Dr Pragya Agarwal

Pragya Agarwal is a behaviour and data scientist and Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice at Loughborough University in the UK.  She is the founder of  a research think-tank The 50 Percent Project investigating women’s status and rights around the world. 

Pragya is the award-winning author of (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman, SWAY: Unravelling Unconscious Bias and Wish we knew what to say: Talking with children about race, and a book for children Standing up to Racism. Her most recent book HYSTERICAL: Exploding the myth of gendered emotions is published on 1st  September. 

Following a PhD from the University of Nottingham, Pragya held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship and has held senior academic positions and visiting fellowships at University College London (UK), University of Melbourne (Australia), University of Temuco (Chile), University of California Santa Barbra (USA) and Johns Hopkins University (USA).  Her publications are on reading lists of leading academic courses across the world. Pragya was selected as a 'creative thinker' for innovative and interdisciplinary research by NESTA and the TRANSMISSION PRIZE for ‘making complex scientific ideas accessible.’

Pragya works as a consultant and speaker with organisations around the world, including universities, corporate and non-profits, and schools, delivering talks and workshops on bias, anti-racism, social inclusion, power and privilege. She regularly appears on panels and has given keynotes around the world. Pragya has appeared on NPR, BBC Woman’s Hour, BBC Breakfast, Sky News, Australian Broadcasting Service, and Canadian Radio. A passionate campaigner for women’s rights, and two-time TEDx speaker herself, Pragya organised the  first ever TEDxWoman event in the north of the UK . Pragya is the winner of the Diverse Wisdom Writing award from Hay House Publishing in 2018, and was named as one of the 100 influential women in social enterprise in the UK, and one of 50 people creating change in the UK-India corridor. 

As a freelance journalist, Pragya writes - ethical, literary, scientific- articles widely. Her writing on bias and prejudice, motherhood, gender and racial inequality and mental health has appeared in The Guardian, New Scientist, Scientific American, Independent, BMJ, Times Higher Education, Huffington Post, Prospect, Forbes, and many more. 

Pragya has a mini podcast series ‘Outside the boxes’ examining how the labels and stereotypes affect us as a society, the science behind it, and what we can do about it. And, in 2020, she launched another mini-series ‘Wish We Knew What To Say’ to accompany her book of the same name. In six episodes, she speaks with parents of different ethnic backgrounds about their experiences and raising children with secure identities.