Choice, constraints and the gender dynamics of labour markets

Professor Naila Kabeer is a feminist economist and obtained her PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. She is the Principal Investigator for the ESRC research project on gender and labour markets. She is currently Professor of Gender and Development at the Gender Institute at the LSE. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection and citizenship, issues on which she has widely published. Much of her research has focused on South and South East Asia. See website here: http://nailakabeer.com/.

Ms. Simeen Mahmud has an MA in Statistics from Dhaka University and an M.Sc in Demography from London University. She is the Bangladesh co-ordinator of the research project. She is Lead Researcher on Deepening Democracy at the BRAC Governance and Development Institute (BDI) and also co-ordinator of its Centre on Gender and Social Transformation. Her research interests include gender and labour markets, microfinance, the construction of citizen identity, education and collective action, mainly in Bangladesh.

Ms. Lopita Huq is an anthropologist. She has an MA in Political Studies from the Jawarhalal Nehru University, Dehli and an MA in Cultural Studies from the New School for Social Research, New York. She is a Research Fellow at the BRAC Governance and Development Institute. She will be organising the collection and analysis of the data for the project. Her main areas of experience include qualitative research on adolescents, marriage, dowry and recently, on  grassroots organizations, citizenship and rights. 

Ms. Kabita Chowdhury studied Islamic History and Culture. She is a research associate at the BRAC Governance and Development Institute (BDI). She will be working on the collection and analysis of the data for the project. Previously she worked at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), in collaboration with the Population Council and Save the Children. The focus of her research has been on family structure change in rural Bangladesh and adolescent girls. Recently she has been working on grassroots organizations, citizenship and rights.

Professor James Heintz is an economist based in the Economics Department of the University of Massachusets and the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). He will lead on the econometric analysis for the project. His current work focuses on employment policy and poverty outcomes; economic policy choices and human rights; informal and atypical employment; macroeconomic policies for sub-Saharan Africa; and the links between economic policies and distributive outcomes, including race and gender dimensions.

Ms. Janna Miletzki, PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and the Environment at the LSE, is responsible for setting up of the project website and research administration during the early phase of the project. See profile here.

Martha Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, an Affiliated Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and International Coordinator of the global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). Her areas of specialization are employment, gender, and poverty with a focus on the working poor in the informal economy. Before joining Harvard in 1987, she had two decades of resident experience in Bangladesh working with BRAC and in India, where she served as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh. She received a PhD in South Asia regional studies from the University of Pennsylvania in the USA.

Lucia Hanmer has been a Lead Economist in Gender and Development at the World Bank Group since 2013 where she works to identify and pursue frontier research topics and develop new knowledge products aimed at filling key data gaps and operationalizing gender equality throughout the World Bank Group's development portfolio. She served previously as senior economic adviser for the Economic Empowerment Section at UN Women and senior economic adviser in the Chief Economists Office at the UK's Department for International Development. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

David Kucera is a Senior Economist in the International Labour Organization’s Economic Policy Department. His research addresses gender dimensions of trade, structural transformation and informal employment, resulting in such co-authored journal articles as “Feminization, Defeminization and Structural Transformation in Manufacturing” and “Gender Segregation and Gender Bias in Manufacturing Trade Expansion.” He is an associate editor of the journal Feminist Economics and was previously Associate Director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York City. He received a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research.