Dr Ishrat Jahan Khan (Barsha) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Dhaka, which is the top-ranked public research university in Bangladesh. Ishrat has been teaching in this field for more than a decade. She was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship to pursue her doctorate at the University of Sussex in England. Her research investigates the various meanings and manifestations of economic empowerment in the private trajectories of middle-class professional women in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It explores the disjuncture between women’s earning potential and its transformation into their agency over choices and decisions in everyday relationships, including marriage and intimate lives.

Ishrat started her career as a development researcher at ActionAid International. Later, she moved to the academia following her degree in Women and Gender Studies, which she completed from the University of Hull with Erasmus Mundus GEMMA scholarship.

In addition to teaching, Ishrat has a decade of experience working on a number of community-based research initiatives. As a feminist scholar and researcher, she is primarily interested in issues relating to gender and development, including women's empowerment, financial inclusion, violence against women and girls (VAW&G), and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).She has collaborated on several gender and development-related projects in Bangladesh and abroad, including Share-Net International, NWO-WOTRO (Dutch Government-funded SRHR research), Equimundo (US-based Mencare Project), UNDP, WHO, and Canterbury University, UK to name a few. Besides her diverse academic and development career, Ishrat also worked at Channel I (one of the mainstream private television channels in Bangladesh) as a news presenter for more than a decade.