We celebrate International Women’s Month 2020 by interviewing three women in our department at different stages of their academic career. They tell us about their career journeys, highlights and barriers they have faced as well as what hopes they have for the International Development industry. Interviews conducted by Human Rights student, Cherry Agarwal. 

“The UK has the most serious gap in promotions of female professors in the whole of the EU. And the gender pay gap in the UK is extremely high still… female academics are paid 15% lower than men on average.” – Dr Kate Meagher, Associate Professor in Development Studies.

“Being from a working class background – I’m the first in my family to graduate from university – you feel like an impostor. It is something that a lot of women feel. but only now in my forties do i feel like i deserve to be here.” – Dr Tiziana Leone, Associate Professor in Health and International Development.

“The moment in which you realise that you have just identified a connection between issues that no one has thought about before and that this can somehow assist in understanding how the word world works and how you can make it world the world work better and I think that’s absolute bliss and fortunately throughout my career I think I’ve had many of those opportunities of identifying moments in which you know the research can economically be well received from a scientific point of view but at the same time when you feed those findings back to partners in the field and you can experience first hand how evidence can change of government policy hopefully for the better.” – Dr Sandra Sequeira, Associate Professor of Development Economics.

Cherry Agarwal (@QuilledWords) an MSc Human Rights candidate and is an independent journalist and educator based out of the UK. She started her writing career in 2012. Until recently, she worked as a senior reporter with Newslaundry.com, an award-winning news and media watchdog based out of Delhi, India. Her work focused on the rights of journalists, press freedom, media ethics, regulations and censorship. She is a Harvard College scholar and was a speaker for UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy Week.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.