Katherine E Hay

Katherine Hay is a Distinguished Fellow in Gender Equity and Health, and a Senior Strategy advisor at the University of California San Diego. She has extensive experience working to understand and address gender equity in health outcomes, the health care workforce, philanthropy, and issues of women's gendered social and economic opportunity. Prior to this, for 8 years Katherine was a Deputy Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (first in India, and then in Seattle), where she led work to evaluate large-scale health and gender empowerment program in low resource settings and co-developed the foundation’s first Gender Equality strategy. Throughout her career, Katherine has been a consistent voice for gender and equity in policy, research, evaluation, and change. Named one of the world’s most influential people in gender policy by Apolitical, Hay has advised multiple major philanthropies, governments, UN and other global agencies on closing equity gaps. She helped foster new think tanks and institutions on gender and health in Africa and Asia, and established dozens of initiatives and investments resulting in enduring global research collaboratives, and hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, including several in leading medical journals such as the Lancet. Katherine has guided and supported multiple health journalists from the New York Times, the Economist, the Globe and Mail - working to ensure greater accuracy, inclusion and diversity of perspectives, in reporting and stories.

Sub-specialties:
Katherine has deep expertise in building gender investment / funding strategies at leading philanthropic organizations working across multiple geographies and can speak directly about the challenges of shifting organizational funding priorities towards gender equity and inclusion. Katherine has also worked closely across research, govt, and implementers to expand data an research on topics including gender based violence, maternal and child health, women's economic inclusion - and has converted these partnerships and findings into both deep research collaborations (in journals such as the Lancet) and in policy uptake and use.
Katherine also works to link journalists to new voices and researchers particularly women and people of color and researchers in low and middle income colors to increase the overall representation and perspectives in media. As a collaborator and connector she has links to health and gender researchers whose work may not be getting adequate attention and is always happy to make those connects.