Gulnaz Anjum

Research samples have historically overrepresented men, resulting in worse outcomes for women. Even when women are represented, inequity might persist due to underlying differences in how people reason about gender. Theories of androcentrism argue that, in general, people emphasize gender more about women than men. Based on this theory and building on prior archival work, we conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,315). Participants read scientific findings based either on all-male or all-female samples. For both, the gender homogeneity of the sample is a key limitation that should be noted when describing results. However, participants were more likely to pick women as a keyword to represent findings based on all-female samples (compared to leaving gender unlisted or listing both women and men) than to pick men to describe identical findings based on all-male samples. Grounded in androcentrism theory, this work has practical implications for accurate science communication and gender equity.

Behavioral science has achieved remarkable policy influence, yet the problems it addresses, such as climate change, health inequality, and financial precarity, have worsened. We argue this is no coincidence. The field suffers from systematic power-blindness: it treats individuals as abstract decision makers while bracketing the structural forces that shape their behavioral possibilities. This article develops the responsibility–power–justice (RPJ) nexus framework as a corrective, advancing two foundational claims. First, power is not external to behavior but constitutive of it; every behavioral intervention embeds claims about who bears responsibility for problems and solutions. Second, justice is not a normative standard applied after behavioral analysis, but a causal mechanism operating within it: Tax compliance depends on perceived fairness, health behaviors reflect institutional trust, and cooperation requires beliefs about equitable burden-sharing. Across climate policy, public health, and economic governance, we demonstrate a consistent pattern: powerful actors reframe structural problems as individual failures, behavioral science supplies the intellectual tool kit, and interventions redistribute responsibility downward while leaving power structures intact. We trace this pattern to the field’s roots in methodological individualism, its privileging of individual-level experiments, and its institutional entanglement with prevailing governance arrangements. We conclude by outlining what a justice-oriented behavioral science would require.

Background: The journey in exile for Syrian refugee women is filled with constant uncertainties as they balance motherhood, grief, trauma, discrimination, and prolonged asylum procedures. While humanitarian organizations repeatedly rely on “resilience” frameworks, our work focuses on Syrian communities’ native language, history, lived realities, and cultural idioms such as Sumud (steadfastness) and Sabr (patience). Objective: This study explores how Syrian refugee mothers living in Lesvos define, practice, and transmit resilience to their children throughout their journey, and examines the extent to which NGO interventions align with their culturally informed understandings of resilience. Methods: Eight Syrian refugee women residing in Kara Tepe camp participated in semi-structured interviews conducted in Arabic. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis within an interpretivist and decolonial framework, emphasizing women’s own voice, language, and narrative. Results: Four overarching themes appeared. (1) Becoming Through Sabr showed that women described their resilience primarily through Sabr; a cultural and spiritual form of patient endurance. Resilience was both a necessity and a way of reclaiming autonomy. (2) Roots without Soil captured how motherhood constantly transforms in exile as many become solo mothers. Intergenerational resilience was marked by storytelling, future promises, and spiritual reassurance. (3) The Paradox of Sanctuary reflected the dire conditions they faced along their journey and the contradiction between the promised haven and the reality of “sanctuary”. (4) NGO Support and Gaps demonstrated that women appreciate kind treatment, yet significant gaps still persisted in addressing ecological needs, cultural and gender-specific adaptations, and structural alignment. Conclusion: Resilience for Syrian mothers was embodied through Sabr, maternal responsibility, family bonds, and communal solidarity. Their narratives call for humanitarian interventions co-created with the community and that address the gap between humanitarian policy and on-the-ground implementation.

Background: Highly skilled migrant women are often framed as beneficiaries of global talent mobility, yet their psychosocial realities remain poorly understood. Indian women navigate racialised institutional expectations, gendered cultural norms, and emotional labour that directly affect wellbeing. Existing integration models overlook how power, belonging and misrecognition shape women’s mental health in everyday life. Objectives: This study examines how highly skilled Indian immigrant women in the Netherlands negotiate cultural, emotional and professional identities; how they experience racialised institutional norms; and what strategies they use to sustain wellbeing within unequal social and workplace environments. Design: A qualitative study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Methods: Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 highly skilled Indian women aged 24 to 49 years (residing 2–8 years). Analysis followed idiographic, reflexive procedures, examining affective, cultural and identity-based meaning-making with attention to context and embodied experience. Results: We developed four themes: (1) Internalization of inherited moral economies of care and humility; (2) Encounters with Dutch Norms that impose assertiveness and emotional restraint as markers of competence; (3) Identity Negotiation through selective unlearning, cultural anchoring and strategic self-presentation; and (4) Ambiguous Selves, defined by ongoing emotional vigilance and partial belonging. These findings culminate in the concept of Emotional Simultaneity, the continuous coexistence of conflicting emotional and cultural demands. Conclusion: Highly skilled Indian women’s wellbeing is an ongoing, relational process shaped by structural power and emotional negotiation. Emotional Simultaneity offers a new lens for understanding migrant women’s mental health and highlights the need for inclusive, context-sensitive policies that recognise emotion as a determinant of health.

Background: Migrant women’s health and wellbeing are shaped by intersecting structures of gender, race, religion, and postcoloniality. Pakistani migrant women in Norway occupy a particular intersection of these structures, in which collectivistic kinship expectations, patriarchal norms, and postcolonial inheritance interact with Norwegian institutional gatekeeping. Despite a growing Pakistani-origin population in Norway, little qualitative research has examined how the identity work of recent first-generation Pakistani migrant women relates to their psychological and social wellbeing. Objectives: This study examined the psychological and social wellbeing implications of identity reconstruction among Pakistani migrant women in Norway, with particular attention to how acculturative challenges, structural exclusion, and gendered nostalgia shape stress, belonging, and adaptation. Design: Qualitative study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with a postcolonial feminist orientation. The reporting of this study conforms to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ). Methods: Eleven in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with Pakistani migrant women aged 20 or older who had migrated to Norway between 2020 and 2023 and were fluent in Urdu and English. Eight interviews were prioritised for in-depth idiographic IPA case work based on rich, idiographic suitability for analysis, and the remaining three were retained as contextual cases. Informational sufficiency was assessed through ongoing analytic memo-writing. Reflexivity, theory triangulation, and multivocality strengthened methodological rigour. Results: Five interrelated Group Experiential Themes captured participants’ lived experiences: (1) Resisting and severing gendered expectations, with implications for chronic stress and internalised surveillance; (2) Reconstructing identity in self-exile, with implications for self-efficacy gains and relational isolation; (3) Encountering exclusion in institutions and everyday life, with implications for anxiety, sleep disruption, and stress associated with administrative limbo; (4) Nostalgia, liminality, and limbo, with nostalgia operating as both an emotional regulator and an amplifier of loneliness; and (5) Intergenerational and inter-cohort cultural (dis)identification, with implications for diminished belonging and intra-community alienation. Conclusion: Identity reconstruction among Pakistani migrant women in Norway is a health-relevant process in which structural exclusion, gendered norms, and cultural nostalgia converge to shape stress, belonging, and agency. The Identity Meaning-Making Model offers a recursive framework with direct implications for culturally responsive mental health care and equity-driven integration policy.

Background: Rural women in climate-vulnerable regions face intersecting health risks from environmental stressors, gendered labor roles, and limited access to health services. Understanding how men and women perceive climate change is critical for designing interventions that protect women’s health and well-being. Objectives: To examine gendered perspectives on climate change among smallholder farmers in rural Pakistan and explore how these perspectives influence health-related risks and adaptive capacity, with a focus on implications for women’s health. Design: This study employed a cross-sectional Q-methodology design to identify shared and divergent viewpoints within and between male and female participant groups. Methods: Thirty participants (10 women and 20 men) from South Punjab, Pakistan, provided written informed consent. They sorted 48 statements into a forced quasi-normal distribution from “most disagree” to “most agree.” These individual sorts were analyzed, through PCA and varimax rotation, for identifying shared perspectives (‘Factors’ in Q terminology) separately for men and women. The qualitative interpretation of the factors was based on most (dis-) agreed upon, distinguishing and consensus statements. Results: Women’s factors, such as Structural Health Vulnerability and Fatalistic Resilience , emphasized infrastructural deficits, funding gaps, and health risks to food systems and livestock, linking adaptation capacity to systemic reforms. Men’s factors, including Optimistic Techno-Adaptation and Economically Worried , Techno-Faithful , displayed greater confidence in technological and market-driven solutions, though often overlooking structural constraints. Conclusion: Gendered framings of climate change reveal distinct implications for women’s health in rural Pakistan. Women’s perspectives emphasize systemic barriers that heighten vulnerability, underscoring the need for interventions that integrate climate adaptation with women’s health programs. Addressing faith-based framings, economic insecurity, and infrastructure gaps can improve the design of culturally resonant, gender-sensitive health interventions.

Background: Migration journeys profoundly affect women’s and children’s health, often producing layers of stress, trauma, and survival. Yet the experiences of mothers and children in transit remain underexplored, particularly through methods that allow them to narrate their own stories. Objectives: This study examines how migrant mothers and children in transit through northern Mexico use collaborative collage and storytelling to reflect on their lives and imagined futures, with attention to their health and wellbeing. Design: This qualitative study employed an arts-based research design. Collaborative collage-making and narrative inquiry were used to explore how migrant families reflect on and represent their experiences. Methods: Nineteen participants (nine mothers, ten children) residing in four migrant shelters engaged in arts-based sessions, creating collages and discussing their meanings. Data consisted of visual materials and audio-recorded conversations. NVivo software was used for coding and theme development during our reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Four themes shape this study: (1) What Mothers Carry centers on the emotional, physical and invisible weight mothers hold as they protect, nurture and attempt to preserve parts of themselves; (2) Hardship Beyond Borders captures the exposure to violence, hunger, and uncertainty families endured across countries, borders, and bureaucracies; (3) northern Mexico as Liminal Space reflects its role as a place of both protection and discrimination; and (4) A Future Imagined and Fought For highlights how mothers and children envision stability, education, and the chance to serve others. Conclusion: Collaborative collage created space for mothers and children to voice layered experiences of trauma, survival, and aspiration. These findings underscore the value of arts-based, participatory methods for illuminating women and children’s health and wellbeing in migration contexts and highlight the need for trauma-informed, culturally responsive support for families in transit. Grounded in the Mexican transit context, these findings are primarily intended to inform organizations and institutions working directly with migrant families in transit in northern Mexico. At the same time, the study aims to increase awareness among policy, academic, and public audiences by centering the humanity and lived experiences of mothers and children in forced migration.

Introduction: Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using sensor-generated time-series data has gained significant attention for assessing mental and physical states to address various behavioral disorders. This study utilizes benchmark datasets of stress-related activities to improve prediction performance. Methods: To achieve this, we employ multiple deep learning architectures, including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Transformer models, for feature extraction and classification. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate model performance, with particular focus on the impact of window size and overlap ratio on classification accuracy. Results: The experimental results demonstrate that Transformer models outperform LSTM and RNN models, achieving classification accuracies of 97.83%, 97.36%, and 92.4% on the test dataset, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed approach shows a significant improvement over the deep neural network reported in the original Stressense dataset study. Discussion: These findings highlight the effectiveness of Transformer-based architectures for HAR tasks involving stress detection. The improvement in classification performance suggests strong potential for advancing seamless mental health monitoring using non-intrusive wearable devices.