Hi everyone! Excited for my first blog post! Tomorrow, I will be starting my internship with the World Bank. Ahead of that, I thought I could use this post to briefly introduce both myself and the team that I will be working with at the World Bank.
I am an incoming 2nd year Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) where I will be concentrating in Political and Economic Development. Prior to HKS, I lived and worked in Washington D.C. and Mumbai, where I supported early to mid-stage nonprofit organizations to scale their programs and interventions. While living in India, I became interested in gender policy, particularly after visiting so many communities and seeing how differently women and men were being treated. While this technically was nothing new—I knew that India, like others, was built on patriarchal ideologies, norms, and values, but the more I saw such examples of patriarchy and inequality through my site visits and travels, the more passionate I started to feel like doing something about it, especially as a woman who had the great privilege of growing up in a gender equal household. Since starting graduate school, I have since shifted my attention to gender policy, with a focus on gender-based violence and sexual reproductive rights within resource-constrained contexts. This internship will be one of a few other projects I will be working on that focus on gender policy.
At the World Bank, I will be working with the Women, Business, and the Law Team (WBL). The WBL team examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion. The newest study, Women, Business and the Law 2021, was launched in February 2021. It employs eight indicators that are structured around women’s interactions with the law as they begin, progress through, and end their careers: Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. This year, the study included important findings on government responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The next study will also present data on new areas of research, namely childcare, women’s access to justice, and the rights of women with disabilities.
I will be supporting with data collection, analysis, and research toward the upcoming WBL study, focusing primarily on women’s access to justice and the implementation of existing gender laws across different economies. I don’t have too many more details than this, so I am very excited for tomorrow to learn more about my project and my fellow interns.
Please stay tuned! Excited for these next few weeks!