Although treatments for depression exist, sometimes these treatments don’t work for many who use them. Furthermore, women experience higher rates of depression than men, yet the cause for this difference is unknown, making their illnesses, at times, more complicated to treat. UC Davis researchers teamed up with scientists from Mount Sinai Hospital, Princeton University, and Laval University, Quebec, to try to understand how a specific part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, is affected during depression.

Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, is among a cohort of three interdisciplinary teams awarded $45,000 each from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to advance public understanding of global religions. The new award builds on an ongoing UC Davis project on Muslim women and the media, as well as a New York Times media project, both led by Joseph. “Decolonizing the Representation of Muslim Women in the Media: Training Next Generation Journalists” is an extension of Joseph's 25 years as general editor of "Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures."

Despite the roles women played in shaping most national park landscapes and uses, few of their stories are shared at the park sites. Now historians from UC Davis have made the stories of women previously missing from these narratives accessible to all for 64 National Park Service sites in the Pacific and Western United States, where the national parks began.

It took decades of fighting for women in the United States to win the right to vote. Today, more women than ever are turning out for elections, running for office and influencing public policy at the ballot box. But the fight isn’t over, says UC Davis historian Lisa Materson, who studies women’s political history. Some women remain disfranchised. And we are seeing efforts across the nation to make voting harder.

In a remarkable pairing of science and art, Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology, and Matt Verdolivo, senior artist at Academic Technology Services, or ATS, collaborated to produce illustrations showcasing new archaeological discoveries.

When UC Davis political scientist Amber Boydstun co-founded the Women Also Know Stuff initiative in 2016, the idea went beyond amplifying the voices of her female colleagues around the world. A primary goal was to improve political science. In a major nod to the project’s success so far, the American Political Science Association recently awarded Boydstun and 11 colleagues a $25,000 grant to broaden the impact of its searchable online database of female political scientists.

It is well known that men benefit reproductively from having multiple spouses, but the reasons why women might benefit from multiple marriages are not as clear. Women, as a result of pregnancy and lactation, can’t reproduce as fast as males. But new research by UC Davis challenges evolutionary-derived sexual stereotypes about men and women, finding that multiple spouses can be good for women too.

While women have made great strides in entering the workforce, running companies and getting elected to Congress, there remains a persistent gender gap in attitudes about equality between men and women, suggests a UC Davis study. Although the last half of the 1900s saw much progress, the trajectory of attitudes about gender equality slowed in recent decades as men began to work longer hours and take on increased responsibilities to get ahead at work, nudging their wives into more traditional roles at home.

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa Materson, collaborators in research and teaching of women’s and gender history at UC Davis for 10 years, were keenly aware of many fascinating stories about women in history, as uncovered by female historians. But getting those stories into the big narratives of history was more than one or two people could accomplish. Then Oxford University Press asked the scholars, both associate professors of history in the College of Letters and Science, to create a women’s history handbook.