Shahra Razavi is the Director of the Social Protection Department at the International Labour Organization (since February 2020). She is a development economist, with more than 25 years of experience working on social policy, social protection, gender and development. Before joining the ILO she was Chief of the Research and Data Section at UN Women, where she directed the research for the entity’s major flagship reports, oversaw the gender statistics programme and provided technical support to intergovernmental negotiations.As Senior Researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) she coordinated cross-country comparative research programmes at the interface of social policy, social protection, labour markets and the care economy. She obtained her Bsc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and her Msc. and D.Phil/PhD from Oxford University. She has published extensively on social policy, social protection, gender and work in a development context.