Bridging Gaps, Building Futures: A Dialogue on Gender, Education, and Work

About the Speakers:

Rukmini Banerji, Chief Executive Officer of Pratham Education Foundation

Rukmini Banerji was trained as an economist at St. Stephen’s College (Delhi) and the Delhi School of Economics. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (1981-83) and completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1991. She returned to India in 1996 and joined Pratham. Over the years, she has worked extensively in Pratham’s education programs in rural and urban areas. Along with her teams, she has played a major role in designing and supporting large scale partnerships with state governments in India, for improving children’s learning outcomes. She led Pratham’s research and assessment efforts including the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) exercise from 2005 to 2014. Since 2015, she has been the CEO of Pratham. In 2008, she received the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar by the Government of Bihar, India. She was the first recipient of this award. In 2021, she was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Development.

Originally from Bihar, she is now based between New Delhi and Pune. She writes frequently on education in both Hindi and English dailies in India and enjoys writing books and stories for children.

Alessandra Voena, Faculty Affiliate at the King Center on Global Development

Alessandra Voena is an empirical microeconomist who studies primarily the economics of the family and the economics of science and innovation. She is currently a Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and an Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. She has previously taught at the University of Chicago and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2017, she was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship and the Carlo Alberto Medal from the Collegio Carlo Alberto. She holds a PhD and an MA in Economics from Stanford University and a Laurea in Economia e Commercio from the Università degli Studi di Torino.

About the Moderator:

Suhani Jalota, Affiliated Researcher at the King Center on Global Development

Suhani Jalota is an applied microeconomist and entrepreneur with a focus on labor markets, healthcare access, and AI adoption in emerging economies. She is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where her field experiments explore barriers to workforce participation and health system access, and test AI-enabled interventions to increase productivity at scale.

She leads Stanford’s Future of Work for Women Initiative with the Hoover Institution, a cross-sector program that turns evidence into partnerships to accelerate workforce entry and firm productivity. She is also the Founder of Myna Mahila Foundation, a research-driven social enterprise that now reaches 1.5 million women with a team of 70 in India; Myna Research, which runs field experiments in urban slums; and Rani Work, a platform enabling smartphone-based digital employment. 

She has received several honors, including the Top 33 She Shapes AI Award, Forbes 30 under 30 Asia, Asia 21 Young Leader, Queen Young Leader award, Glamor College Woman of the Year, and top 50 under 50 most powerful women by India Today. She holds a BS from Duke and a PhD and MBA from Stanford as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.