Caren Grown

Caren Grown is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. She is an internationally recognized expert on gender issues in development. From 2014-2021, she served as global director for gender at the World Bank Group and as senior technical advisor in the Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice until 2022.

Prior to joining the World Bank, she was economist-in-residence and co-director of the Program on Gender Analysis in Economics at American University in Washington, D.C. Over the course of her career, Grown held several senior positions, including as senior gender advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she led the development of the agency’s gender equality policy; senior scholar and co-director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College; and director of the poverty reduction and economic governance team at the International Center for Research on Women.

Grown’s books include “Taxation and Gender Equity,” co-edited with Imraan Valodia; “The Feminist Economics of Trade,” co-edited with Irene Van Staveren, Diane Elson, and Nilufer Cagatay; and “Trading Women’s Health and Rights: The Role of Trade Liberalization and Development,” co-edited with Elissa Braunstein and Anju Malhotra. She co-authored “Taking Action: Achieving Gender Equality and Empowering Women” with Geeta Rao Gupta and “Development, Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives” with Gita Sen. Her articles have appeared in World Development, Journal of International Development, Feminist Economics, Health Policy and Planning, and The Lancet.

Grown is a member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the editorial boards of Development Policy Review and Feminist Economics. She was a founding member of the International Working Group on Gender and Macroeconomics (GEM-IWG) and Data2X, where she is also a member of the advisory board.  She has been a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and several U.N. agencies. She was named in the top 20 of Apolitical’s Gender Equality Top 100 Influencers in the World in 2018 and 2019.

Throughout her career, she developed and co-led several large research projects, including the UNU-WIDER program on aid effectiveness and gender equality, the three-country Gender Asset Gap Project (based at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India), and the seven-country Taxation and Gender Equality Project (based at American University and University of KwaZulu Natal).

At the Center for Sustainable Development, Grown is focusing on climate change and development through a gender lens, fiscal policy and public finance for gender equality, and new institutional approaches to achieve gender equality and sustainable development.

She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in economics from the New School for Social Research and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.