Tong has held professorships at Williams College and Lafayette College. She was the Thatcher Professor in Medical Humanities at Davidson College until 1999, when she began her professorship at the University of North Carolina. She chaired the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women from 2003 to 2007. From 1999 to 2002 she was the co-coordinator of the International Network for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Tong has also served as chair of the Institutional Review Board's Conflict of Interest Committee at Chesapeake Research, Inc., co-chair of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine's Task Force on Pandemic Influenza, and on the boards of the U.S. Women's Bioethics Project, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Tong has been a consultant to the Advanced Center for Learning Studies, the
Fulbright Foundation, the
Hastings Center, the National Advisory Board on Ethics and Reproduction, and curricular programs involving medical humanities bioethics and women's studies. She has received grants from the
Sloan Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, the Fullerton Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Tong describes intersectionality and its importance to the globalization of feminism. Tong explains the different sections of feminism that have emerged throughout the years. Tong suggests that intersectionality represents the commitment of women and global feminists, regardless of culture, to "widen the scope of feminist thought." Although global feminism is defined by the sexual issues and gender discrimination of women, its personal twist stems from the political and economic disparities. "Third World" women are far more concerned with the latter disparities separating them from their privileged oppressors. The political agenda of the western world has direct implications on the globalization of the rest of the world, the "non-west." == Personal life ==