MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities

Information about entry requirements is provided for each degree programme, but  generally  speaking we require a first or upper second class honours (2:1) degree from a UK university or a non-UK equivalent, such as a cumulative grade point average of 3.5 on a 4.0 scale.  

For country/regional specific information about equivalent qualifications, please select the relevant region for you from the country/regional specific information section of the online Graduate Prospectus.

Additionally, we ask for two good academic references (see point 5 below) and a personal statement. 

Personal Statement:  We take great consideration of your personal statement which should describe your academic interests, ambitions, research concerns and explain the reasons why you wish to undertake the particular area of study you are interested in at the Gender Institute. There is no fixed word limit but in general your statement should be up to 2-3 typed A4 sides.

Please go to the LSE Graduate Admissions page, where you can find out about the application process, the application form itself, and information about financial assistance. The  Financial Support Office is responsible for administering School funds and a variety of scholarships, studentships, prizes and awards.

Applicants whose first language is not English, or who have not been educated to degree level in English, are required to demonstrate their command of the language by taking either the International English Language Test (IELTS) or the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The Gender Institute asks for the Higher requirement: 7.0 in IELTS (at least 6.0 in each section) or 107 in the internet-based TOEFL (at least 21 in writing, and 20 in the other three elements). More information here about English language requirements.

We do not require GRE/GMAT scores for our programmes.

Normally we require two good academic references per candidate, but further detail about references can be obtained on the Graduate Admissions FAQ website. Guidance for referees: writing a reference for an MSc candidate. 

Yes, part-time Masters study here at the Gender Institute really means 'half-time'.  The usual arrangement is to take half the programme over one year and half in the following year.  You will take GI424 Gender Theories in the Modern World: an interdisciplinary approach in your first year, as this course provides training in key concepts and approaches within the gender field and will inform your overall degree here at the Gender Institute.

Tuition takes place during the day, at the same time as full-time students. The detailed timetable is available just before the start of the session.  We do not hold lectures in the evening beyond 6pm, or at weekends, but we do try to accommodate part-time students' requirements to fit in with working patterns, and we have a representative for part-time students on staff/student forums.

You should be aware that part-time study alone is usually insufficient to obtain entry clearance to the UK on a student visa. See https://www.gov.uk/browse/visas-immigration/student-visas for more details. 

**ESRC funding has already been allocated for the 2016/17 academic year**

The 1+3 scheme provides funding for a one year research training master's linked to a three year PhD and is designed for students who have not already completed an ESRC recognised programme of research training. This relates to our MSc (Research) programme.  Students must be from HEU to be eligible and will be considered automatically, however please indicate in the application form that you wish to be considered for this funding.  You must include with your application an outline research proposal. This proposal should be a brief description of the research topic you are considering pursuing during your PhD and should explain why you are interested in this area of research. As your research interests will develop over the year of your Master's training your proposal need only be indicative. Applications for MSc (Research) programmes received without this outline research proposal will be considered for the MSc programme only and not the PhD portion.  Please also note entrance into the PhD programme is dependent on the MSc result in line with usual admittance to the PhD programme (normally distinction level).

In January of each year, the Gender Institute puts 1 person forward from a pool of candidates, including applicants to our PhD programme (+3 and 1+3 are considered together).  We have a quota of 1 place plus a reserve.                       

If you do wish to be considered for ESRC funding then you should ensure you have submitted a complete application for admission, including transcripts and references, by late December as ESRC funding is only considered once per year.

Please note that the ESRC 1+3 Scheme is only available to Home/EU and full-time applicants. 

Please check Term dates for details.  Registration is usually a couple of weeks before the beginning of the first term, so you should definitely be here for that, as well as the School Orientation and also the Gender Institute's own Departmental Orientation session, which begins with a lecture on the Wednesday evening before Week 1 of Michaelmas Term.

If you are looking for private accommodation, plan to spend at least three weeks before that to give yourself enough time to look for and secure housing. Check the Accommodation Office for more information.  

If you use  Facebook  , you might want to search for various LSE student groups that might include housing and 'buddy-up' information.  In addition to their suggestions for student housing, there are several external sites that will be useful:

• Spare Room
• Gumtree
• Easy Room Mate
• Move Flat 

The first port of call for a place to study is the LSE Library.

The Gender Institute open space in COL.5.04 Columbia House is a working area, a social area, offprints collection and so on. The  PhD   students often come and sit with the MSc students in the social area. Mail will be left for you here. We are lucky enough to have a kitchen and you are welcome to use the facilities - we operate a 'clean up after yourself' policy. Your access to the open space is primarily during main teaching days, Monday through Thursday 10.00-5.00pm in term time unless otherwise notified and we would be grateful if this could be observed. Occasionally we will hold seminars or film screenings here but we will always notify you in advance.

Please also note that although LSE and the GI are primarily safe places, our offices are open to the street and you should never leave valuables lying around this room. If in doubt, check with Hazel (h.johnstone@lse.ac.uk) or Kate (k.steward@lse.ac.uk).

The School offers a range of study support facilities, via the LSE Library, IT Services, the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC), LSE Language Centre, and the Student Services Centre.  TLC support includes study skills lectures and workshops as well as one-to-one 'tutorials' for students requiring more detailed support.  Easy access to the various events and support activities are available via LSE Learning World website set up by TLC.

London is a huge city, and transportation is good but expensive. Most people have Transportation For London (TFL) transit cards, known as Oyster cards. If you live within walking distance of LSE, you may want to get an Oyster card and use the pay-as-you-go plan for occasional bus or Tube (subway) rides. It's actually a pre-pay plan, but it's much easier (and cheaper) to 'top-up' your Oyster card than to pay at the bus or Underground station. If you live farther away, you can get a monthly bus pass, or monthly Tube pass (includes buses)-the cost is dependent on which Zones you want to travel in.  

Students receive a 30% discount, so you'll want to get your Oyster card as soon as possible. You can apply on-line close to the beginning of the school year, and get a Photocard--you'll need a passport-type photo to send in.  

LSE Gender Institute 

Columbia House

Houghton Street 
London WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

General enquiries: Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 7602

Another section of the LSE website you may find useful is Maps and Directions. 

Yes, please see Affiliated Journals for further details.

Gender Institute alumni go in an ever-expanding range of career directions once they have finished studying with us.  We have alumni currently working at The Guardian, Stonewall, UNDP, the UN, Catalyst and various government/non-governmental agencies and not-for-profit organisations. 

For more information, please see What do LSE Gender Studies graduates do? (LSE Careers Information) and the Gender Institute Alumni section of the GI website (graduate destinations are listed by year on the left-hand menu).

The Gender Institute has a jam-packed Events Schedule every academic year, usually running from September to May.  We run a series of highly anticipated public lectures with high profile speakers, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Jacqueline Rose, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Michelle Bachelet have all appeared in the past.  We also run a smaller-scale series of research seminars with faculty, doctoral students and visiting fellows, as well as public conferences, workshops and symposia, and various student-led activities, such as film screenings, study groups and student socials.  

To learn more about our teaching staff, their research specialisations, and visiting fellows, advisory committee,  admin  team and associate fellows, please see Who's who. 

Yes, feel free to follow LSEGenderTweet on Twitter and the 'Like' the LSE Gender Facebook page. 

We also create a Facebook Group for each year's offer holders, which acts as a contact point so that people can get to know each other before they arrive as students. Offer holders will be sent details of this group after they have been sent an offer.

Graduate students often ask about the intended role of lectures and seminars. The following provides a brief guide. 

Lectures:  Each course generally comprises a series of lectures. As graduate students, an important part of your learning will be done through reading the course literature and discussing the issues in and outside seminars. You should understand that you will be expected in your own written work to go considerably beyond the content and approach of lectures in your subjects. Lectures are intended to fulfil various functions, but they are not a substitute for independent reading and thought. Lectures are intended to provide students with an overview of a particular subject-area, its related concepts and issues, and to introduce the most important relevant academic literature. This can mean that lectures will often not be able to achieve the depth of coverage that you will find in the relevant literature. Lectures also provide you with exposure to the individual styles and approaches of different teachers at LSE.

Seminars:  In addition to lectures, teaching is conducted in seminars. These are usually held weekly over the period of the course, with students allocated permanently to groups of, normally, ten to fifteen. Although each course has a 'Teacher Responsible' (also known as 'Course Coordinator') for its overall organisation, the academics involved in the teaching of courses are responsible for individual seminar groups. While lectures can attract large numbers of students, seminars are limited in size and provide an opportunity for students to give presentations and discuss issues raised in the academic literature. Students are expected to supplement formal contact hours by extensive unsupervised reading, preparation for seminars and essay-writing.

Note that attendance at seminars is compulsory. Participation in a seminar represents a commitment to the seminar leader and your fellow students.

Teaching takes place in the first two terms (Michaelmas and Lent). The Course Guide will explain the hours of study for each course.

We expect full-time MSc students to spend at least 40 hours a week on their studies.  This combines your face-to-face teaching time in lectures and seminars, as well as reading time, meeting with academics during office hours and general preparation for classes. The amount of time actually spent in class will vary depending on which courses you take (some courses have longer lectures/seminars than others), but you should expect to spend between 5-10 hours a week in class in the first two terms. In the third term, you will be busy preparing for exams and dissertation, so it would be a mistake to expect the work to slow down once teaching has finished for the year.

Course teaching - lectures and seminars - will be held in the first two terms (Michaelmas and Lent Terms). The third term (Summer Term) is dedicated to preparing for examinations and beginning to write the bulk of your dissertation. The dissertation is due on the first working day of September, so you do have the summer vacation months to write it, but you should be aware that you will not have access to your dissertation supervisor or any other academic staff outside of term time.  Therefore it is wise to try to take full advantage of office hours set up by your dissertation supervisor in the Summer Term.

Some LSE lectures are recorded already and then made available via Moodle. Lecture notes and presentations are normally uploaded as well. You should check with the course convenor to make sure, as it varies between departments. You are welcome to record all Gender Institute lectures, but you must get permission from the lecturer beforehand.

Timetabling is undertaken by the School rather than by Departments and the Module Timetable is available on-line shortly before teaching begins (see LSE Teaching and Timetabling). Timetable clashes are kept to a minimum but are sometimes inevitable because of the number of optional courses offered across the School. You are therefore advised to make your final course selection only after having checked carefully the scheduling of relevant lectures and seminars in the Module Timetable.

Examinations are held in the Summer Term, normally in June. The provisional examination timetable - which is organised by the School's Examinations Office - is normally published by the end of the preceding Lent Term and will be available on-line.

All full-time MSc programmes in the Gender Institute are 12 month programmes. The academic year begins in late September and the MSc dissertation submission date is the first working day of September in the following year.

It's a good idea to think about your topic during Michaelmas term, and if desired you can discuss this with your academic advisor; however, you won't be asked for your topic until late that term, and even then for only a brief description. You'll work on your dissertation ideas during Lent term, but may not start writing until Summer term. For most students (especially those with exams), the bulk of your dissertation writing will take place after Summer term, during the summer break. 

Yes, once results are released, the Gender Institute will award a prize to the student with the best results from each degree programme. In addition, one student will receive the Gender Institute prize for best overall degree result. The actual prize will be a modest gesture (usually a book token), but the real value is being able to say that you were awarded the prize for your results on your CV, and academics will mention it when it comes to writing references.

In addition to the best overall performance in degree prizes, we are very pleased to be able to award the Betty Scharf prize for best dissertation in gender and best dissertation in gender and religion annually, and wish to thank the Scharf prize for their continuing generosity.

Selecting and registering courses is different in almost every institution, so you may want to read the below carefully.

Firstly:  You do not need to worry about selecting courses before you register in September.  The course registration system will open around the first week of term and students will be able to register for their courses then and not before. You register for courses on-line via LSE For You, which will be familiar from the application process.

Now, an important distinction:

• Degree Programme:  This refers to the MSc that you applied for, so your degree programme might be 'MSc Gender' or 'MSc Gender, Media & Culture', or 'MSc Gender (Research)', etc.
• Courses:  A course at LSE is an individual unit or half unit of study that makes up your degree, some institutions might refer to courses as classes.  Each department has its own set of courses, and you can tell which department offers which course by the course code prefix, so ' GI424'  is a course code, and the GI means that the course is offered by the Gender Institute, just as all courses that begin with MC  (e.g. MC418) are courses offered by the Department of Media and Communication.

All of the MSc degree programmes at the Gender Institute are made up of four units, but how many of these units are optional and how many are compulsory will depend upon your degree programme.  You can find this information by clicking on your degree programme title below: 

• MSc Gender
• MSc Gender (Research)
• MSc Gender, Development and Globalisation
• MSc Gender, Media and Culture
• MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities

You can surf through information about the abundance of courses LSE has on offer this year on our Graduate Course Guide 2016/17. Changes are likely to be made before the beginning of next academic year, but at least this will give you an idea of which courses you may be interested in once you arrive. 

Selection of courses is done solely through LSE For You, which you will be used to from the application process.

Everything about course choice and registration will be explained fully at the Gender Institute Orientation sessions. 

You've probably looked at the Graduate Course Guide and found there are many more classes you'd like to take than will fit into your schedule. Attending the GI inductions (both the GI-wide and the one for your specific programme) is most helpful. You will be introduced to the lecturers, who will describe their courses and offer you an opportunity to ask any questions you may have.  

Complete reading lists for GI courses are accessible  only to registered students. However, the  LSE Calendar is accessible to everybody on the internet. There you can find a link to the Prospectus relating to your prospective degree course, which will have preliminary information on readings for particular courses.

It's certainly not a requirement, but if you have the time and the inclination, it's a great idea to read something from the Recommended Readings (tab 3 above), suggested by faculty and previous MSc students. 

No. In fact, unless you have bought one of the recommended reading list books (above) you probably won't have to buy any books at all while you're at the GI. All (or nearly all) key readings are available in the LSE library's Course Collection, or through the Library's offprint collection (these are individual photocopied readings). Some Recommended readings will be in the Course Collection or the Main Collection--all are available to LSE students. Alternatively, some courses have (relatively inexpensive) Study Packs, which contain all the key readings. In addition, the GI has a limited number of key readings in the Gender Institute Open Space, located in COL.5.04.

You should take a look at our What to expect from your MSc year at the Gender Institute. This is written by Joanne, a former GI Masters student and is currently a doctoral candidate here. There is also a blog  Students@LSE written by LSE students about their experiences studying here. 

At the Gender Institute we have a Degree Convenor for each Degree Programme. 

MSc Gender - Dr Sumi Madhok

MSc Gender (Research) - Dr Sumi Madhok

MSc Gender, Development & Globalisation - Professor Diane Perrons

MSc Gender, Media and Culture - Dr Sadie Wearing and Dr Leticia Sabsay

MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities - Professor Wendy Sigle

Students are politely requested not to contact academics before the beginning of Orientation, and if you have any questions, comments or concerns, please contact Kate (k.steward@lse.ac.uk).

Degree-specific meetings take place at an institute level and typically meet once a term. The meetings provide a forum for students on each degree to share their views about their programmes of study and to discuss GI issues that affect the student community as a whole. All students may attend but normally, there is one representative for each programme, selected by the degree cohort.

Gender Institute students also elect one part-time and one full-time representative to attend the relevant School level Taught Graduate Students' Consultative Forum and one student to sit on the Library User Committee Forum.

Student reps are not selected until Michaelmas Term begins.

Students will be assigned an academic adviser during the first week. The academic adviser is a student's most important academic link with the Institute and the School. The academic adviser will have set office hours and usually additional times during the first few weeks and will be happy to offer advice on courses, MSc regulations and on administrative matters generally, e.g., on the prospects of proceeding to higher degrees such as MPhil/PhD.

Additionally, the academic adviser may be able to offer advice if a student's work is affected by illness, financial difficulties.  If a student is unable to resolve the matter satisfactorily with the academic adviser, it can be discussed with the degree convener. 

A student's academic adviser will not necessarily be their dissertation supervisor. Dissertation supervisors will be allocated once topics have been agreed in the second term.

During LSE vacation periods, academic staff will not be available to meet with students and so it is important for workload to be organised to allow time to see an adviser or dissertation supervisor during term-time, especially for dissertation supervision during the summer term.

The Gender Institute does not arrange  internships. However, if you are planning to pursue this yourself, it is advisable to speak to your academic adviser beforehand to ensure that the time commitment involved will be compatible with your studies. Graduate students may be interested in the  LSE Internship Scheme. 

The Gender Institute itself does not currently offer MSc students paid work and the LSE does not normally hire MSc students in teaching/research roles.

There are a few opportunities for part-time (mainly administrative) work at LSE but these are not guaranteed, and as stated in your offer booklet, you may have restrictions on the amount of hours you are legally allowed to work. The LSE is quite a small campus, and although we do create as many jobs as possible, we are bound by our size. The LSE Careers Service do operate a web board for student jobs, but this is available only to registered students. It's called My Careers Service. 

You are welcome to seek work outside of the LSE, of course, but please do bear in mind that in addition to the contact hours of your degree, you are required to spend a large amount of time in private study and preparation (we expect full-time MSc students to spend 40 hours a week on their studies). 

Most importantly, you should not assume that you will be able to fund your studies by working part-time.

If you are a current MSc student or an alumnus of this department and you would like a reference from one of our academic staff, please complete this reference request form and submit it by email. Please include as much information as possible as this makes it much easier to write a meaningful reference. You must include ALL of your courses and ALL of your coursework and exam results.

Please allow 15 working days for the reference to be written. Let us know if it must arrive by a certain date and if there are any other special requirements (e.g. sealed envelope).