Katherine Hay
Deputy Director, Gender Equality, Gates Foundation
Katherine is responsible for the successful implementation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality strategy across a range of countries and initiatives. She leads a team of professionals driving work on women’s employment and enterprise, women’s collectives, barriers to work, and gender data, and also leads the foundation’s Gender Equality and COVID-19 workstream. Katherine is a seasoned gender and development expert with two decades of in-country experience in South Asia. Prior to joining the Gender Equality team in Seattle in 2017, Katherine was a Deputy Director at the Foundation’s India Country Office. Before joining the Gates Foundation, Katherine was an Evaluation Specialist at the International Development Research Centre, where she coordinated and lead research on women’s collectives, livelihoods, decentralization, economic inclusion, and health equity. Katherine has many publications to her credit, on gender and health systems, intimate partner violence, and women’s collectives, including most recently, work in the Lancet on gender equality, norms, and health. Katherine coined and conceptualized ‘evaluation field building,’ positioning evaluation as transformative, and wrote on, and lead investments in feminist evaluation and policy. Her work with women’s collectives goes back to 2005 when she developed and lead one of the first women’s health and empowerment projects using self-help groups in 7 States in India. Katherine has also designed and led organizational strengthening efforts with hundreds of research organizations across Asia. Katherine has an M.A. in International Affairs from Carleton University and a B.E.S in Environmental Studies from the University of Waterloo.