Gender Policy Research Program

Mission

Established in January 2025, the Gender Policy Research Program (GPRP)'s mission is to connect students, faculty, and staff conducting research on gender and policy across the University.

Priorities

Community Building

Colleagues across the University noted the need for a community connecting students, faculty, and staff conducting research on gender and policy across campus. GPRP hopes to bridge the gap between programs, departments, institutes, and schools through networking, collaboration, workshops, events, and more.

Community Building Opportunities

Our Gender Policy Community Hour is held virtually on the second Friday of each month from 12-1pm. All GW community members are welcome to join to discuss their current projects and network with fellow gender policy scholars. To join the Community Hour calendar invite list, sign up here.

Our monthly newsletter features student, faculty, and staff spotlights, events and community building opportunities, research, funding, and work opportunities, and more.

The GPRP blog features the latest news on GPRP, community building and networking opportunities, and writing from gender policy scholars across the University.

Our Mini Writing Retreats and Summer Writing Group provide opportunities for networking, collaboration, and writing development. Will you be in town for the summer? Join our bi-weekly Summer Writing Group!

Research Promotion & Dissemination

In collaboration with our partners, GPRP aims to promote and disseminate student, faculty, and staff research on policy issues related to gender. This includes the publication of policy briefs, reports, literature reviews, pre-prints, white papers, commentaries, blog posts, etc. from GW community members. Community members can submit their writing here to be featured on our website, blog, or newsletter.

Summer Blog Series

This summer, the GPRP blog will feature pieces on various topics at the intersection of AI and public policy, exploring intersectional impacts of the rapidly changing technology. Here's what we've discussed so far:

Introducing Our 2026 Summer Blog Series: AI and Public Policy

Artificial Intelligence (and discourse about it) is becoming harder to escape for many Americans and American sentiment around AI appears to be evolving just as quickly as the models themselves.

What is AI? How Does it Work?

It is imperative that we understand how these models work and what they can and cannot do. These models are not reading, understanding, thinking, searching, or feeling; they are just doing math.

AI is Manipulable

It's critical that we understand the biases these models have inherited from their training data, how they're being manipulated internally, and how external actors are working to shape their outputs and manipulate their users.

The Intersectionality Gap: Why AI Fails Moderation of Online GBV and Disinformation

This guest blog by Dr. Dhanaraj Thakur, director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Law School's Multiracial Democracy Project, explores the ways in which AI-powered content moderation systems struggle with intersectionality.

Over the following weeks, the series will explore the impact of AI in a variety of different policy areas including employment, healthcare, policing, and more. The series will then wrap up with an overview of possible policy responses to AI. Check out the full series here and follow us on LinkedIn to receive updates about the series.