Gender Equality

About the Goal

gender-equality

The United Nations aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls by 2030.

Northwestern is engaged in a broad range of research projects and other initiatives aimed at realizing this goal, from initiatives aimed at engaging the Northwestern community to advance women, gender equity and inclusion on campus to expanding gender equity in the workplace to expanding girls’ education and informing global development that breaks structural cycles of poverty. Other initiatives addressing SDG #5 from Northwestern faculty include research examining the evolution of gender stereotypes and the disproportionate economic impact women have experienced from COVID-19.

Northwestern Experts and Initiatives

Tessie Liu

Tessie Liu is a historian of modern France trained in social and cultural history with a special interest in gender history. Her first book examined how power differentials within families, particularly the ability to retain the labor of daughters, enabled artisanal households to resist industrial capitalism and thereby shape regional economic patterns. Liu’s subsequent research has developed in two parallel streams: one focusing on politics of race and citizenship within French colonialism and the other on the intersection of race and class in gender and sexuality studies.

Mary Dietz

Mary Dietz holds a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program (GSS) and serves on the Advisory Board of GSS and the Council of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. From 2005-12 she was Editor of the flagship journal Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy from 2005-12. Dietz’s academic fields of concentration include Political Theory (history of Western political thought; democratic theory; contemporary Anglo-American and Continental theory) and Feminist Theory. Dietz’s research interests include Aristotle, politics, and problems of empire; the politics of sexing the subject gendered male in Hobbes’s Leviathan; and continuing studies of the political theory of Hannah Arendt.

Featured Course

British Literary Traditions (210-1-01)

This class surveys major texts in the development of English as global and imperial literature from the epic Beowulf (c. 700) to Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1788). A central goal of the class is to approach literary texts as creative expressions as well as challenging reflections on society, power, knowledge, and difference. The millennium-long sweep of English 210 will help us appreciate literature not as escapism but as challenging social thought articulated by means of new representational forms. We will pay special attention to the role of transatlantic travel and imperial exploitation in the development of English literary forms.

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