Linda Scott

Senior Fellow

Center for Inclusive Growth

DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

University of Oxford

Linda Scott is DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.  Scott was an early pioneer in the movement to empower women by increasing their engagement with the market economy. She is probably best known for her concept of The Double X Economy, in which the world economy is reimagined as a complex, interconnected, and potentially powerful community of women, engaged not only as consumers and workers, but as investors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists—the full range of economic activity. She develops this concept in her popular blog, “DoubleXEconomy,” but also through specialised projects and partnerships that test new interventions for helping women overcome traditional obstacles to economic empowerment, such as lack of access to capital or markets.

Scott and her team work with a wide range of major institutional partners, from multinational corporations such as ExxonMobil, Walmart, Nike, and Vodafone, to world NGOs such as CARE and Plan, to governmental agencies such as England’s Department for International Development and USAID.  She is invited to speak in many venues, from the International Finance Corporation to the Women of the Future Summit. In addition to her own blog, she also writes frequently for major media vehicles such as Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes.  Her work has been covered by The Economist, the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and many other world press outlets.  Scott is founder of Power Shift, The Oxford Forum for Women in the World Economy, an annual high-level symposium dedicated to understanding and supporting women in all aspects of economic life. She is a senior advisor to Walmart’s global women’s empowerment initiative and is a member of the International Council for Women’s Business Leadership, convened by Hillary Clinton and Melanne Verveer, at Georgetown University.