“Pragya Agarwal is one of our most important writers and thinkers on race and gender. The more we might think that we don't need her ideas, the more likely it is that we do.” —Ruth Whippman
Dr. Pragya Agarwal is a behavior and data scientist, a diversity consultant, an award-winning academic, and a passionate advocate for racial and gender equity. She has authored acclaimed books on unconscious bias, racial literacy, and reproductive justice, was named one of the UK’s 100 leading women in social enterprise, and was one of 50 people creating change in the UK-India corridor.
Pragya’s most recent book is the critically acclaimed (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman, a hybrid-memoir and scientific analysis of women’s fertility, and an urgent and timely examination of how political ideas of womanhood and motherhood are constructed. She is also the author of Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, an urgent study of the political harm of bias, a Guardian Book of the Week and one of the best science books of 2020, as well as Wish We Knew What to Say: Talking With Children About Race, a manual for parents, caregivers, and educators of all backgrounds and ethnicities. She has hosted a podcast of the same name, where she speaks with parents of different ethnicities about raising children with secure identities.
Pragya is a two-time TEDx speaker, the winner of the Diverse Wisdom Writing Award from Hay House Publishing, and organizer of the first ever TEDx Woman event in the north of the UK. She was named as a ‘creative thinker’ for her innovative and interdisciplinary research by NESTA and awarded a Crucible fellowship. Pragya is also the founder of the research thinktank 50 Percent Project, which investigates women’s status and rights around the world, and she has appeared on NPR, BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC Breakfast, Sky News, Australian Broadcasting Service, and Canadian Radio, and her writing on bias and prejudice, motherhood, gender and racial inequality, and mental health appear in The Guardian, New Scientist, Scientific American, Independent, BMJ, Times Higher Education, Huffington Post, Prospect, Forbes, and many more.
Pragya moved to the UK from India almost twenty years ago to study for a Masters at the University of York on a British Council Fellowship. After her PhD from the University of Nottingham, she was a senior academic in US and UK Universities for over 12 years and held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship. She currently lives in the northwest with her family and holds the position of Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice at Loughborough University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
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