Ayesha Banu is Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Dhaka University. She received her Ph.D from Dhaka University in 2015, and completed her first masters in Sociology from Dhaka University in 1989. She was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship and pursued her second masters in Gender and Development at IDS, Sussex during 1993-1994. Her areas of interests are women’s movements, feminist theory, poverty, and issues related to gender and development.