Iris Bohnet

Iris Bohnet, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and Academic Dean at the Harvard Kennedy School, serves as co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program, an associate director of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, and the faculty chair of the executive program “Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century” for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. She serves on the boards, advisory boards or as a patron of Credit Suisse Group, Applied, Edge, genEquality, TaketheLeadWomen, We Shape Tech, Women in Banking and Finance, and the UK Government’s Equalities Office as well as numerous academic journals. She was named one of the Most Influential People in Gender Policy by apolitical in 2018 and 2019, a Leading Thinker of Victoria, Australia, 2016-2019, and has received an honorary degree from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2016.

Professor Bohnet teaches organizational design, decision-making, negotiation and gender in public policy and leadership in degree and executive programs, and has been engaged in the teaching, training and consulting of private and public sector leaders in the United States, Australia, Europe, India and the Middle East. Some of the larger consulting, research or speaking clients include the UK and US governments, BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Deloitte, EY, Fidelity, GE, Google, the IMF, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, the OECD, Salesforce, Sanofi, Schroders, UNESCO, UNICEF, UN Women, Unilever, and the World Bank.

A behavioral economist, she combines insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective. Her most recent research examines behavioral design to de-bias how we live, learn and work. Her academic work has been published in the best journals of her profession, including the American Economic Review, the American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Management Science. Her book What Works: Gender Equality By Design (Harvard University Press 2016) provides decision-makers from across the sectors with scientific insights on how to redesign organizations, school and society.

A Swiss citizen, she received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich in 1997 and spent a year as a research fellow at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley from 1997-1998. She joined the Harvard Kennedy School as an assistant professor in 1998 and was made full professor in 2006. She is married to Michael Zurcher, and she and her husband have two children.

Source: Harvard University