Suhani Jalota

About

Dr. Suhani Jalota is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the Myna Mahila Foundation, a research-driven social enterprise with the mission to increase women’s agency and decision-making power to make them more confident, financially independent, and healthy.  

In her research, Jalota uses field experiments to explore the intersection between women’s employment, health, and agency and how technology can amplify their self-determination. In her doctoral dissertation, she analyses constraints to women’s paid work and uses data from digital jobs performed at home in India to study the increase in female labor-force participation.

For the last fourteen years, Jalota has been working in urban slum areas and rural communities on projects ranging from adolescent girl health, water, and sanitation to social protection policies in South Africa, Thailand, and several cities in India.

Founded in 2015, Myna Mahila now has a reach of 1.5 million women and a team of seventy in India. Jalota also founded Myna Research, a data collection arm that manages field experiments on women's issues in urban slums in India. She and her team are currently developing Rani Work, an employment platform for women in India perform digital jobs on their smartphones.

Jalota was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, where she received her PhD and MBA. She has a BS in economics and global health with the highest distinction from Duke University.