From the beginning, Dr. Pareena G. Lawrence set out to empower women and defy limitations set for them, especially in the gendered society of her home country, India.
Her experience at an all-girls high school was life-changing, and it was here, Lawrence recalls, that she found her voice and the confidence “that one needs to do the work that we’re called to do.”
For Lawrence, that calling came through economic policy.
“Economics is a way in which you understand systems,” she says. “It helped me understand oppression; it helped me understand poverty; it helped me understand why society works the way it does, and who benefits from it and who loses. And once I understood it, you could actually figure out how economic policy can help change that, and you can use it to change the systems that exist.”
“Medicine didn’t speak to me,” Lawrence adds. “Economics did.”
After completing degrees in economics at the University of Delhi and Purdue University, Lawrence entered the higher education realm, serving as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and then as provost and chief academic officer at Augustana College.
Now, Lawrence has brought her combined economic training and understanding of the power of sisterhood, allies and friends to Hollins University in Roanoke, Va., where she is the first minority woman to serve as president of the all-women’s institution in its 175-year history.
