Yaoqi Zheng

Yaoqi Zheng is a Recognised Student at the Centre for Social-Legal Studies, Faculty of Law. She was a junior academic visitor at the Commercial Law Centre and a Tutor in Law at the University of Oxford.

Her research deploys feminist legal perspectives to examine how UK law can be improved to help women claim equal job opportunities in the financial industry and how the UK law can incentivise institutional investors to promote women’s interests in general. As such, this research expands the repertoire of feminist legal scholarships by extending feminist legal theory to finance and is expected to have broader theoretical implications.

Yaoqi is on the path to impact. She has served as an expert for the World Bank (as the first UK academic representative) since 2022. She has contributed to their two annual reports – Women, Business, and the Law 2023 and 2024 – in a series of annual studies measuring the laws and regulations that affect women’s economic opportunities in 190 economies. They identify barriers to women’s economic participation through the Women, Business, and the Law’s Index, and encourage the repeal of discriminatory laws. Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, references the Women, Business, and the Law’s Index in her new research, viz. in her working paper, ‘Why Women Won’.

Yaoqi is completing her doctoral degree at Durham Law School. She obtained an LL.M. degree from Cornell University.