Iris Bohnet

Career

Bohnet is the director of the Women and Public Policy Program, Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group, and the faculty chair of the executive program, "Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century" for the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders at Harvard Kennedy School. She serves on the board of directors of Credit Suisse Group, as well as on the advisory boards of EDGE and Applied, as well as numerous academic journals. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on Behavior of the World Economic Forum.

Bohnet has served as the Academic Dean of Harvard Kennedy School as well as on the boards or advisory boards of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Switzerland, the Vienna University for Business and Economics, Austria, and the University of Lucerne, Switzerland.

Bohnet is the author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design. The book, acclaimed by the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among others, offers evidence-based solutions to overcome gender bias in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and society. It has been included in 2016 top book lists by Forbes, the Financial Times, LinkedIn, and the Washington Post.

In 2016, Bohnet has been a featured speaker at Google Book Talks, the LSE, the OECD, SXSW, UNESCO, UNWomen, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum, among others.

Bohnet's work has been featured in media outlets around the world, including the Atlantic, the BBC, Bloomberg News, the Boston Globe, The Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, Handelsblatt, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, NPR, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the New York Times, PBS, Tages-Anzeiger, Swiss Television, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired and WirtschaftsWoche.

Her academic work has been published in the top peer-reviewed journals of her profession, including the American Economic Review, American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Management Science, among about 60 others.

A native of Switzerland (Lucerne), she studied at the chair of Bruno S. Frey (whom she also worked with) and received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich in 1997 and spent a year as a research fellow at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley from 1997-1998. She joined the Harvard Kennedy School as an assistant professor in 1998 and was made full professor in 2006.

Recent Publications

Personal

Bohnet is married and she and her husband, Michael Zürcher, an attorney, have two children, the sons Dominik and Luca. She used to compete in synchronized swimming, loves scuba diving and generally, is a water person.