Saadia Zahidi is senior director and head of constituents of the World Economic Forum. She is responsible for the engagement of religious leaders, NGOs, labor leaders, women leaders and gender parity groups and also for leading research on gender issues. Before that, she served as an economist in the World Economic Forum in the Global Competitiveness Program, which was responsible for the Global Competitiveness reports, the Arab World reports and other topical regional studies. Saadia is also the founder and co-author of the global gender gap report series, benchmarking countries according to the size of their gender gaps on health, education, economic participation, and political empowerment. She has a Bachelor’s in Economics from Smith College and a Master’s in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.