Katherine Hay

Katherine Hay, deputy director, is responsible for ensuring the successful implementation of the Gender Equality strategy across a range of countries and initiatives, as well as for ensuring the quality and rigor of that work.

Katherine is a seasoned gender and development expert with 17 years of in-country experience in equity focused grant making. She is a principled and dynamic problem-solver with proven experience developing high impact portfolios. She has focused extensively on women’s empowerment and gender equity throughout her career, and is a long-term advocate for bringing gender and equity into measurement, data systems, and evaluation. Katherine has supported many funders and organizations to set up gender and equity-oriented evaluations and systems and established evaluation associations and communities of practice (including those focused on gender) throughout South Asia.

Prior to joining the Gender Equality team in Seattle in 2017, Katherine lead the Monitoring Learning and Evaluation work for the foundation in India (from 2013). In that role, she was a core member of the India leadership team and was responsible for improving results-based decision making on India investments. She developed and led a $100M+ cutting edge portfolio of evaluative work. Katherine also lead the initial gender equality work in India – work that was recognized by foundation leadership and generated new insights on how to reduce equity gaps and factors undermining development outcomes. That work included research and evaluation on self-help group and empowerment, equity, exclusion in health services, respect and abuse in maternal care, time use, intimate partner violence, and adolescent well-being.

Prior to joining the foundation, Katherine was an evaluation specialist at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in New Delhi. In her 12 years at IDRC, she helped shaped an evaluative and results-oriented culture at IDRC. Among other work, she led the corporate performance assessment (of the then $200 million annual portfolio) and global evaluations of research portfolios on governance, equity, and health valued at over $75 million. While at IDRC, she coined and conceptualized ‘evaluation field building’, positioning evaluation as transformative, and wrote and led investments in feminist evaluation. She successfully developed and led one of the first women’s health and empowerment projects using self-help groups in 7 states (India) with 600 community based organizations. She also designed and led organizational strengthening with 100+ research organizations across Asia.

Katherine has an M.A. in International Affairs from Carleton University, Ottawa. She also has a bachelor’s in Environmental Studies from the University of Waterloo, Canada.