A Conversation with Katherine Marshall
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By Geraldine Sobanda and Mirek Tobiáš Hošman | 2026
Katherine Marshall had a long and extensive career at the World Bank. She joined in 1971 as a technical assistant and following her training through the Young Professionals program became one of the first women in senior management position. During her 35 years at the Bank, she worked as economist and division chief in Eastern Africa Projects at the Central Agriculture Division (1978–1986), division chief in Latin American Country Programs (1986–1990), director of the Africa Region Sahelian Department (1990–1994), South Africa Department (1994–1996), and East Asia & Pacific in Social Policy and Governance sector (1997–2000) before becoming director in the presidential office overseeing the Development Dialogue on Values & Ethics (2000–2006). She was described as “one of the Bank's most influential managers” and “a champion of women's advancement at the institution”.[1]
Today, Marshall continues to work on development issues. She is a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University; Professor of the Practice of Development, Conflict, and Religion, Walsh School of Foreign Service, and also the Executive Director, World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), a non-profit organization that works at the intersection of religion and global development.
Marshall’s professional trajectory overlapped with several distinct phases of development assistance in the second half of the twentieth century as well as with the Bank’s own institutional and ideational evolution. In this conversation for the ECOINT project, Geraldine Sibanda and Mirek Tobiáš Hošman spoke to Katherine Marshall about her experience at the World Bank and the evolution of the women in development agenda at the institution.
Q: Would you recount your experience as a young woman professional at the World Bank?
KM: When I entered the Bank, I was one of the very few women who didn’t have the job of a secretary and obviously I was very conscious of it. I had all kinds of encounters that you can imagine. There was no awareness of harassment at that point. I remember one fairly senior official who walked over to a female young Technical Assistant (me) diligently taking notes at the back of the Board room. “You are having lunch with me at Sans Souci today. 12:30. Be there,” he said and went back to his place. I obeyed. Arriving there he walked to his usual place and his martini arrived immediately. He proceeded to lecture me at length about what was important in life, which involved women staying at home. A phrase that I will remember forever is “nothing is more important in life than when Muffy has the measles”. Of course, I had no idea who Muffy was, I presume one of his grandchildren or something. In any case, I did not obey.
But there were enough people who were more open-minded. It was an odd environment, basically all-male management environment, but it wasn’t impossible. I remember once asking Gene Rotberg for a recommendation letter. He was wonderful, one of the great characters in the Bank. He agreed to write the letter and sent me a blind copy of it. It was a perfectly good recommendation, but in the middle, I read with horror a paragraph that praised my curves and various other features for which I should be hired. I stormed towards his office, absolutely furious. And of course, he was there ready to laugh at me because he had done it deliberately to taunt me. He had sent up a separate letter without the middle section. I guess that is an illustration of the kinds of things that would never happen now. They were well-intention and, in that sense, harmless, but certainly of a different era.
Q: You had a rich and varied career at the World Bank. At some point, you were closely involved in the so-called women in development agenda. Could you tell us more on that?
KM: There were two sets of issues. One was the position of women within the Bank, the second was addressing the issues of women in development assistance. I remember my initial reaction when these issues came up was that it wasn’t my area. In other words, I didn’t come here to work on women, and I sort of resisted to get involved in meetings on women in development in the early years. I think we knew well enough that we were constantly “having to prove ourselves”, to show that we are actually competent to be there. And if you got labeled as, you know, focused on women, that would detract from it.
But the two issues were important, and one quickly realized that if women wouldn’t pick up the topic, it was unlikely to be picked up at all. I think it’s one of the interesting stories of success within the Bank that the early women who got promoted – Nancy Berry, Jessica Einhorn, Marianne Haug, Anne Hamilton, and others – worked together and met some of the senior leadership at different points to promote strategies that would focus on women. I remember we had lunch as a group regularly, even though we were very different people and came from very different places.
At some point me and Marianne Haug worked together to require basically a strategy note from different departments within the Bank that would discuss how they were dealing with the issues of women in the overall programs. One thing I did at one point was to look over all the annual meeting briefs – this was all totally informal, never written down. These briefs were prepared every year for the management and there was basically some kind of a paper on every single member country, sort of a stock taking document about what the priority issues were and how we diagnosed the situation. I looked at them and my question was: how many times is there any mention of women? And the answer was basically zero. It was clearly not a priority at that time and there was nothing practical or tangible. My point was that we needed to become much more specific and give this topic a higher priority.
Q: What was the response at the Bank? How did people view what you were trying to achieve?
KM: There was a lot of skepticism in terms of validity and priority. Many people asked why the Bank should deal with this, almost rolling their eyes. It was somewhat similar in the case of the environment. Some people thought that we had a core business and we needed to deal with serious matters. Why would you spend time on other things?
Q: Could you give us an example of a project that in your view the Bank should be doing more at that time?
KM: I think the most interesting example in terms of changing people’s attitude was the focus on girls in education. It was one of the rare examples where you could see some of the work that was done in the research department on documenting the benefits of girls’ education translating into policy. It went down to the crude practical level such as providing toilets for girls in schools. It was often demonstrated that the fact that there were no appropriate bathrooms was one reason why girls didn’t go to school or why they dropped out. So, the Bank started addressing the issue and bringing it to governments’ attention and also including it within its education operations. I think it really represented a major breakthrough, a sort of “aha moment” where people actually came to appreciate and understand that this was not a trivial, politically correct set of arguments, but that it really came to the substance of societies.
Interestingly – and that was something I wasn’t aware of – there was a whole set of debates about how much one should get involved on the level of the family. This was seen as the private territory where you didn’t even collect data. Apparently, this is still something that you would hear in some quarters. I was oblivious to that. I mean, I was previously in the agriculture sector where it was obvious and a sort of truism that women were the farmers in Africa. When an extension worker went to the farm and only talked to the men, they were missing a huge piece of the pie because it was the women who were actually out in the fields doing the work and deciding when to plant.
Q: Was there something specific about the approach to women in development in the context of Africa within the Bank?
KM: I think one of the main questions was do you have women at the table? In other words, are women in decision-making? And this clearly was a tangible issue within the Bank, you know, promoting and valuing the women who were there, giving them opportunities, and also looking at younger women, selecting them for jobs, and addressing the whole set of issues around attitudes towards women.
The point was that sometimes the agenda and priorities would be different had women designed them, just because women heard and saw things and understood things differently. But this required a broader change of the management culture. I often give the example that in my own agriculture unit, I focused a lot on teams and shared responsibilities within the teams. That was because we had older, colonial era agriculturalist and technical specialists, and younger economists who tended to be women. So, you had young women and older men and how do you get them to work together? Because if you put the women in charge, the men didn’t like it, but if you put the men in charge, they dismissed the women. So, I set up a team arrangement, but the vice president at that time didn’t like it at all. He thought you needed to have someone in charge, somebody as the lead. He didn’t appreciate my argument that you needed to have shared responsibility in order to function. And I remember having one argument and I asked him what about marriage, does there have to be one person in charge? And his answer was clearly yes, but mine was no.
Selected Publications by Katherine Marshall:
An expansive list of Marshall’s publications is available on Google Scholar and on the Berkeley Centre for Religion’swebsite. These include:
- Katherine Marshall, The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity (Routledge, 2008)
- Katherine Marshall, Global Institutions of Religion: Ancient Movers, Modern Shakers (Routledge, 2013)
- Susan Hayward and Katherine Marshall (eds), Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen(United States Institute for Peace Pres, 2015)
- Katherine Marshall and Marisa Van Saanen, Development and Faith: Where Mind, Heart and Soul Work Together(World Bank Group, 2007)
- Katherine Marshall and Lucy Keough, Mind, Heart and Soul in the Fight against Poverty (World Bank Group, 2004)
- Olivia Wilkinson and Katherine Marshall, Strategic Religious Engagement: Paths to Enhancing the Impact of National and International Development Initiatives, Review of Faith and International Affairs 24 (3), 2026.
