Shruti Majumdar

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT SHRUTI MAJUMDAR

Shruti is a sociologist with 15+ years of experience at the intersection of research and practice in the field of preventing and responding to violence against women and women’s economic empowerment in diverse development and humanitarian settings. As the Global Learning Lead at the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, the only global grantmaking entity within the UN system dedicated to ending all forms of violence against women, Shruti’s priorities are to grow the Trust Fund’s Learning Hub - she leads a team of passionate researchers, nurturing strategic partnerships, listening and learning from survivors of violence and women’s rights organizations across the globe, and ultimately expanding the global knowledge base for effective, innovative and scalable solutions on ending violence against women and girls. Most recently, Shruti served as the acting Deputy Country Representative in Afghanistan in 2024, where she supported the country office in establishing its first women’s civil society project following the Taliban takeover.Prior to the UN, Shruti worked for over six years at the World Bank, where she led several research initiatives on gender equality with government partners and civil society organizations in India, Bangladesh, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Jordan. Her book \"Revolution by Stealth: How Women’s Groups Catalyzed a Cultural Transformation in Bihar\", co-authored with Vijayendra Rao and Paromita Sanyal and based on three years of ethnographic research in rural Bihar is under contract with Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2026). Prior to her international work, Shruti did fieldwork in her home country, India with various women’s rights organizations on child, early and forced marriage and trafficking. Shruti has an MA and PhD in Sociology from Brown University, and a BA in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. Most recently, Shruti has been advancing a practitioner-centered research and policy agenda informed by her authorship of “Beyond Backlash: Advancing Movements to End Violence against Women” (2025), examining how backlash, strategic disinformation, and shrinking civic and data spaces undermine gender justice. Her work explores how the UN and women’s-rights movements globally can more effectively use data and evidence to defend rights, hold power accountable, and sustain social change in the face of organized anti-gender backlash.