Jeni Klugman

Jeni Klugman has over 30 years of experience in international development, and a record of successful innovation and strategic leadership of major initiatives. Her areas of focus include gender, poverty, inequality, human development, labor markets, governance, and institutions, with operational experience that spans most sectors and almost 20 countries.

Her executive experience builds on academic and technical knowledge in economics and in law.  She is currently managing director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and sits on several advisory boards and councils, including The Lancet Commission on Gender and Health and the Women for Women Research Advisory Board. She is lead academic adviser on the World Bank’s Gender Dimensions of Forced Displacement research program and consults with the Canada-Caribbean Resilience Facility and New York University’s Center for International Cooperation. She is also is a senior gender integration adviser at Stanford University’s Global Center for Gender Equality.

Previous roles include director of gender and development with the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C. Klugman directed and was lead author of three global human development reports at the United Nations Development Program (2008–2011). She served as a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, an adviser on women’s economic empowerment with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a co-Leading Thinker for the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation in Australia. Klugman has also sat on a number of global commissions and boards, including those related to The Lancet Commission on Gender Norms and Health, the World Economic Forum’s Advisory Board on Sustainable Competitiveness and Global Agenda Council on Benchmarking Progress in Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Union, and various United Nations agencies. She has been a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association since March 2010.

Klugman has led over a dozen major global reports for leading multilateral agencies and high-level groups on topics ranging from migration to women’s economic empowerment and access to justice. She has over 100 publications on a range of development topics, from poverty reduction strategies and labor markets to gender, conflict, health reform, education, and decentralization, and has co-authored over 25 global, regional, and country-level reports for the World Bank. Academic publications include such top-ranked journals as the Journal of Economic Inequality, La Revue d’Economie Politique, The Lancet, and The Review of Income and Wealth, and books published by Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and Edward Elgar. As World Bank staff, Klugman also led and managed numerous World Bank country and regional studies, and executive board papers. She has taught graduate courses at the Harvard Kennedy School, the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Sydney University Law School.

Klugman has a doctorate in economics from the Australian National University and a Master of Science in development economics and bachelor of civil law (hon) from University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She is a barrister of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia.