Shalini Sinha
Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment
Shalini Sinha is Asia Strategy Lead and Home-Based Work Sector Specialist at WIEGO. Shalini’s academic training is on gender studies, and she has worked on issues of gender and labour for over two decades in the South Asia region. Shalini straddles the space between academic discourse and grassroot activisms, with a grounded understanding of the poor women in urban settings. She has years of experience of contributing to informed analysis as well as global advocacy on the subject. Shalini has also written extensively on homes as sites of work for the working poor, especially about those women who work from home, articulating their livelihood issues spatially and materially. In her recent work, Shalini’s combines a gender lens and labour perspective, looking at how home is used for economically productive work, largely by women; documenting and recording the challenge this workspace imposes on women’s economic activity as well as her care responsibilities. Over the years, Shalini has been highlighting the impact of local government policies and urban plans on home-based workers as a category, in India and elsewhere, and advocating for the city governments and urban planners to integrate women home-based work into local economic development plans. Throughout her two-decade long career, Shalini has highlighted that building gender friendly and equitable cities needs to reflect the needs of the working poor, especially women, living in unauthorized slums and informal housing, paying special attention to livelihoods that are sustained in and around homes.