Aashima Sinha

Aashima Sinha is a research scholar in the Institute’s Gender Equality and the Economy program. Her research interests span the fields of feminist, development, and labor economics. Currently, her research focuses on the micro- and macroeconomic implications of social reproduction. She
investigates the gender-differentiated effects of unpaid care work time on the well-being outcomes of care providers in low- and middle-income countries. Additionally, she has developed composite scores for each state in the United States to analyze how the organization of social reproduction in the household, public, and market sectors impacts economic growth and overall societal development. Other areas of her research include violence against women, the human development costs of public space harassment, and international measures of gender inequality. She augments her research with policy evaluation and provides region-specific policy recommendations.

Aashima’s expertise includes conducting primary surveys in developing countries, including a
unique contextualized time-use survey in rural and urban areas of India. As part of a collaborative research project, she is currently implementing a randomized control trial in India to evaluate the impact of couple counselling intervention on sharing of unpaid work, women empowerment, gender norms, health, and overall well-being of couples and their children. Aashima has secured multiple grants to support her fieldwork research, including two grants from the Asian Development Bank Institute and one grant from the University of Utah’s 1U4U Innovative Research Funding Program.

During her doctoral program she has worked as a Research Assistant (RA) on various projects including a joint project of the Department of Economics and the Department of Public Health at the University of Utah, which examines the impact of public-space sexual harassment of women in the Global South and the role of men’s perception and social norms in perpetuating sexual
harassment. She also collaborated with Professor Günseli Berik as an RA, to evaluate and recommend theoretical and methodological improvements in UNDP’s gender indices including Gender Development Index and Gender Inequality Index.

Prior to her Ph.D., Aashima worked as an Analyst with consulting firms in India, where she provided research and advisory services to public authorities, private firms, and civil organization. Aashima holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Utah (2023), an M.A in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (2017) and a B.A (honors) in economics from the University of
Delhi (2014).