Person:
Das, Maitreyi Bordia
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Demography,
Social Protection,
Social Development,
Human Development,
Social Inclusion,
Safety Nets,
Equity,
Labor Markets,
Urban Development
Degrees
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
April 3, 2023
Biography
Maitreyi Bordia Das is the Director for Trust Funds and Partner Relations in the Development Finance Vice Presidency of the World Bank. Based in Washington DC, she leads the furtherance of the World Bank’s trust fund reform, implementation of the Bank’s policy framework for financial intermediary funds (FIFs) and supports the ongoing World Bank Group Evolution process. Maitreyi is a leading voice to sustainable development, equity and inclusion, with a career that spans government, academia, the UN system and the World Bank. At the Bank, Maitreyi has held several advisory and managerial positions and led numerous research, policy and programmatic initiatives across urban development, resilience, water security, health, social protection and social development. She was the World Bank’s first Global Lead for Social Inclusion, is a speaker at various public forums and has an extensive publications record. In her last position as Manager in the Global Practice on Urban, Resilience and Land, she oversaw and expanded a wide range of trust funded global programs and partnerships. Having started her career as a lecturer in St Stephen's College, University of Delhi, Maitreyi has also been a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Center of Population and Development Studies and an advisor to the United Nations Development Program in Guyana. She has a PhD in Sociology (Demography) from the University of Maryland. Before joining the World Bank, Maitreyi was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 20
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Publication
Does Culture Matter or Firm? Demand for Female Labor in Three Indian Cities
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02)In discussing the inordinately low employment of Indian women in urban areas, several studies have argued that culture and attitudes have created a labor market that is inherently discriminatory. The unsaid corollary is that culture is slow and hard to change and so, women will stay out of the labor market until social change occurs. The empirical evidence on the role of culture is slim at best. This paper fills the void in the policy literature, as it assesses the relative role of culture, as signified by attitudes of employers, and firm characteristics in hiring women. The paper is based on a unique survey of 618 firms in three of the largest cities in the state of Madhya Pradesh (India)—Bhopal, Indore, and Gwalior. Using detailed descriptive, bivariate and multivariate analysis at the firm level, the hiring process, and attitudes toward male and female workers, the paper addresses the issue of culture and firm characteristics, while noting that the two are not necessarily in binary opposition. The results reinforce the conventional wisdom in some ways and are surprising in others. The most salient result is that employer attitudes matter much less for the chance that women will be hired, than do firm and location characteristics. This has significant policy implications, the most important of which is that female employment in urban India is amenable to policy intervention, and that it is not necessary to wait for culture to change. -
Publication
The Motherhood Penalty and Female Employment in Urban India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03)Since the 1990s, India has seen robust economic growth, rising wages, steady fertility decline, increased urbanization, and expanded educational attainment for males and females. But unlike other countries that have undergone similar transitions, urban women's employment has refused to budge, never crossing the 25 percent mark. This paper fills a critical gap in policy research on women's employment in India. The discussion is situated in the normative construction of motherhood and the gendered nature of caregiving in India. The analysis uses pooled data from six rounds of the National Sample Surveys to examine the effects of having a young child on mothers' employment in urban India over 1983-2011. The analysis also looks at household structure, and analyzes the effects of other household members on women's labor supply. The results show that although the onus of childbearing may have reduced, that of caregiving has increased. Having a young child in the home depresses mothers' employment, an inverse relationship that has intensified over time. Further, living in a household with older children and women over the age of 50 is positively associated with women's employment. These results show that the care of young children is an increasingly important issue in women's employment decisions, in a context where formal childcare is practically nonexistent. These results have significant implications for policy to raise women’s labor force participation in India. -
Publication
What Does Social Inclusion Mean for a Resilient City?: A Policy Note on Urban Floods
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05)Cities today face an unprecedented risk of natural hazards compounded by serious governance challenges. How can cities ensure that in building resilience, they address the needs of those most at risk of being excluded? How can they develop strategies that simultaneously foster resilient infrastructure and social inclusion? This note focuses on urban floods—one of the most pervasive forms of disasters that strike cities—and illustrates who may be left behind, and how building city resilience and social inclusion can work together. It is intended to stimulate thought and debate, and to lead the way for a more in-depth analysis of the problems and solutions, and towards more effective and sustainable city resilience. -
Publication
Changing Norms about Gender Inequality in Education : Evidence from Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11)Using a recent household survey for two cohorts of married women, this paper examines norms about gender equality in education for children and adults. Among the main findings are that gender education gap norms have changed: younger generations of women are more positive about female vs. male education, both as pertaining to child and adult education outcomes. Perhaps the strongest result is that Bangladeshi women are more likely to espouse attitudes of gender equality in education for their children and less so about gender equality among spouses. It is also easier to explain norms regarding children's education and more difficult to explain norms about equality in marriages. The authors believe that question on relative education of boys and girls captures the value of education per se, while the question on educational equality in marriage captures the norms regarding marriage and the relative worth of husbands and wives. The effect of education in determining norms is significant though complex, and spans own and spousal education, as well as that of older females in the household. This indicates sharing of education norms effects or externalities arising from spousal education in the production of gender education gap norms within marriage as well as arising from the presence of older educated females in the household. Lastly, the authors also find associations between gender education gap norms and household poverty, information processing and religion, though the evidence here is more mixed. -
Publication
Minority Status and Labor Market Outcomes : Does India Have Minority Enclaves?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-06)This paper uses data from the 61st Round of the National Sample Survey to understand the employment outcomes of Dalit and Muslim men in India. It uses a conceptual framework developed for the US labor market that states that ethnic minorities skirt discrimination in the primary labor market to build successful self-employed ventures in the form of ethnic enclaves or ethnic labor markets. The paper uses entry into self-employment for educated minority groups as a proxy for minority enclaves. Based on multinomial logistic regression, the analysis finds that the minority enclave hypothesis does not hold for Dalits but it does overwhelmingly for Muslims. The interaction of Dalit and Muslim status with post-primary education in urban areas demonstrates that post-primary education confers almost a disadvantage for minority men: it does not seem to affect their allocation either to salaried work or to non-farm self-employment but does increase their likelihood of opting out of the labor force - and if they cannot afford to drop out, they join the casual labor market. Due to the complexity of these results and the fact that there are no earnings data for self-employment, it is difficult to say whether self-employment is a choice or compulsion and whether builders of minority enclaves fare better than those in the primary market. -
Publication
Exclusion and Discrimination in the Labor Market
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)The frameworks developed in this paper are based on a review of the literature on processes of discrimination and the norms and attitudes that accompany them. Intended as a background paper to the World Development Report 2013 this paper will also feed into the Social Inclusion Flagship Report by the Social Development Department at the World Bank. It is divided into six sections. This section one is an introduction to the objectives and provides the context for this work. Section two is a brief discussion of the conceptual underpinnings and measurement of labor market discrimination from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Section three lays out a typology of processes of discrimination, while section four is a discussion of the mechanisms of discrimination and the ways in which candidates are screened. Section five addresses the question of how discriminated groups react to discrimination. The final section addresses some of the ways in which occupational and labor market mobility is possible for disadvantaged groups and what policy implications it could have. -
Publication
Poverty and Social Exclusion in India: Women
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)This brief describes the poverty and social exclusion of Women in India. The last few decades have seen remarkable progress in the status of women and girls, yet the cultural roots of gender inequality are still strong and affect a range of outcomes. The high salaries and independent lifestyles of women in urban India have captured public imagination. Yet progress has been very uneven and slower than would have been expected based on India’s levels of per capita income. Females still have an overall survival deficit in childhood and during their reproductive years and are severely disadvantaged in the labor market. Inequalities in wages are a disincentive for women to work, but they clearly want work!. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is an example of a program that explicitly seeks to provide paid work to poor women. The scheme mandates that at least one-third of workers should be women and makes several provisions to enhance the participation of women. Threats to women’s security also influence the ability of women to access markets and services and claim spaces for themselves. This is an area in which policy can have a huge effect. Making public spaces safe for women is a major step forward in enhancing women’s access to these spaces. -
Publication
Poverty and Social Exclusion in India: Adivasis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)This brief describes the poverty and social exclusion of the tribal groups in India. Tribal groups or Adivasis are considered to be the earliest inhabitants of India. While India is widely considered a success story in terms of growth and poverty reduction, Adivasis in 2004–2005 were twenty years behind the average. Scheduled Tribes are often conflated with Scheduled Castes in the development literature, although they are completely different social categories. Physical remoteness and smaller numbers have gone together with political isolation and low voice in decision making for the Scheduled Tribes. There have been measures to assure defacto autonomy and self-rule to Adivasis, but implementation has been patchy. More discussion of tribal aspirations and problems from their point of view is needed, rather than an examination of such issues through the lens of policy makers, the bureaucracy, or the civil society. -
Publication
Social Inclusion in Macro-Level Diagnostics: Reflecting on the World Bank Group's Early Systematic Country Diagnostics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06)The idea of social inclusion has garnered considerable attention, especially in the context of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation of its Country Partnership Frameworks. In addition to this primary purpose, the paper fulfils three other purposes. It allows for a broader reflection on the value of the social inclusion construct in macro-level diagnostics; it takes the opportunity to develop and refine a methodology to assess social inclusion and finally, it positions the narrative on social inclusion into the ongoing discourse on poverty, shared prosperity, inequality and the thinking around the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is therefore, a refined articulation of the idea of social inclusion in the context of global epistemological shifts -
Publication
Social Protection in Low Income Countries and Fragile Situations : Challenges and Future Directions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03)Demand for social protection is growing in low income countries and fragile situations. In recent years, the success of social protection (SP) interventions in middle income countries (MICs) like Brazil and Mexico, along with the series of food, fuel, and financial crises, has prompted policymakers in low income countries (LICs) and fragile situations (FSs) to examine the possibility of introducing such programs in their own countries. Flagship programs in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, and Rwanda have shown the adaptability of social protection interventions to the LIC context. Yet, despite growing levels of support for these initiatives, many challenges remain. In LICs and FSs, governments are confronted with a nexus of mutually reinforcing deficits that increase the need for SP programs and simultaneously reduce their ability to successfully respond. Governments face hard choices about the type, affordability, and sustainability of SP interventions. The paper reviews how these factors affect SP programs in these countries and identifies ways to address the deficits. It supports the establishment of resilient SP systems to address specific needs and vulnerabilities and to respond flexibly to both slow and sudden onset crises. To achieve this, both innovation and pragmatism are required in three strategic areas: (i) building the basic blocks of SP systems (e.g., targeting, payments, and monitoring and evaluation); (ii) ensuring financial sustainability; and (iii) promoting good governance and transparency. These issues suggest the possibility of a different trajectory in the development of social protection in LICs than in MICs. The implications for World Bank support include the need to focus on increasing knowledge and operational effectiveness of SP programs, fostering institutional links between multiple SP programs, and using community capacity and technological innovations to overcome bottlenecks in operations.