A course that was fashionable for many years in the wake of
the 1960s' feminist movement and available at many universities, will disappear off the academic map.

It was a discipline that the sisterhood fought long and hard to have created in the first place, and demand for places peaked in the 1980s and early '90s. Since then, interest in obtaining a BA in Women's Studies has dwindled, although small numbers of students still take up postgraduate studies.

Who will mourn the loss? Critics say first degree courses in women's studies failed to move with the times, staying trapped in the ideology of '60s and '70s' feminism, and the ethos of "male-bashing", a notion that young women today – the natural constituency of women's studies – simply don't buy.

Christina Hoff Sommers, the American academic and author of Who Stole Feminism? calls women's studies "predictable, tiresome and dreary..." She adds: "British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive... But most women's studies departments are predicated on the assumption that women in the West are under siege. What nonsense."

Some academics think the time has passed when matters of gender and feminist critique need to be given a separate niche; such strands of study are best approached via the mainstream, integrated into other subject areas like history, literature and politics.

Could it simply be that young women have been staying away not because they think women's studies are irrelevant to life today and or that the issues less lively than they were, but simply out of financial imperatives arising from the expense of university education?

They perhaps feel the need to study something that is perceived as more "practical" and lead to a well-paid job, as many will leave university with a great burden of debt.

Supporters and teachers of women's studies say there is as great a need to promote the discipline as ever. Things may not be as unequal for women as they were 40 or 100 years ago, but that's not to say every frontier has been completely breached.

Is dwindling interest in women's studies emblematic of an acceptance that the status quo in our society is okay? An acceptance that, in many cases, men are still paid more than women for the same job, that women do more domestic work than men, that almost all the power brokers in our society are male, and that lower status jobs generally have a higher concentration of women?

According to Baroness Haleh Afshar, professor of politics and women's studies at York University, where the Centre for Women's Studies is a highly popular choice by postgraduate students, if dedicated courses die out and the vital issues they embrace are simply sucked into mainstream studies, they will be marginalised.

"I'm sorry, but the mainstream is male and highly unlikely to include us. One of things we, as an area of study, have always fought for is the idea that we are equal but different, not an add-on to something else."

The 10 postgraduate women's studies students at York are currently pursuing research that covers areas as diverse as violence to women in Iran, micro-finance among minority women in Bolivia, women and the political process in India, and a comparison between Muslim and non-Muslim working-class women in British tertiary education.

The work of these and other such students down the decades has often resonated right across the academic world, and put women at the centre of many different agendas, says Prof Afshar, who caused uproar some years ago with her hypothesis that Islam and feminism were compatible. Today the idea is not considered oxymoronic.

"The way we do research has changed how academic research is done generally, and a lot of what we do does have practical uses. However, maybe an 18-20-year-old young woman, the age of the average undergraduate, is actually unlikely to appreciate that.

"Many of our postgraduate students study something else, spend a few years in the workplace and discover certain problems such as the glass ceiling. They then come to do women's studies as postgrads, very much aware of how tough things can still be for women in society."

She cites the experience of her own daughter, a school teacher and head of department. "I am a third generation feminist who got married and had children. My daughter used to say to me, 'Mother, it's all been done, there are no more battles to be won.' Then she got married, had a baby and took a year off to be with the child.

"She suddenly realised she didn't want to be head of department, and that if she went back, she would therefore get all the rubbish jobs to do. This shouldn't be the case in the 21st century. She's finally realised I'm not that stupid after all."

Prof Afshar says the world will go backwards without people who are dedicated to the study of women and their relationship to the world. "I know feminism has been seen for a long time as synonymous with dishevelled women burning bras, but many smartly-dressed young women do our courses and see what we are doing as worthwhile.

"It's only a small elite group of Anglophone women who are making assumptions that we have it all. We truly don't."