News & Updates

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News & Events Announcement 

August 18, 2026

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I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Gender Policy Lab (GPL) LinkedIn group (see icon at the bottom of all web pages). This group is designed to deliver current content related to GPL developments, milestones, and research. It also is a professional social media space for lab members to share individual updates about their advocacy and research, as well as perspectives on current gender-related events, politics, policies, and adjacent issues. Importantly, the GPL has an “Artificial Intelligence Position Statement” (July 2026), which guides all online digital content creation and includes GPL LinkedIn group content.

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The GPL LinkedIn group is "public," which means that anyone on or off LinkedIn can see posts in the group; however, only group members can add comments and create posts. GPL members welcome professional and respectful engagement with group posts through the comment feature. Individuals interested in joining our social media group and/or learning more about our work are encouraged to reach out to us through LinkedIn or email the Gender Policy Lab through our website contact page.

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Sincerely, 

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Melinda Lemke, Ph.D.

Director, Gender Policy Lab

News & Events Announcement 

July 14, 2026

Hi everyone! I am Joyce Adeola Jekayinoluwa, and I am so happy to introduce myself as one of the Gender Policy Lab’s (GPL) inaugural Research Associates, working alongside our director, Dr. Melinda Lemke.

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I am a doctoral student in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. My research focuses on gender-based violence prevention, higher education policy, and institutional accountability. Put simply: I want to know what accountability means to the students and staff living inside these systems, and not just what it says in a policy binder.

Those questions are at the center of my dissertation, which examines how students and institutional actors understand and evaluate university responses to sexual and gender-based violence in Nigeria and the United States. Universities often define accountability through policies, reporting procedures, and compliance. But I draw on African feminist frameworks and the concept of mattering to ask a different question: what does accountability look and feel like to the students and staff who experience these systems, and how we might rethink accountability beyond compliance alone?

A recent project connected to the work of the GPL is a book review I published in the Journal of Women in Higher Education on Jessica C. Harris’ (2024), Hear Our Stories: Campus Sexual Violence, Intersectionality, and How We Build a Better University. Harris’s book pushes back against race-evasive approaches to campus sexual violence, which is the kind of scholarship and institutional practice that has long left Women of Color survivors out of the conversation. Drawing on interviews with 34 undergraduate Women of Color and 23 institutional staff across three universities, she shows how racism and sexism intertwine to shape whether, and how, survivors report, seek support, and heal. What stayed with me most was that the book does not stop at identifying problems. It asks what a more just university could look like by centering the experiences and knowledge of the people most affected.

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That is one of the reasons I am excited to join the GPL. I have always believed that research should be useful beyond the university. The GPL brings together people who ask difficult questions, work across disciplines, and care about how research can inform policy and practice. I am grateful to be part of that work and excited to learn from the scholars, practitioners, and students involved.

If you are a graduate student interested in gender policy, whether your background is in education, public health, law, social work, or another field, I hope you will connect with us through the contact page. I would love to see more students join this growing community of researchers interested in using scholarship to inform policy and create meaningful change.

Sincerely,

Joyce Adeola Jekayinoluwa, M.A.

Research Associate, Gender Policy Lab

News & Events Announcement

July 1, 2026

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​I am thrilled announce the launch our Gender Policy Lab (GPL) website. The GPL was made possible by research funding from the University at Buffalo, SUNY Community for Global Health Equity (CGHE), an interdisciplinary scholarly community comprised of seven research hubs that work to improve people’s whole health and well-being around the world. Like the values held by CGHE leadership, the GPL is premised upon bringing faculty, students, and community members together in purposeful ways to support empirical research on gender inequality, while also translating research into meaningful policy solutions within schools and governance.

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We know that public education and related policy bears a strong responsibility for the well-being of students, families, and communities. We also know that despite much progress made to reduce the kinds of structural inequality experienced by specific groups within our school ecosystems, educational policy and practice continue to bestow uneven benefits, create experiential erasure, and enact violence for these same groups. Utilizing a "gender policy" lens allows our research, advocacy, and partnership with local-to-global organizations to go beneath surface-level political discourse and rhetoric to expose policymaking and power at work, identify entrenched barriers to young women's advancement, and create a pathway to workable solutions. In short, this framework will help to identify new insights and shape actionable steps in the collective effort to advance gender equality—and basic human rights.

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I invite you to take a moment to learn about the GPL, its mission and purpose, and the scholarship of our research associates and affiliates. To learn more about the GPL and how you can get involved, please email us through our contact page.

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Sincerely, 

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Melinda Lemke, Ph.D.

Director, Gender Policy Lab                                    

News & Events Announcement

September 8, 2026

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In, Intimacies of Violence: Reading Transnational Middle-Class Women in Bangladeshi America (2024), Nadine Shaanta Murshid, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, University at Buffalo, SUNY, examines the lives of transnational middle-class Bangladeshi women in the United States, focusing on their experiences with structural and partner violence.

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Using anti-racist and transnational feminist frameworks, as well as theories from social work, migration, and Bangladesh studies, Murshid offers four propositions. First, she explores how migration can reshape Bangladeshi women’s identities, social standing, and personal relationships, creating new forms of inequality within their romantic and intimate lives. Second, she argues that family expectations and social norms provide an important connection between larger systems of inequality and women’s everyday experiences. Third, Murshid considers how Bangladesh’s history of wartime rape influences the ways women recognize and interpret violence. Lastly, she demonstrates that violence is not limited to interpersonal relationships, but can be reinforced through institutions, including the household, immigration processes, and the prison system in the United States. Murshid’s work is a first to examine the private lives of this community, providing readers with a unique opportunity to broaden their understanding of the relationship between immigrant experiences and structural violence.

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Murshid wrote, “In this book, I challenge conventional narratives about partner violence by shifting the lens—seeing women who experience violence as having full, complex lives, rather than reducing them to victims.”

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The Gender Policy Lab (GPL) celebrates this work for shining a light on the experiences of immigrants in U.S. society and the connection between said communities and structural violence, systems of governance and belonging, and historic resiliency. The GPL is proud to support Murshid’s book and her advocacy for transnational Bangladeshi women.  

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​A review of Murshid's book, by Wahhaj (2025), can be found in the Journal of Bangladesh Studies.

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Contributor: 

Danielle Zack Smith, Ed.M.,

Research Associate, Gender Policy Lab

News & Events Announcement 

July 21, 2026

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The Gender Policy Lab (GPL) understands that large language models (LLMs), or Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI), can accelerate research production and related dissemination. GPL members also are free to explore and utilize Gen AI in their own research, teaching, and service in accordance with their respective institutional policies and field-related publishing standards. This said, as an entity the GPL is committed to developing human-created critical thinking, digital content, knowledge, and related skills.

As a website builder and domain registrar, Wix, Inc. provides a comprehensive suite of AI tools to build and manage its websites. This includes an AI Image Creator, Text Creator, and Website Builder, as well as built-in marketing agents. Aside from using the conversational agent to assist with questions related to information input, the Wix AI suite is not utilized for the GPL website, its pages, and uploaded content. Instead, the website is curated by the director and a research associate-web designer.​

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The work of the GPL is premised on authors, editors, and reviewers maintaining ethical research and publishing standards—and all GPL members are committed to exercising the highest principles concerning academic freedom, data security, fairness, intellectual property rights, personal integrity, and transparency. Thus, the GPL supports emerging discipline- and field-specific publishing policies (e.g., Elsevier, SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Wiley), which require researchers to distinguish between various AI technologies and identify if Gen AI is utilized in research processes and published works.

To this end, GPL “News & Updates,” and forthcoming GPL policy briefs, white papers, and collaborative projects, are considered original writing and research. The GPL acknowledges that basic assistive technologies (e.g., Microsoft Word spelling, grammar, thesaurus, word count) are used in this kind of scholarly work, but a specific disclosure is not required. However, Gen AI tools such as ChatGBT and Grammarly, which produce content (e.g., images, infographics, literature content, scholarly citations) or affect methodology, coding and analysis, and/or conclusions, are not utilized. Furthermore, misrepresenting documents, improperly referencing/failing to give credit to original authors, and/or altering, fabricating, or falsifying research content is prohibited in these specific GPL publication types.

The Gender Policy Lab recognizes that the use of AI in research is quickly evolving, and as such, the lab will revisit and revise its position as required. As the GPL aims to maintain accurate and transparent content, it also will publish corrections and retractions when necessary.

If you have questions or concerns about how the GPL approaches AI assisted and/or generated content, please do not hesitate to reach out to us through our contact page.

Sincerely,

Melinda Lemke, Ph.D.

Director, Gender Policy Lab   

News & Events Announcement

July 7, 2026

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Welcome to the Gender Policy Lab (GPL)! My name is Danni Zack Smith, and I am a research associate for the GPL under the leadership of our director, Dr. Melinda Lemke. I recently graduated from the University at Buffalo, SUNY with an Ed.M. in Educational Culture, Policy, and Society. My research focuses on equity, gender-based violence, intersectionality, and disability. 

I am thrilled to be a part of this lab, and I am eager to collaborate with our GPL affiliates and current graduate students interested in researching gender policy. There is no shortage of work to be done, and we encourage interested graduate students to reach out to us using the form on our contact page. Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or are looking to get involved.  

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As part of the GPL, I have had the opportunity to assist in transforming previous graduate coursework into a published article regarding the relationship between comprehensive sex education and gender-based violence in the United States. This scholarship was published in Youth, a peer-reviewed social sciences journal. My role in this work involved assisting in conducting a 50-state policy review to examine comprehensive sex education and the prevalence of gender-based violence. We created tables outlining the overlap of abstinence and non-abstinence-stressing sex education and conservative indicators by state, as well as a map providing an illustration of each state’s number of conservative indicators. The conservative indicators included: the 2024 Republican presidential vote, alongside the presence of abortion bans/restrictions, the death penalty, legal corporal punishment in school, anti-critical race theory legislation and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. This data curation in tandem with our team’s literature review underscores both the need for policies mandating comprehensive sex education in K-12 schools to combat gender-based violence, and the current political and ideological landscape preventing effective change from taking place. Our recommendations include increasing reporting protocols and protections, providing SEL-focused, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed individual and group support, and collaborating with community organizations. 

Our work here and other ongoing projects by GPL scholars is just the beginning of critical and meaningful research and policy recommendations from individuals and scholars across the academic disciplines. I look forward to contributing to and witnessing our future successes.

Sincerely, 

Danielle Zack Smith, Ed.M.

Research Associate, Gender Policy Lab