This chapter opens with a brief vignette on the long struggle to give women a voice in history across different parts of the world. It then examines the agendas and ambitions of gender histories, the discovery of men’s studies, the history of private life, the history of the body. Gender, it argues, did not only develop new fields of historical inquiry, it also impacted massively on traditional fields of historical writing, including political history, the history of empire, the history of science, economic history, nationalism studies and the history of warfare. The fields of women’s and gender history have been closely connected to a feminist politics of historical writing. It sought to recover the full range and depth of women’s experiences and it discussed a range of diverse gender identiteis and multiple ways of constructing the category of ‘woman’ and ‘gender’. It also emphasised the relationality of gender with a range of other master concepts for historical writing, inclucing race, class and religion. By historicising gender identities, it also de-essentialised those identities and pointed to the discursive construction of gender, with more recent historians also rediscovering the embodied experience of gender. Gender history, the chapter concludes, played a crucial role in pluralising our understanding of identity.

This chapter reports on results of similar conjoint experiments conducted at the United States Naval Academy and at the London School of Economics. At both institutions, we find pro-diversity preferences that largely complement those from other schools. However, at the Naval Academy we find no preferences in favor of women applicants despite the fact that women are underrepresented among students at the Academy (whereas they make up majorities at most undergraduate institutions), and we find that preferences against gender non-binary applicants and faculty candidates are far stronger at the Naval Academy than at other institutions. At the London School of Economics, we find positive but smaller preferences in favor of blacks but not for East Asian or South Asian applicants but we find strong preferences in favor of applicants from disadvantages socioeconomic backgrounds.