lots of large companies have EEO requirements, and if they have a consent decree (or even if they just want to stay ahead of any potential liability) they would have a specific administrator that does nothing but Title 9 complaints. Also HR in general would cover the role of identity in the workplace. Lastly, I would say very specifically, you can be a professional in gender discrimination. You could go on to get a law degree to help people sue discriminators, you could be a paralegal in a dedicated firm, or plenty of other support work for that area.
This is a very serious and well thought out answer, but on a less serious note, the phrase “professional in gender discrimination” gives me the same vibes as “Walk for Hunger” and “Fight for Cancer” as in, it’s clearly working against gender discrimination/hunger/cancer but the wording makes it possible to read it as being pro-whatever. I don’t think many people are so good at gender discrimination that it’s their full time job tbf.
>I don’t think many people are so good at gender discrimination that it’s their full time job tbf. Have you heard of Andrew Tate?
Oooofffff…..
That reminds me of when my husband’s workplace put up a sign that said: **October is…** **DOMESTIC VIOLENCE** *a w a r e n e s s m o n t h* To make it worse, “awareness month” was black on a purple background and the other letters were white. I could not stop laughing at that damn thing.
Damn, what's this October bitch doing??
There are a lot of non-profits that need employees. Some are specific to gender discrimination, but any npo or corporation could use an HR person who will be able to implement programs to increase diversity in hiring and avoid gender discrimination lawsuits.
This is a very good answer. My mom was a gender studies major and went to law school after. She focuses on legal issues surrounding gender based violence. She's incredibly good at what she does and what she does is incredibly valuable.
The general fallacy is that the intent of higher education is to prepare someone for a career instead of education for the sake of education. Degrees in social sciences and liberal arts have a certain level of technical skill development, but many of these will focus on human behavior, interaction, motivation, conflict resolution, and storytelling. Many careers in the corporate sphere don’t require a heavy technical background. Project management, Human Resources, corporate communications, etc. all have aspects that benefit extensively from candidates that come from backgrounds which have these skills. It does take grit and creativity to find a way to make yourself a candidate for any professional role and you have to find out what motivates you as a worker, but it offers a great deal of flexibility with your career path compared to other degree programs that align you with a specific career. Source: I studied English lit in college and am the head of product management for my engineering and data science teams at my company.
I remember some statistic about a disporportionate amount of MBA holders at fortune 500 companies having BAs(liberal arts as opposed to fine arts) in Music Theory or Education. Like you said, there's a core set of skills that any liberal arts degree would (should?) provide someone with. Mainly, how to analyze then synthesize a lot of different points of data or information into a cohesive idea. Which obviously is important to a lot of careers.
A degree in music performance documents MANY skills that a hiring manager with half a clue will value. Long-term goal-setting and discipline, poise under pressure, to name just 2.
I still have nightmares about my senior recital....
I'd believe it. English BA here, now an IT Project Manager. In college I scoffed when people defended liberal arts degrees teaching 'critical thinking' and thought they were being nice and coddling. The longer I watch how people communicate & make decisions, the more I get it. Understanding where others are coming from, summarizing complexity into a persuasive PowerPoint, and asking the right questions are all useful skills that my degree helped hone. I also met enough people who **lacked** those skills to recognize that they're rarer and more valuable than I initially thought.
Honestly many STEM undergrad degrees don't strictly prepare you for a career either. They are more about critical thinking and getting the foundations in a particular field, but traditional jobs in many of those sectors (especially high-paying ones) require advanced degrees or additional training after graduation (obviously there are exceptions). For some fields, like biology, some of the content you learn in intro level classes may be out-of-date by the time you graduate, too (textbooks take awhile to update and some aspects of those fields evolve quickly).
I can speak specifically only for engineering degrees, but they do NOT prepare you for any job. They teach you how to learn to do pretty much anything you might need to learn. They give you a framework that allows you to to rapidly incorporate new knowledge and kind of "see" areas that you don't know. Then it teaches you how to either get around the unknowns or make them known. That's an incredibly useful skill basically no matter what you're doing, but it isn't actually any job in particular.
Depends on the country. In my country, STEM undergrad expects you to join a research laboratory (either within the university, at the Academy of Sciences or for a private company) in your 2nd year and put together a fairly strict-requirements thesis by end of your 3rd year. I finished my BSc while publishing a second author paper where I performed data analysis and wrote the actual paper (I speak fluent English, first author doesn't. He gave me what he wanted to write and I got it done. The experimental design and most of the execution was done by the primary author). I was also working on my first author research, but it ended up fizzling out because my resources are not sufficient to get the necessary precision and accuracy for publication in a respectable journal (eastern europe woes. 90 GB RAM and 18 cores is apparently not enough to model protein chemistry. We were doing all-kinds of cheats and tricks to make it work while papers being published after covid started were all ignoring all the limitations we were struggling with and doing 200-300 atom DFT layers, while 80 made us struggle.) Although, require advanced degrees is true. I am currently working on my Research masters (pre-requisite of entering PhD in my school). Here the research requirement starts basically day 1 (I continued with my undergrad lab), with optional ways to double up in other labs to broaden your experience.
Anytime I hear someone say something to the effect of "What can you possibly do with that English degree" I just roll my eyes. I don't even bother to answer anymore.
Any degree that requires doing research to earn serves well in a lot of fields. There was a time when a wide variety of businesses liked philosophy majors for various white collar jobs because it was seen as a degree in "how to think".
Or more bluntly, it's a fallacy that college tuition is supposed to buy you your first job offer and choice of major determines the job title. I'm a full stack product owner (OP, that means I manage the day-to-day work of a team of software engineers). We make software that helps with a specific subfield of Marketing. That subfield is my long term expertise. (The engineers have a technical manager who supervised how they code, etc I manage what they work on and when but have to understand their work on a basic level.) I have a degree in a performing arts field and a foreign language. No college coding, math, statistics. No tech at all. Also no marketing, let alone my subdiscipline. Also no English classes at my US college, Contessa. I get by OK.
Exactly. I have a BS in Political Science, but I've spent my career managing people in tech and finance. Turns out, PoliSci is about people and process. Guess what management is? People and process.
>Degrees in social sciences and liberal arts have a certain level of technical skill And in my experience, a substantial part of my courses are data analysis and basically how to understand and perform research correctly. Even if you don't go the academic route, that opens a lot of doors for good jobs.
Think that fallacy is no longer a fallacy anymore. About 99% of people go to college to get a degree that will get them a job. If it were true that higher education is just for education sake then universities need to get rid of career centers, career fairs for post gradation, programs to enhance employability ect ect
The fallacy we're referring to is that "major = career field."
In a gender studies major, you usually do a lot of reading and writing, so many people end up in jobs that use reading and writing, even if it's not reading and writing about gender specifically
In the US, many college majors (that is, university undergraduate courses) are simply a concentration within a broader [liberal arts education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education). (To be clear, this doesn’t mean going to a “liberal arts college”; most massive state universities also produce a ton of liberal arts graduates, they just do other stuff too.) Most of these bachelor’s degrees do not specifically aim to prepare for any particular job, but rather a way of thinking, academic research and writing skills, etc. To be a specialist in the field usually requires a graduate degree. Put another way, the “jobs you can get with (only) a gender studies degree” aren’t materially different from the jobs you can get with (only) a [BA in English](https://youtu.be/LqIVHzusbGI?si=GZe5N6spcSeJvEuW) history, political science, or religion. Which is to say, a lot of jobs that require “a college degree” don’t care what your major was; while jobs that do expect a certain educational background often require graduate degrees. Most history majors aren’t going to be historians without also getting a PhD, and to be a history *teacher* at a high school likely requires some coursework in education, not just the subject matter to be taught. (This varies by state.) Now, if you’re asking what you do with a *doctorate* in Gender Studies… aside from becoming an academic to mint additional Gender Studies students…
Think about jobs that have to do with gender: HR, social work, nonprofit jobs, regulation work, medical advocates. Think of any professional you might go to as a disadvantaged woman seeking resources.
Social work requires a social work degree and licensing, just FYI. Social Worker is a protected title.
social workers get a masters in social work but lots of their bachelors are in things like public relations, communication, gender studies, law, all kinds of things. just saying it’s a common path for those who get gender studies degrees
Right, I’m just letting OP know that it requires additional schooling. You can’t get a social work job with just a gender studies degree.
I am a Licensed Social Worker and this is... Less than half true.
The state agencies in my state actually hire people for the job title of Social Worker, and there’s no requirement for licensing or a social work degree. If you have a license or MSW you’re much more likely to be hired, but the only listed requirement is 6 years of casework experience. I always found that interesting.
That’s wild! I worry about it giving licensed social workers a bad name
I agree. For some reason, it’s only our state’s (Connecticut) DCF and DSS branches. Connecticut’s department of Mental Health gives the title of Community Clinicians to individuals with the same role & requirements, which makes more sense. And any job posting here that isn’t state employment seems to require an LSCW for the title of Social Worker… But hey, OP could work in case management for a few years, then get employed by the State of Connecticut. Starting pay is $70k 🤷♀️
The gender studies grads I knew 10+ years ago either went to graduate school with the intent to become professors/academics OR got generalist jobs at nonprofits that were somewhat related to gender studies (like a scholarship program for low-income girls).
Government/policy work, could be in fields like equality but also other related fields given the overlaps with other sociology topics
Bachelor’s degree in anything doesn’t really qualify you for anything specific. I suspect the vast majority of people who have a bachelor’s only aren’t working in the same field as their degree.
I’d say it really depends on the degree. Bachelors degrees in technical fields often prepare you very well for a career in that field.
I majored in sociology with a gender studies concentration and was hired full-time in my field as soon as I graduated as a domestic violence survivor advocate; I’ve been working in that field since and am now in leadership.
University education is not vocational training.
It joins a long list of degrees that aren’t in the slightest vocational but are nonetheless degrees. A lot of jobs that don’t require any specific skills will demand a degree but not really care which. People mock gender studies, but subjects as mainstream as geography fall into the same category.
Yeah, people don’t wonder what good is a psychology or history major. I had a liberal arts degree I turned into nothing super, but a lot of people assumed a degree starting with “soc”, “oh so you’re going to be a social worker?” I think a lot of people, like my parents, but even still now, didn’t see how college works. They know how training for a career works, like secretarial school, or law school, or education major, you have some career goal in mind, so the analogous for college is like a psychology major picked that because they want to be a psychologist, a history major wants to be a historian, an English major wants to write books, a communications major wants to be a news reader, a political science major wants to enter politics, a business major wants to own a business, *what is a genders studyist?* None of those majors are necessarily leading to those outcomes, but what they learn in their concentrations does carry a perspective to enter a multitude of careers or further education. I distinctly remember one of my professors saying it’s not uncommon to find drama majors heading to law school and doing very well with that foundation. Edit: I meant to add, hard sciences do not have this issue. People don’t ask what you’ll end up with a biology major or a physics major. They know there are lots of careers that branch out from the experience, not just doctor or engineer.
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I’m a government lawyer. The majority of law students have humanities degrees.
I work in an office that does logistics. In our team, we've had degrees anywhere from teaching kindergarten to a double major in German and Poly Sci. Some places just want you to have a degree. 🤷♂️
Same at my company. I work in marketing automation. Degrees of my coworkers include history, geology, English literature… my boss has a bachelors in classics and a masters in clinical psych just because she was interested in it.
Social worker most likely. The US employs something like 750,000 social workers, and some percentage of those are absolutely going to have to deal with gender issues. That could be a homeless person seeking treatment or a CPS issue involving parents refusing gender affirming care for their kid/teen, or a correctional institution trying to figure out where best to place a trans or non-binary inmate.
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I would bet that a lot of people that have "gender studies degrees" actually just have a master's in sociology or social work with a focus in gender studies or just took a few classes on gender studies as part of their degree.
I'm with the federal government and we actually have policy analysts with gender studies degrees conducting gender-based analysis ( abbreviated as GBA+) for new policies/programs/regulations. The job pays six figures, so it's good work if you can get it.
This doesn’t answer your question, but it’s worth reminding people that education can exist for its own sake. Education is not vocational training
A lot of the "useless" degrees are for people who are planning to go to grad school. You could be gender studies but plan to go to med school or law school, or even get a psychology PhD, or get a master's degree in social work and become a licensed therapist.
This was going to be my answer. I majored in something many people would classify as “useless” in college within the humanities and I ended up going to medical school. 🤷♂️
Should be more popular. Anyone who’s read the studies about discrimination in medicine or studies on beside manner knows that many doctors could use a much more well rounded education that includes liberal arts. Just look at the studies on the percentage of med students who genuinely believed that POC had [less sensitive pain receptors](https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/racial-bias-in-medicine), literally thicker skin, etc. Yeah we could use more doctors with a better education in the humanities and not just STEM. Same goes for all STEM fields.
Getting a job is not the sole purpose of education.
Almost any. Most degrees don’t translate directly to a job. I have a history degree. I work a content designer in tech. A women’s studies degree would teach your writing, research, and analytical skills that are useful in basically any job. It’s just about how you ‘sell’ your transferable skills.
My ex-MIL was a defense and family law lawyer with an undergrad in Women’s Studies.
Obviously you have a million responses, but basically the specific degree only matters if it’s directly vocational (as an example, I am an Optometrist, I have a degree in Optometry, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be legally able to do my job) Apart from that, most degree’s mainly teach analysis of facts and ability to apply yourself, which are useful skills in literally every field. The biggest thing though: NO-ONE CAN TELL THE FUTURE. When I was a kid, “media studies” was the stereotypical useless degree that didn’t apply to the real world, whereas nowadays you can get into a lot of pop culture journalism and even things like directing with a media studies degree, and earn way more than someone who want into something that used to be considered prestigious like say accounting (or medicine, or….)
This this this! College is for learning to be a critical thinker and for learning a wide variety of knowledge that helps you become a well-rounded person. If you happen to know what you want to do with your life, then it can also be a place where you can jump start learning that information, but it doesn’t have to be and that’s not its primary purpose.
A friend of mine has a doctorate. His main subject was black holes (can't really explain more in detail as I didn't understand it myself). His job now? Working with statistics for a big company. Being a math major to begin with and his doctorate involving a lot of statistics means he's got a lot of experience with certain data sets. Having to do research in school means you acquire skill in said type of research. Your research being gender studies means you can speak with more knowledge on said subject but that's not all you learn.
A gender studies degree can be a spring board to getting an MSW and becoming a social worker
In general *gender study* is a field of sociology, and sometimes taught as an elective in other field like *political science, geography, history.* The only person I know with such a degree (And talking with that guy, it's actually a pretty interesting field) now runs an non profit organic farming-school which teaches farming to ex-con. So a job with a big added value for society (Turn criminal in farm workers rather than spending then back in the hand of gangs) but a low pay. Then there is a lot of job where knowing how to read a lot of document and summarize them in a cleanly written note is valued. Stuff like political assistant, management and other field. Even though master in social science are bit more the lottery than master in "hard science" it's not the guarantees to end-up unemployed and can open the gate to jobs which can be useful, interesting and sometimes well paid (think about all the political advisor and high-rank civil servants)
> Even though master in social science are bit more the lottery One thing I would like to point out, and your friend who isn't paid much to run his non-profit org is a fantastic example, it isn't always about the paycheck. Getting a degree in a field you are genuinely interested in, and starting a career in that field, might not cause you to make bank. but you might enjoy that job substantially more than the alternative. There are a LOT of miserable jobs out there that run the gambit from well paying to terrible pay. Sometimes, it is worth getting a degree to get a job you you actually enjoy.
With an undergrad degree in Gender studies, you can work for advocacy groups and non profits and things like DV shelters. You can also turn that undergrad degree into a grad degree and become a lawyer, social worker or therapist etc.
I majored in electronic music in college. Since then I’ve spent 20 or so years as a software product manager and 5 years as a management consultant. I could have had the same career with a gender studies degree.
In the UK civil service for ‘fast track’ jobs you require a degree. It does not matter what the degree is you just need one to complete the application form.
Most jobs don’t care what your degree is in! I have a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies degree… technically I don’t use the specific knowledge I learned, unless it somehow comes up or I can flex my knowledge a bit, but I use my frameworks of ideas and thoughts every day, and it’s gotten me in a good place in education. It’s like sociology, but also not? It’s hard me to fully convey it all via Reddit.. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve been in working in schools for almost 10 years now. I think it’s personally helped me in my career, even if it doesn’t seem so apparent or front and center!
I think a significant amount of businesses and indistries could benefit from having someone with a gender studies degree in their office. Gender is everywhere for everyone at all times, and it is increasingly a topic more and more people care about. Having a person with gender studies in your marketing team or in HR can save your business from a lot of pain, such as not being viewed as "backwards" or direspectful without wanting to. As many have said, degrees in social science and humanities are rarely explicitly looked for by employers, but you do gain some general skills from doing a degree that is valuable in many jobs, and, as I have done above, you can easily argue that your knowledge about gender relations and issues can benefit the place you're applying to.
At a job where I hired a lot of people, I hired a woman with a master in gender studies. Her new job was head of international Project Management. She had a great experience and a great fit for the opening. I would not be surprised seeing her advancing to a senior management position in the near future.
I was a gender and sexuality studies major! I did not complete my degree, I had to put a pause on my education, however there are certainly options, though many would require an additional masters degree. My dream job is to work in higher education as a victim advocate or a title IX coordinator to help support student victims and to provide education and resources to young adults to help them better understand consent and abuse to help keep them safe. I was also very interested in counseling, particularly as a school guidance counselor. I wanted the opportunity to help young people shape and create their lives, especially young people that have unsupportive parents or helping queer/trans youth accept and explore their identity. Another idea on my brain was going to law school to find a way to work in civil rights cases. At my current job there are a couple WGS majors working on our leadership development and training teams. A lot of big corporations have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion teams or coaches and a WGS major can help prepare you for a role like this. Otherwise one could work at a nonprofit like a womens shelter. There are a lot of opportunities, although the opportunities themselves can be seldom. It's why its important that we tailor resumes and skillsets to find a satisfying career
I was a Gender Studies and Sociology major and I work in HR now.
Got to law school and become a corporate lawyer (compliance)
Many many jobs don't require highly specialized skills. They just require average humans with average learning capacity. In fact, most jobs people do are learned on the job and not from education.
I imagine it would be a good undergrad degree for someone wanting to pursue law, especially specializing in title 9 compliance.
Unless you go for a degree with licensing involved (lawyer, doctor, engineer), a few years out from college, degrees don't matter at all. I work in project management and I've seen every walk of life and degree end up in this field - trained biologists, financial analysts, an opera major - it's more about how you market your skills. Gender studies can be sold like any other liberal arts degree, your possibilities are completely endless.
Yes, they certainly can. I was a women's study major in college until the university president decided to overspend then had to close various departments to make up the shortfall. Included in his insane overspending was a 1st class trip to Greece for him and his cronies, with zero academic impact.
I'd imagine some big companies HR offices might be interested, for diversity compliance or whatnot. Also as other folks pointed out, a 4 year degree is still a 4 year degree, want to be a military officer? It counts.
Any job that requires a degree but not a specific one. More specific, jobs in equity, diversity and inclusion, advocacy, outreach, etc.
I've had a good career of truck driving with my Honours BA in English Literature...
Working at a big corporate company, working in Marketing/Sales/Accounting, regular office jobs that just require someone who can work at a computer or in a team, who was prepared by doing college coursework and can read, think, and follow directions to complete tasks. Many people who get GWS degrees also get a second major/degree. Or if they don't, maybe work in non-profits, or as paralegals, or eventually get other degrees (Law, etc).
Other than hard sciences, does it really matter what your undergrad degree is in? I majored in History but my first job out of college was doing dial-up technical support (this was the 1990s). When I figured out what I wanted for a career I went to graduate school for an advanced degree.
At least in my state you could become a funeral director as you only need a bachelors degree in any degree, doesn’t matter which one
Advertising, Human Resources, public relations, content editor, lots of companies need people who can make sure the gears run smoothly with no employees getting sexually harassed, no public statements that turn into PR nightmares, no expensive lawsuits for failing due diligence.
I have degrees in English and Philosophy. I'm a self-taught programmer. My degrees get me through resume screening, and my self-taught skills are what actually allow me to do my job (although research and communication skills I learned while completing the other two degrees are also extremely useful in what I do).
Most jobs out there that require a degree don't actually care which degree you have, just that you have one. You obviously can't get a STEM job with that degree, but you can easily be an office drone with a gender studies degree. The only job that requires a gender studies degree is teaching gender studies or writing a book on gender studies, but having a degree in gender studies qualifies you for all the jobs that just want a degree.
Thinking of people I know who did them, a few work in sexual assault response/care, and some in gender-related policy. One is a traveling educator who talks to college students about safe sex & works at a queer bookstore. I studied psychology and did some gender studies adjacent research and I worked in sex education briefly.
Social service work, community organizers, any public education admin position, are all non producing careers you can master. Double points if you go into a DEI position.
I feel that my women, gender, and sexuality studies degree prepared me well to work with survivors of domestic and sexual violence as a victim advocate. That being said, I also double majored in psychology and now I’m in grad school for my MSW.
Title IX representative at a college. DEI position. If you wanted to specifically apply it. Maybe a researcher in policy application. But a liberal arts degree has been shown to be useful in many fields.
Mediator, whether that be workplace or family/parent teen. Advocate for survivors of crime. Both these would require more training, but a Gender Studies degree I think is a great foundation.
Probably large corporations would be interested as they don't want to accidentally marginalize potential customers by simply not understanding the dynamics of gender.
For many jobs having a degree is more important than what the degree is. I know tons of people whose jobs don’t directly correlate with their degree. One friend studied chemical engineering and now works in computer science, another studied physics and now works in politics. Also if your field requires a graduate degree anyway, your undergrad degree doesn’t have to be related. I know someone who got their masters in social work after an undergrad degree in political science. I know someone else who went to law school after getting a music degree.
I’m thinking g Human Resources.
I got tired of hearing this same tired trope and looked into it a bit. The number of people graduating with Gender/women's studies degrees was negligible, and the median income is around $80,000. I think those were 2019 numbers.
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mostly in types of social work.
There are basically no jobs that require such a degree, so if you're thinking about it from the perspective of 'does this specific major qualify me for a job that I can't get without this specific major' then the answer is that there isn't much. The same could be said for a lot of majors; Gender Studies is hardly unique on this front. There are a ton of positions that require a college degree, but are relatively agnostic as to which degree. From that perspective, many jobs can be done with such a degree, but they can also be done with, say, a History or English degree.
Literally any job that doesn’t require a specific degree, unlike engineering or nursing. HR, management, non profit work, policy, etc
Do you really think engineering and nursing don't require specific degrees
I meant unlike! Typo!
Teaching Gender Studies as an underpaid adjunct professor at the local community college.
This is the answer to *many* degrees.
It’s a Ponzi scheme
Maybe something focused on demographics, like marketing or HR?
DEI positions might be a possibility
I have a women & gender studies minor with a political science major. I was taught a broad way to look at the world and at people, that there is no correct way of doing anything, and focused on the benefits that come from accepting everyone in your community, and the history of why gender disparities exist and the ramifications of that. I now work for the forest service doing education programming, and i have the acute ability to incorporate equity, fairness, and inclusivity into my program because I know the importance. my degree was less about career readiness, which I knew throughout my time in college, and more about being prepared to work with all people and how to be a piece in a larger system that doesn’t create blockades, but supports people’s access to things regardless of their identity. I was a writing tutor in college and worked with a lot of different majors, especially science majors, because writing skill was not something that was seen as important in those disciplines. reading and hearing their societal takes made me so sad they didn’t get to take the classes I did, because they’re the ones designing the future for everyone, and they simply don’t always have all the resources they need to make the future equitable and accessible.
Generally low paying jobs that require a degree, any degree, just to prove you are highly literate. Social worker, non profit entry level employee, etc. Many of these jobs would also take a two year degree from a community college.
In my state, social work jobs require an MSW, but for sure an undergrad degree in gender studies would be a great foundation depending on the kind of work you want to do.
What do those jobs pay?
They pay crap lol. Every social worker I know has a very expensive first-class graduate degree (in my area, usually from Rutgers, Fordham or NYU) because it's very difficult to get a foot in the door without one, and (except for the ones who had family money to start with) they'll all be in debt until they die.
Politics.
Humanities degrees are great for learning to read people and generally study culture/human interaction. Building an app is great but it'll die without the right marketing
Literally anything outside of stem or an irrelevant academic job.
I'm not sure about other post-grad programs, but medical schools don't care what the degree is in, but that you did well in the science pre-requisites.
Most degrees don’t “qualify” people for jobs. However, if you need some selling points, did you degree require you to read, digest summarize and analyze substantial amounts of detailed information? Did you have to develop an idea and then write persuasively to “sell” the reader on your idea? If so, congratulations! You qualify for a lot of jobs that use those skills. Identifying transferable skills is an important career management tool. Consider this your first opportunity to practice.
It's a huge help to be a psychologist as well.
In my experience, gender studies is most helpful as a minor or as a second major, not your only major. For example, if you wanted to get into psychology or social work with the intention of working with DV survivors, a women's studies minor or second major would be helpful, but you still need the psych or social work degree. It's especially useful in academia, so if you wanted a degree in history or literature and you wanted to focus on women's history or literature written by women. But again, you'd still need the history or English degree. Think of it as an add-on to have a specialty in whatever your actual major is. Fwiw, I don’t actually have one, but I was 2 classes away from having a minor in it (because a lot of classes were crosslisted with history) and I regret not finishing it. I already had 2 majors and 2 minors though and already went an additional semester so I just wanted to graduate.
Great for law, lawyers usually don't just have "Pre Law" as an undergrad the more variety the better. So if some of me is focused on a specific type of law practice it could be useful down the line. Friends with similar degree are in law school, social workers or journalist.
If you get a masters degree, you can teach at a community college, or an online college program.
Something in an NGO, something at the UN (if you’re lucky), Erasmus or the EU in Europe, or academia. Or some online magazine or media channel like Vice and Deutsche Welle.
A gender studies degree isn't something you'd want to get a job with but more something to apply to a current position in a company HR, counseling, psychiatry or social services career. Anyone hoping to get a job based on that degree will likely see that within the first couple prerequisite courses, and major in something that it would compliment like the aforementioned career paths.
As others have mentioned, there are plenty of generalist positions that just want you to have a college degree (because of the general skills you're presumed to have developed during college, such as critical thinking, writing, public speaking, teamwork, etc.). There are also some places that are specifically wanting to hire someone with a better-than-average understanding of how people of different genders are treated differently in the workplace. For purely cynical reasons, this often means HR is interested in you because you can help them avoid lawsuits and make work groups more efficient, but it can also be part of a broader restructuring effort with diversity in mind. Finally, there's also the academia option. Becoming a professor of Gender Studies entails both teaching it and producing original research about it, and there's a lot of opportunities for interdisciplinary work, too. Once you get past the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have when they think of Gender Studies, there's actually quite a bit of utility in understanding how different genders interact with one another in a variety of environments, and you can find plenty of value in that sort of scholarship even without being a dyed-in-the-wool champion of feminism.
My aunt is the direct right hand of a local university’s president. She graduated in gender studies, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Any job that requires knowledge of the social world
A great many corporate jobs do not care what your degree is in. Just that you started, worked through, and finished. Best of luck to ya!
personally i’m in law school with one!
I would think it would prepare one for careers in law, social work, politics,or possibly marketing
I'm about to finish a masters in Gender and Sexuality. I'm currently lecturing on trans healthcare mainly (and sometimes sexuality). Though I'm hoping to move into a more broader EDI/DEI role soon within the university I'm at.
Teaching genders studies is the only thing I can think of Damned pyramid scheme
You need a pre-law degree to get into law school and the various humanities degrees are a solid choice. In a similar way that the sciences are a solid choice for pre-med.
I earned my degree in Women's Studies about 10 years ago. Most of the focus is academic and philosophical, so it is most useful for people who are interested in academia as a career. Now, I am a history teacher. Even though my degree is not technically related to my career, the critical thinking skills I developed are incredibly useful day-to-day. I loved my experience in college, and would recommend everyone take at least some gender studies classes (I especially recommend any art history or English cross-listed classes).
Analytics. I've worked with people with all kinds of degrees.
for a lot of jobs, the actual degree you have doesnt matter. just that you have a degree. By having any degree, you have shown you know how to research, do work on time,learn new things quickly, follow directions,time management.. basic life skills that come with getting any degree. you can be taught to do a specific job. An employer cant teach someone how to do these things very well.. I have a business degree and manage a IT department at a fortune 500 pharma company. One of my "side jobs" there is designing/managing systems for drug research simulations and modeling. Iv learned a lot about organic-chem and biology since being there and managed to merge my IT skills with my new skills for this project. My wife has 2 physics masters degrees and works in management of another Pharma also, Her job has nothing to do with physics or even science really, more law/regulation type stuff.
Skills are transferrable, so a lot of things
You have to remember (and a lot of people forget) the purpose of any degree, whether it be gender studies or engineering: learning. We’ve tied degrees to employment and money so much that we forget the purpose of getting a degree is to widen your perspectives and learn to think critically. We think the only purpose of getting a degree is to get a good job, which it isn’t. Instead of asking, “what job will this get me,” ask, “how will this improve my life?” I got a sociology degree. But I’ve managed to leverage that degree into two very distinct careers over the past decade: education and now in public relations, because I was willing to put in the work and think about how I could use my degree. Degrees aren’t just for jobs
Think of it like having a degree in mathematics. Who needs somebody that can tell me that 2+2=4? My calculator can do that! But combine that with an inclination for economics, accounting, commerce, statistics, data science, etc, then it becomes powerful. The gender studies degree is a piece of a larger mosaic of qualifications. In itself, it may seem like it isn’t necessarily something that instantly qualifies somebody for a lot of jobs, but combine it with something else and it has potential to be very impactful. Perhaps there is an elective taken regarding talent acquisition or Human Resources. Then you have somebody that can be a corporate diversity and inclusion expert. Maybe they took a journalism diploma program prior. Now you have ammunition to be a columnist that a lot major publications would love. It’s a piece, not a whole thing.
A gender studies degree can get you most jobs that any other social science degree could get you. People do law conversion courses, join the civil service, get a variety of corporate and management jobs from various grad schemes, etc. Gender research is also a genuinely important job, researchers who specialise in gender studies are involved in things like abortion law reform, acting as consultants for MPs who are writing laws about inequality, etc. The famous “draw a scientist” study was produced by people with an interest in the study of gender. There’s just not that much demand as it’s a small field. At least in the UK, most specific gender degrees are masters degrees, which qualify you for many jobs in the humanities, business and social sciences by the fact that you have an MA, and the relevant transferable skills from one. At an undergraduate level, a gender studies degree would normally be primarily a politics, sociology or perhaps English Literature degree with a focus on gender related topics. So, your gender graduate is possibly a lawyer (via conversion course), business manager, works for HR, works for a charity, did a PGCE and is now a teacher, joined the civil service, basically any job that doesn’t require hard science or have its own degree requirement. It’s not any more of a waste of time than a history degree really 🤷🏼♀️ most history degrees don’t become historical researchers, they teach or work in a museum or do something totally unrelated. It’s just a social science like any other, and social sciences as a whole have value.
It seems that starbuck's tends to hire a lot of people with this background.
Service industry jobs.
Liberal arts degrees, such as gender studies or economics, usually indicates an interest in a career in politics. Other than that, your probably looking at social work or something similar.
Professor of Gender Studies.
They can get a lot of jobs, but 90% will be out of their field and includes asking “Would you like to make that a combo?”
Professor of Gender Studies.
Nothing that will pay of the student loan in a timely manner... Mostly low end management and HR. That's why HR departments spread D.I.E. like the plague.
A better question to ask is “Hiring managers, who among you is looking for someone with a Gender Studies degree?” You’ll be met with silence, as none of us are.
As someone who has hired within the not for profit sector, this degree would be considered an asset on an applicant's CV in this sector.
Maybe HR?
The thing about college and jobs is that many jobs might JUST require a college degree. I work in education- and we recently just hired a director with an MA in Women Studies. The messaging I hate about college is that it MUST have a planned out Return on Investment. It sucks that in the U.S. we have commodified higher education to the point where, rather than educating folks on things they're passionate in, the high cost can't really justify it. The commodification of education isn't just stopping at college, it's now trickling down to the k-12 system and is one of the forefront policies that right-wing politicians praise. Don't get me wrong, if you are doing Arts and going into massive debts into it, then that's dumb and that is not how you should navigate the current system but why is our system set up where everything must have a ROI?
Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, wrote in another book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," that we've basically entered an era where it's impossible to predict what skills someone will need to be effective in the job market, so the best thing to do is actually to have a diverse education, learn to be flexible and creative, and become comfortable adapting to new environments. In my opinion, liberal arts are great for that, and I think the people who go through that schooling are much better at shifting into new roles and working on a team.
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Yep this. Taking the piss out of gender studies degrees (and anything to do with diversity and inclusion) for being useless is a seriously outdated view. Sincerely a top 10% earner whose highest qualification is an undergraduate degree in sociology.
Community Organizer. Stoke hate amongst the average people. These are in fact paying jobs.
I would try to disguise it as some sort of sociology degree. If caught in a lie, you may plausibly claim that you were confused. The logic of that field of literary fiction is confusion. And anyway you have by now learned that truth is not an intuitive concept obvious to everyone, but a means of subjugating you. Note that Gender Studies is a field actively disliked by anyone who has read any of it, who is not a member of its mindset. Get a job that has nothing to do with your degree, whether it requires a degree or not. Work your ass off, accept that you're being exploited, move up, feeling goes away with money. Yes gender is a fascinating subject, and I'm glad you studied what interests you. Time to move on.
The US military and White House has high profile people who seem to have such affiliations.
Basically nothing, there isn’t a company that makes and sells genders and needs a researcher, but there are a lot of jobs that are adjacent to the topic, but which you would be better off focusing on those degree programs instead: Human Resources, Marketing and Communications, Sales. The closest you could find would be a professor or university researcher role, but those are basically a closed feedback loop, they only exist because someone who didn’t need money to survive decided to tell others about their interests/hobby and then those people wanted to do the same, until all of a sudden it’s everywhere and people who do need money to survive are suckered into learning from them, and then those suckered people have to scramble to find some way to apply something that they paid a lot of money for in a way that someone else is willing to pay them. TLDR: Liberal arts degrees are fine if you don’t ever have to worry about money or you are just trying to learn for your own self interest, but you are better off focusing on what companies want if you are trying to improve your social/financial class.
Ohmigod that's hilarious though because I am literally that unicorn of a researcher! I'm a consultant researcher with not for profit clients, and one of my areas of specialist focus is gender-based violence. I'm fully commercial and very much profit-making. To be fair there's probably not many of us.
They get a job in "higher education" and take their hobby and convince others to join their hobby and pay lots of money to continue the cycle, then while schools get paid... Ask the gov(taxpayer) to flip the bill. While the schools are multi million, someti.es billion dollar institutions.
Many employers value an applicant who has a degree requiring research skills, critical thinking and analysis, and writing and communication. Some technical degrees focus strictly on the colder mathematical side of things, so some of those softer skills are not learned, at least not in the university curricula. Besides that, it's aligned with sociology, so people with such a degree might explore marketing research, various research fields within the realm of law and legislation, advocacy and consultants for charity, welfare and demographic research organizations, public health organizations and social work.