Student Perceptions of the Names of Women’s and Gender Studies Programs: Considerations for Administrators and Decision-Makers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, a shift toward the commercialization of higher education and economic market-oriented priorities have pushed academic departments to reflect on their identities as disciplines and consider innovative recruitment and retention methods. The name of a program has broad implications for how students perceive an academic unit within an institution. The question of what to call a program is contentious, particularly for academic departments whose disciplines are diverse and dynamic over time. Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) programs face additional challenges in an increasingly polarized political landscape. This tension has prompted some programs to consider changing their names to titles they believe may be more marketable to potential students. However, the extent to which alternative names are perceived as more engaging remains unclear. This exploratory study of students at a university in southeastern Ontario, Canada, assessed perceptions of different WGST program names depending on previous experience in WGST. Students who had previously taken a WGST course generally supported traditional names such as Women’s Studies. However, students who had never taken a WGST course responded more positively to “neutral” names (e.g. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Studies). Thus, adopting broader program names may appeal to new students while maintaining the commitment to feminist scholarship, thereby improving recruitment and retention. We present considerations for university administrators, including emphasizing recruitment efforts toward students who may not traditionally gravitate toward WGST courses. Diversity in enrollment in WGST courses encourages rich discussion of social justice issues that may not be apparent under the narrow heading of “Women’s Studies.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".