Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government Co-Director, Women and Public Policy Program
A behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent research examines behavioral design to de-bias how we live, learn and work.... Read more about Iris Bohnet
Why are male graduates earning 20% more than their female peers post-MBA, and what can business schools do to fight the MBA gender pay gap? Hannah Riley Bowles, WAPPP Co-Director, explains how women in the workplace are disadvantaged by their social networks and face certain bias.
Using metrics pioneered by Harvard Business Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Brad Fulton finds that increasing staff diversity does not automatically make a nonprofit more effective. But such organizations can benefit from that change if they can help their employees learn how to acknowledge and talk about their social differences.
Zoe Marks, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Charli Carpenter, International Security Program Fellow and Professor in the Political Science Department at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, share their thoughts on how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the war in general, has impacted Afghan women, and what the women themselves and others can do to improve their situation.
The informal sector was historically a Western concept referring to low-income activities among unskilled migrants and colonized natives. In today's globalized world, the term encompasses the vast majority of the working population at the base of the economic pyramid, according to Martha Chen, co-founder of the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and a lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
One important issue confronting today’s climatic change campaign is determining what crucial mass is necessary to force governments to take their objectives more seriously. Numerous environmental activists have campaigned with a specific percentage in mind: 3.5%. This is based on the findings of political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who discovered that peaceful organizations require the active engagement of at least 3.5% of a community to accomplish significant political transformation.
The stock exchange's new rule takes on crony capitalism, which for far too long has allowed powerful people to make decisions in the interests of their own restricted group and reserve the spoils of business performance for their own use.
The 3.5% rule posits that no government can stand up to that share of the population mobilising against it. It comes from Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, who found it was a useful predictor of a protest’s success. What is so special about this figure?
Starting with the uncomfortable, unavoidable conversations needed to bring about change in society and hte workplace, Harvard psychologist Robert Livingston lays out a clear blueprint for rooting out bias and racism. This unflinching guide is one of the finalists for this year's FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
The West’s failure in Afghanistan may well have resulted from not spending enough money in the right places. A different balance between US military expenditure and economic aid might have convinced ordinary Afghans that they had a significant stake in the success of the state that the US and its allies were striving to build.
