Courses in this MPP core sequence examine how social categories, group-based cleavages, and inequalities shape contemporary leadership and policy challenges. The modules equip students with core knowledge, analytic approaches, and professional skills to understand and navigate how institutions and policies interact with dynamic, contested, and conflictual group-based identities and hierarchies. Through a diverse set of complementary module-length courses addressing race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, caste, class, and more, this sequence grounds questions and debates about identity, intergroup conflict, unequal treatment, and shifting social and political boundaries in rigorous empirical and historical perspective. This course is a four-credit sequence in which you'll take two half-semester modules selected out of seven options (note: some modules are offered twice). See full list of options here.
Section F (Spring 2): Hannah Riley-Bowles. Gender and Work: How Paid and Unpaid Labor Shape Social Status and Power
This module examines the gendered division of labor, particularly evolving expectations around breadwinning and caregiving and their implications for the future of work. Students will study how nature, technology, social institutions, and intersecting group identities contribute to perceived and actual gender/sex differences; analyze the "gender gaps" in pay and leadership and grapple with what "gender equality" means from contrasting scholarly and ideological perspectives; and gain tools for analyzing questions of gender and work at the individual, organizational, and policy levels.
This course is required of all MPP1 students.