University of Detroit Mercy Women's and Gender Studies

09/03/2026

09/03/2026

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at the Manhattan brownstone she'd lived in for more than fifty years — the one with the living room that hosted hundreds of Talking Circles: strangers, organizers, kids with a cause, anyone who needed a room.

Her foundation says those gatherings continue.

Steinem was known for the time she went undercover as a Pl***oy Bunny to expose the conditions the women there faced. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 when the men running print media assumed nobody would buy one, and built the Women's Action Alliance, the Ms. Foundation, and Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

She built almost none of it alone, and said so. Ms. and the Women's Action Alliance were co-founded with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black child-care organizer who toured the country with her as a speaking partner — that raised-fist photo of the two of them is the movement's most famous image.

In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bella Abzug and Flo Kennedy, and her speech that day argued that s*x and race were the two easiest tools for sorting people into cheap labor.

She credited Kennedy, Chisholm, Hamer and Evelyn Cunningham with teaching her what activism was.

"It was like finding a family," she said.

She wasn’t perfect. A 1977 essay she wrote about transgender women aged badly. In 2013 she wrote in The Advocate that trans people are living authentic lives that "should be celebrated, not questioned," and that their health care decisions belong to them alone. She spent the rest of her life on the right side of that line, and the National Gay Rights Advocates gave her their award for it.

She also told NPR weeks before Dobbs that overturning Roe wouldn't undo the work, because the fight was always about who gets to make decisions over her own body, and that question doesn't expire with a ruling.

She was right. Four years of ballot measures proved the fight is far from over.

Her people asked for two things today — light a candle, and give to Gloria's Foundation, if you can.

We'll add a third. Behave like a FULL human being today. Loudly. Let them hear you.

08/21/2026

Biologists and physicians have long known that s*x in humans is more complicated than “male or female”.

The author of a new book,“The Binary Delusion: How Biology Defies the Myth of Two S*xes,” notes that some people are more typically female in some traits, more typically male in other traits, and intermediate in still others.

https://theconversation.com/biological-s*x-is-neither-binary-nor-a-spectrum-a-biologist-explains-how-its-multidimensional-289786

07/13/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1HLb797Zeq/

"If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to raise a ra**st," anti-s*xist educator Jackson Katz says. "Perpetrators aren't individual monsters; they are people reflecting a system. We need to address that system." Katz has spent 40 years challenging a fundamental assumption: that violence against women is a women's issue that some good men help out with. He rejects that frame entirely, arguing instead that these are men's issues first and foremost.

The excuses we make -- the "boys will be boys" mentality -- actually carry "the profoundly anti-male implication that we should expect bad behavior from boys and men," he argues. "The assumption is that they are somehow not capable of acting appropriately, or treating girls and women with respect." For Katz, only through boys and men holding themselves accountable can violence against women truly end -- and that work has become more urgent than ever.

Katz believes we are living through a critical inflection point: "We're witnessing a global backlash against women's progress, since the past 50 years have seen unbelievable challenges to patriarchal norms."

"Trumpism and rightwing populism isn't a revolt against the 'elites'; it's a reaction to men being de-centered and a backlash against feminism," Katz asserts. "Trump has been marketing himself with the men's movement and it's fueled the manosphere from being an abusive men's rights subculture to becoming the mainstream." The re-election of Trump -- found liable for s*xual abuse and ordered to pay millions in damages -- has had what Katz calls "a normalizing effect" on abusive behavior, unleashing "a firehose of misogyny."

Yet Katz insists that "lots of men are uncomfortable about their peers' behavior, but are scared of speaking out because of losing social status or facing retribution." His solution, developed through his Mentors in Violence Prevention program across universities, schools, and the military, is to reframe speaking up as aspirational -- making "the guy who speaks up" a strong man, a good friend, a leader. He wants men to ask different questions: not "what was she wearing?" or "why didn't she leave?" but fundamental questions about perpetrators and systems.

"In terms of preventing violence, we have to ask a different set of questions... like why does John beat Mary, why is domestic violence still a big problem in the United States and all over the world?" Once we're thinking this way, "then we can ask about how can we do something differently, how can we change the practices, how can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes."

His call to action is both simple and challenging: "It's our moral, ethical and human duty to help women in this struggle together." Against the rising tide of the manosphere and misogyny, Katz argues that "we on the other side need a bigger microphone to get into the conversation -- we each need to stand up and say 'not in my name.'"

He wants men to create "a peer culture where the abusive behavior will be unacceptable not because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable." Katz asserts that “there’s been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy... we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that.”

To that end, Katz believes that it's critical to be a positive role model for young people and to provide a platform for their voices. “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power," Katz asserts. “We owe it to the next generation of boys and girls, who haven’t chosen to be born into this patriarchal society,” he says. “Challenge your peer groups, educate each other and make sure your voice is louder than those spreading abusive norms. It takes courage, but it will only cause more tragedy if we don’t show it.”

Jackson Katz is the author of a new book "Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men's Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9798765157138 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4n7PCp5 (Amazon)

You can watch Katz's TED talk "Violence against women — it's a men's issue," at http://bit.ly/Xq6fzu

Raising kids to have empathy for others and an understanding of consent is one of the most important things parents can do to help reduce the incidence of s*xual assault. To teach children -- girls and boys alike -- about the need to respect others and their personal boundaries, we recommend "Let's Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent, and Respect" for ages 4 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/body-boundaries) and "Consent (for Kids!)" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/consent-for-kids)

There is also a helpful guide for teens on topics such as consent and coercion, "Real Talk About S*x and Consent: What Every Teen Needs to Know," for ages 13 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/real-talk-about-s*x-and-consent

To discuss topics such as s*xual harassment, respect, and consent with tweens -- both girls and boys alike -- we recommend the insightful novel "Maybe He Just Likes You" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/maybe-he-just-likes-you

For an exceptional book for older teens and adults about the early warning signs of abusive relationships, myths about abusive personalities, and how to get help, we highly recommend "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" at https://www.amightygirl.com/why-does-he-do-that

If you know a teen girl struggling after s*xual abuse or trauma, “The S*xual Trauma Workbook for Teen Girls: A Guide to Recovery from S*xual Assault and Abuse” may help at https://www.amightygirl.com/s*xual-trauma-workbook-girls

For several fictional stories that address r**e and s*xual violence and offer a helpful way to spark conversations with young adult readers around s*xual assault, we recommend "Speak" for ages 14 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/speak), "Girl Made of Stars" for ages 14 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/girl-made-of-stars), and "The Way I Used To Be" for ages 15 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-way-i-used-to-be)

06/16/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/192j9djvaL/?mibextid=wwXIfr

In 1975, two researchers at UC Santa Barbara decided to stop guessing and start recording.
They sat in on 31 ordinary conversations between men and women. They counted every single interruption.
Out of 48 interruptions — 47 came from men.
They published the findings. Nobody changed the meetings.
So forty years later, a linguist named Kieran Snyder started counting again. For weeks, she logged every interruption in every professional meeting she attended. Men interrupted three times more often than women. When men interrupted, they chose women as their target nearly three times as often as they chose other men.
She published it too.
Still, the meetings continued.
By 2017, researchers at Northwestern Law School had grown curious about a different room — one where surely the pattern wouldn't hold. They pulled twenty years of transcripts from United States Supreme Court oral arguments. They counted. Male justices interrupted female justices roughly three times as often as they interrupted each other.
Sonia Sotomayor. On the highest court in the country. Same invisible pattern as a first-year employee at a Monday morning sales meeting.
Here is what the numbers can't fully capture.
An interruption isn't just bad manners. It is a quiet edit — a signal sent to everyone in the room about whose words are still arriving and whose have already been dismissed. One interruption is a moment. A hundred interruptions across a career quietly builds a record: who got the airtime, who got credited, who got called "sharp" and who got called "a lot."
Performance reviews get written from those impressions.
Promotions get written from those reviews.
McKinsey and LeanIn.org have tracked workplace advancement for over a decade. Women fall behind men at the very first step — the jump from entry level to manager — at a rate that nothing later in a career fully repairs. When a man and woman contribute equally to the same project, observers consistently remember the man as the one who drove it. When that same project fails, they remember the woman.
The work was identical. The memory was not.
And almost none of it is deliberate.
Boys interrupt girls more often at age four. Teachers interrupt girls more than boys in classrooms. By the time anyone sits down at a conference table, the script has been quietly rehearsed across twenty years of small moments nobody thought to question. The pattern doesn't require intention. It only requires everyone to keep performing it without noticing.
We look at who leads, who presents, who gets named in the announcement — and we call it talent. We say he is just more confident. We say she is harder to read. And then we hand the outcome to the person we shaped across a thousand unexamined moments and call the whole thing a meritocracy.
What the research shows changes things is not a louder voice.
It is the room.
When women make up 60 to 80 percent of a group, the interruption pattern disappears. When organizations begin tracking meeting talk time as a real metric, behavior shifts within months. When a chair simply says "let her finish" — she finishes. The room remembers what she said. It gets written down. It gets credited.
The fix was never in her voice.
It was in whether the room had been trained to hear her.
She said it first. She has always said it first.
The only question was whether anyone was paying attention.

06/02/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1LVLdciYjB/

A recent study has confirmed what every woman instinctively knows: men and women experience the simple act of walking through the world in fundamentally different ways -- with women performing an invisible, automatic threat assessment that begins the moment they step outside alone.

Researchers at Brigham Young University showed nearly 600 college students photographs of campus walking paths at four Utah universities and asked them to click on the areas that stood out most as they imagined walking through those spaces alone. They turned the responses into heat maps -- and the differences were stark.

Men looked at the path ahead. The destination. A streetlight, a garbage can, the walkway in front of them. Women scanned the periphery -- the bushes, the dark corners, the spaces alongside the path where someone could be hiding. As lead researcher Robert Chaney put it, they "expected to see some differences, but we didn't expect to see them so contrasting. It's really visually striking."

The gap widened dramatically at night and in what the researchers call "high-entrapment" settings -- narrow bridges, walled paths, spaces where escape would be difficult. In those conditions, the heat maps were so structurally different that the two groups were essentially looking at entirely different environments.

And there is good reason for that vigilance. Women aged 18-24 are four times more likely to experience s*xual violence than women of other age groups. Among college women, there are two s*xual assaults for every one robbery -- a complete inversion of the ratio in the general population. That scanning isn't paranoia. It's pattern recognition built on a lifetime of lived experience.

But the study reveals something beyond individual behavior -- it reveals who our shared spaces are built for. Those walkways, bridges, and campus paths were designed by people who see space the way the men in this study do: eyes forward, focused on the destination. A narrow walled bridge with a single light at the end works fine for the person who looks straight ahead. It doesn't work for the person whose eyes go immediately to the dark edges on either side.

It's not that anyone set out to make public spaces feel unsafe for women. It's that many of the people making design decisions rarely had to scan for danger themselves -- so they never thought to design for those who do. The threat isn't just in the shadows. It's in the fact that no one considered the shadows at all.

Co-author Alyssa Baer said her hope is that having concrete data will start conversations that lead to meaningful action in designing safer spaces. Chaney went further: "Why can't we live in a world where women don't have to think about these things?"

--> We want to hear your thoughts. Do these findings match your own experience? What do you do when you're walking alone at night -- and have you ever tried to explain it to someone who didn't understand? What do you notice that the men in your life don't?

------

For a groundbreaking look at how a world built on male-default data -- from urban planning to medicine to car safety -- systematically disadvantages women, we highly recommend "Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" for ages 14 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781419735219 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/2Qzqg8H (Amazon)

Urban design isn't the only area where s*xist bias affects research; for two excellent books for adult readers about how medical systems often fail women, we recommend the new "Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World" (https://www.amightygirl.com/unwell-women) and "Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctor's Believe in Women's Pain" (https://www.amightygirl.com/ask-me-about-my-uterus)

To read the full study, "Gender-Based Heat Map Images of Campus Walking Settings: A Reflection of Lived Experience," published in the journal Violence and Gender, visit https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10951437/

To read BYU's coverage of the study, including additional heat map images, visit https://news.byu.edu/intellect/study-visually-captures-hard-truth-walking-home-at-night-is-not-the-same-for-women

05/11/2026

04/08/2026

The Women's and Gender Studies Program is thrilled to announce the winners of our 2025-26 Annual Undergraduate Writing Competition!

Poetry (collection of 3-6 poems)
1st place: Melissa Converse - ​Blue’s Clues Never Covered This​
2nd place: Eemi Toma - ​I Do Not Want to Be the First​
3rd place: Kylee Foster - ​The Phenomenal Fawn​

Academic Essay
1st place: Erin DeFever - ​Beyond the Binary: Speculative Fiction as a Lens for Postgender Futures​
2nd place: Lena Williams - ​Voices in the Margins: Biblical Women Reclaiming their Narrative​
3rd place: Candy Saputo -​ Domestic Violence: A Plague Infiltrating the Souls of Our Women​

Short Fiction/Personal Essay
1st place: Sarah Soria - ​The Consistency of Wool​
2nd place: Erin DeFever - Matryoshka: A Cruel Legacy
3rd place: Melissa Converse - ​Survive​

Please join us in congratulating these students!