In Wyoming, the state legislature has passed an annual budget that explicitly defunds the University of Wyoming’s “Gender and Women’s Studies” program.
The College Fix reports that an amendment to the budget which was introduced on February 25th declared that “The University of Wyoming shall not expend any general funds, federal funds or other funds under its control for any gender studies courses.” The amendment notes that this ban also encompasses “academic programs, co-curricular programs or extracurricular programs” relating to gender studies.
Despite the controversy and political debate surrounding gender studies, only six students at the university of over 2,000 received bachelor degrees in the major in 2021. Of those six, five were secondary degrees awarded to students who had another major in addition to gender studies. This accounts for just 0.02 percent of diplomas handed out by the university.
In previous years, the amount was even lower: In both 2020 and 2019, there were only three students who graduated with degrees in gender studies from the university.
The defunding of gender studies is indicative of a larger cultural trend in the United States where there is increasingly broad popular support for cracking down on hyper-political curricula in colleges and other public schools. Although not as prominent as the race-based and anti-White teachings of Critical Race Theory (CRT), women’s and gender studies have long been controversial for being sexist towards men and portraying women as perpetual victims of a so-called “Patriarchy” in the United States and Western Civilization as a whole.