Women in Jordan are excluded from labor market opportunities at among the highest rates in the world. Previous efforts to explain this outcome have focused on specific, isolated aspects of the problem and have not exploited available datasets to test across causal explanations. In this podcast, Emma Cameron, student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, interviews Growth Lab Research Fellow Semiray Kasoolu. Semiray discusses Growth Lab’s recent research on women’s economic exclusion in Jordan. The Growth Lab team has developed a comprehensive framework to analyze the causes leading to low female employment rates and participation in the labor market and systematically test their validity, using micro-level data.
Interview recorded on October 18, 2019.
About Semiray Kasoolu: Semiray joined the Center for International Development's Growth Lab as a Research Fellow in 2017.
Prior to joining CID, she worked with the World SME Forum in the Republic of Georgia to diagnose constraints to the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises and to design solutions to facilitate their integration into global value chains. She also worked as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs, focusing on portfolio monitoring and analysis.
Semiray holds a B.S. in Economics and Accounting from Saint Peter’s University and a Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID, 2017) from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Her research interests include private sector development and competitiveness and she is passionate about using data science techniques to formulate policy recommendations to contribute to these areas.