My research interests are focused substantively in the areas of gender, women's empowerment, marriage and family, feminism, international development, domestic violence, postcolonial sociology, and postcolonial feminism; and geographically in South Asia and the US. My doctoral dissertation, titled "Platonic Co-Parenting in the Global North: A New Lens into the Unfinished Gender Revolution" is a feminist study of the new and rapidly growing practice of platonic co-parenting in the Global North. The dissertation investigates the extent to which platonic co-parenting (PCP), an alternative family form in which parenting is separated from romantic relationships and often also from coresidence, is creating and sustaining gender egalitarian parenting relationships. Using 32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with men, women, non-binary and trans people, who were at different stages of the PCP journey, I investigated the practice of PCP by focusing on the motivations for people to choose the PCP path to parenting; and how they navigated gendered patriarchal norms in the process of becoming platonic coparents including division of household labor.

Prior to entering academia, I was a journalist in India for 5 years. During this time I covered health, education, poverty and development-related issues for leading newspapers in India. I also reported extensively on son preference and female foeticide, and caste-based discrimination. I later taught journalism at the School of Communication, Manipal University (India), and Gender Studies at the Asian University for Women (Bangladesh). I also worked as a Communications Consultant for Bangalore-based NGOs, Vimochana and FEDINA. Both organizations work on providing protection, counseling and legal help for victims of domestic violence and dowry harassment. 

I hold a master’s degree in Gender, Development and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a master’s and PhD in Sociology from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Academic publications:

• 2022  Desai, Sonalde, Feinian Chen, Shilpa Reddy and Amy McLaughlin. “Measurement of Women's Empowerment in Developing Countries” Annual Review of Sociology Volume 48
• 2025 (Forthcoming) Reddy, Shilpa. “Who gets to have a child in grad school? Financial precarity of the migrant single mother” Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari (eds) Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in North America. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers
• Under Review Reddy, Shilpa and Reeve Vanneman. “Does employment­­­­ protect women from violence? Individual & community level effects of women’s employment on marital abuse in India.”