The future of American society, and indeed the world, depends upon an increased understanding of difference, the ability to accept diverse points of view, shaped by race, culture and gender. Negligence of an education in multiculturalism and gender awareness will lead to continued escalation of dangerous social trends. In support of the University's mission as a Land Grant Institution, the Women's Studies Program at UNR serves the entire Northern Nevada community by anticipating and addressing these contemporary problems. Students at UNR who take Women's Studies courses will benefit by learning to live in our increasingly diverse world, as gender and racial awareness become an expected aspect of their academic training, whether in the humanities and social sciences, the physical and life sciences, or areas such as primary and secondary school education, law, medicine, psychology, urban planning, and so on. The Women's Studies Program at UNR should thus be particularly attuned to a multicultural perspective.
Women constitute neither a minority nor a unified culture.
The economic, social and political problems women have faced historically are not really comparable to the problems of ethnic minorities. Indeed, since women comprise a little more than half the population of every race, religion and ethnic community in the world, there is a women's studies aspect to every cultural study of a minority. Women's Studies courses in a range of disciplines should have as their purpose the teaching of gender as an overlooked, unacknowledged dimension of all scholarship. Gender is distinct from the biologically determined physiology that we refer to as one's sex. Feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science recently have addressed issues of how knowledge is constructed in the sciences.