Women: An Emerging Market Speaker Bios

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) on Oct. 19 will host "Women: An Emerging Market," the third event in ICRW’s Passports to Progress 35^th anniversary discussion series. A panel of experts will discuss how building the capacity of women to earn a living – especially in low- and middle-income countries – can alleviate poverty and drive global economic growth.

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The following speakers will participate:

Katty Kay

Katty Kay is Washington correspondent and anchor for BBC News. BBC World News bulletins air on 230 public broadcast television stations throughout the United States.

Kay’s career with the BBC began in Zimbabwe in 1990 where she started filing radio reports for BBC World Service radio. From there she also covered the end of apartheid in South Africa. Kay then went on to work as a BBC correspondent in London, and later Tokyo, reporting on stories including the Kobe earthquake and the Japanese economic recession. She settled in Washington in 1996 where she took some time out of broadcast journalism to join The Times Washington bureau before returning to the BBC in 2002. From Washington, Kay has covered sex scandals in the Clinton administration, four presidential elections as well as wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. She is a contributor on Meet the Press, The Chris Matthews Show and Morning Joe, and a regular guest host for Diane Rehm on NPR.

Kay also is co-author with Claire Shipman of The New York Times bestseller, "Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success," which shows how women’s management style is ideally suited to the new business world, resulting in more profitable companies with happier employees.

Anju Malhotra

Anju Malhotra is vice president of research, innovation and impact at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). Malhotra leads the organization’s efforts to cultivate cross-institutional learning, measure and evaluate the impact of ICRW’s work and foster innovation to strengthen institutional impact.

Malhotra is an expert on women’s empowerment, gender equality and demographic and social change. She has made extensive contributions to the field in conceptualizing and measuring women’s empowerment; maximizing the potential of girls and young women; advancing reproductive health and rights; and developing rigorous but feasible and accessible approaches for monitoring and evaluating programmatic impact. Prior to joining ICRW in 1998, Malhotra was a faculty member at the University of Maryland and a National Institutes of Health post-doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina.

Nemat Shafik

Nemat (Minouche) Shafik is the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She joined the IMF in April 2011, after serving as the permanent secretary of the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), where she was chief executive of the department responsible for all U.K. development efforts. These included a bilateral aid program in more than 100 countries, multilateral policies and financing for the United Nations, European Union and international financial institutions, and overall development policy and research. Prior to DFID, Shafik was the youngest-ever vice president at the World Bank, where she was responsible for a private sector and infrastructure portfolio of investments worth about $50 billion. She also was part of the senior management of the International Finance Corporation.

Shafik has chaired several international consultative groups and served on a number of boards, among them: Middle East Advisory Group to the International Monetary Fund, the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, which supports microfinance, and the Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme, which promotes the role of energy in poverty reduction. She also has taught at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Economics Department at Georgetown University. Shafik was named “Woman of the Year” for Global Leadership and Global Diversity in 2009.

Gayle Smith

Gayle Smith is special assistant to the President and senior director at the National Security Council, where she is responsible for global development, stabilization and humanitarian assistance issues. She was previously a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, co-chair of the ENOUGH Project, and co-founder of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. During the Clinton Administration, Smith served as special assistant to the President and senior director for African Affairs at the NSC, and as senior advisor to the Administrator and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Smith was based in Africa for over 20 years as a journalist covering military, economic and political affairs for the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Globe & Mail, London Observer and Financial Times. She has also consulted for a wide range of NGOs, foundations and governmental organizations including UNICEF, the World Bank, Dutch Interchurch Aid, Norwegian Church Relief and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation. Smith is a graduate of the University of Colorado.