Sona Mitra
Principal Economist, IWWAGE
Sona has been working in the area of women and development for the last one and a half decades. Her core research interests are in areas related to women’s economic empowerment. She has looked extensively into the causalities of low work participation rates of women in India within a political economy framework and has studied in great detail the gender gaps in the existing labour-force surveys conducted by the Government of India.
Sona completed her masters and PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis looked at the relationship between macro-economic growth and women’s employment in India since the 1990s.
Prior to joining IWWAGE, Sona has worked with the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), National Institute for Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS). She has been an independent consultant with UN agencies working on women’s empowerment and has been a technical adviser to studies conducted by the Action-Aid, UN Women (India), and ICRW. She also teaches a course on Labour and Development under the Master’s in Economics program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and regularly publishes articles in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in books, and opinion pieces in leading newspapers and magazines.