I will be retiring from my post as Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science by the end of 2024. I will continue as Professor Emeritus and also as part of the Faculty of International Inequalities Institute, LSE so my connections will not be completely severed. I will also continue as director of a new research programme at III on Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy. I will be a Fellow of the Bosch Academy in Berlin from August 2024 to January 2025 working on the new programme.
I have been at the LSE since 2013 making a full circle since it is where I started out as an undergraduate and where I did my PhD back in the early 1980s. After completing my PhD, I joined the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and to which I am still associated as an Emeritus Fellow. Later I was Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University. I have done short stints in other institutions as well. I was part time Senior Research Fellow at the Department for International Development, UK between 2009-2010, the Kerstin Hesselgren Professor at the University of Goteberg, Sweden in 2004-2005 and Senior Sabaticant for the International Development Research Centre in Canada, based in its Regional Office in South Asia in Delhi between 2005-2006, a city where I have many friends and colleagues.
I am interested in various aspects of inequality and how they play out within households, labour markets and the wider economy. I am also interested in forms of collective action by poor and marginalized groups that seek a more just distribution of power, resources and political voice and in what this tells us about the relationship between individual empowerment and societal justice. Gender is obviously an important example of these inequalities but I am also interested in how gender intersects with other socio-economic inequalities. Much of my work focuses on South Asia but I have worked in a number of other countries as well.
My publications include Reversed realities: gender hierarchies in development thought (Verso, 1994) The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labour supply decision-making in London and Dhaka (Verso, 2000 and Kali for Women 2001) Gender and social protection in the informal economy (Commonwealth Secretriat/Routledge, 2008), Can the MDGs provide a pathway to social justice? The challenge of intersecting inequalities (IDS/MDG Achievement Fund, 2010) and Organizing women workers in the informal economy: beyond the weapons of weak (Zed Press, 2013). My next book is called ‘Renegotiating patriarchy:Gender, agency and the Bangladesh Paradox’ and will be published by LSE Press and free to download from their website from September 2024.
I have always sought to link my research with the ‘real’ world of policy and practice which I have done through various training efforts, first the Women, Men and Development short course I directed at IDS, Sussex for several years and then later more regional training and advisory work with governments (eg. India, Bangladesh and the Gambia), various international and bilateral organizations, such as the World Bank, UNDP, UNIFEM, NORAD, SIDA, Oxfam and with national NGOs such as BRAC (which had gone international) PRADAN and Nijera Kori. I am on the advisory committee of the ILO’s Better Works Program and on the Advisory Boards of United Nations Research on Social Development and United Nations University-International Institute for Global Health.
I am on the editorial committees of a number of terrific journals including Feminist Economics, Development and Change, Gender and Development, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. I am a member of the International Association of Feminist Economics and the Development Studies Association.