Congratulations to Mahi Lal ’22, who recently graduated from Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) with a Master in Public Policy, concentrating in labor economics, quantitative methods, and international development. Her next chapter takes her to Lansing, Michigan, where she is a Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow working with the Mayor’s Office. She’s rethinking how the city’s permitting process works for new and minority developers, making it easier for more people to build in Lansing and shape its growth.
Mahi’s interest in labor markets took shape at Wooster. In her junior year, she was awarded the presitgious FlyWire Scholarship in Social Justice to conduct research at UC Berkely’s Labor Institute in the summer. She returned to Wooster, co-founded and co-chaired the Wooster Women and Gender Minorities in Economics club, building community for underrepresented students in the field. Towards the end of her junior year and into her senior year she began her 3 semester thesis experience to emprically examine wage disparities in nursing in the United States. Inspired by her courses in Gender Economics that used mixed methods, completing qualitative interviews that were able to provide testimony about the discrimination faced by migrant nurses.
Upon graduation, Mahi secured a consulting position as a research assistant with Optimal Consulting Group in Washington DC. After working for a few years she applied and was accepted into Harvard’s Public Policy program. At Harvard, she took those questions about labor markets global. For her capstone, she partnered with the World Bank to study women’s economic participation in Türkiye, looking at what keeps women out of the labor force and how policy can change that.