Sophie Legros is a manager at Shared Planet, where she specialises in the Just Transitions practice area. Sophie is a mixed-methods social scientist with 10 years of experience as a researcher and practitioner in international development. Her professional experience spans 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, partnering with grassroots, government, corporates, and INGOs to deliver transformative social programs.

​

Her expertise lies in social norms, gender equality, urban insecurity and livelihoods, research design (MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences), and mixed-methods.

Prior to joining Shared Planet and pursuing her PhD, Sophie was an independent research consultant. As an independent consultant, she worked for Corpovisionarios, a non-profit think tank focused on promoting citizen participation and co-responsibility as potential vehicles of social, economic and political development, particularly in post-conflict Colombia. Sophie provided literature reviews and background research on social norms. She was also a consultant for Girls not Brides, where her work included research for a guide on the South African Development Community Model Law to prevent child marriage (UNFPA); data analysis on gender-transformative programs related to child marriage and sexuality; and a mapping of community-based organisations working on changing behaviours and attitudes to address child marriage. Sophie also worked for 7 years at Coaches Across Continents (CAC), an international organisation in sport for development and peace, where she co-led the Global Initiative for Gender Equality (2015-2016) and designed the strategy, interventions, and monitoring and evalua9on tools for CAC’s gender-transformative programs. Her work also included design and tion of community-level interventions aimed at sustainable social change in social inclusion, gender equality, human rights, health, and environmental protection (50 developing communities in 20 countries).

​

Sophie has extensive academic experience in development. As a PhD Candidate in International Development, Sophie has focused on gender norms in urban neighbourhoods in post-conflict Colombia. She conducted 16 months of fieldwork in Medellín, where she recruited, trained, and oversaw ten recent graduates on methodologies to conduct household surveys in marginalised neighbourhoods, with many of these graduates being from the neighbourhoods in question. Sophie went on to write articles with these researchers to publish in their university journal and collaborated with one research to start a participatory methodology lab in Medellín.

​

Sophie’s doctoral thesis sits within a range of her work that focuses on gender, social norms, and peace-building, including published journal articles and book chapters. Relevant publications authored by Sophie include Mapping the Social-Norms Literature: An Overview of Reviews published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Power, Policy and PrioriAes: The Experiences of Colombian Women Playing Football, published in Women’s Football in Latin America: Social Challenges and Historical Perspectives. Sophie has also prepared a paper for the ‘Feminist Political Economy and Gendered Peace’ workshop titled Caring for Peace: The intersections between violence, gender inequalities, and the care economy in Medellin’s insecure neighbourhoods. The paper is concerned with the lived realities of people and families in post-conflict but highly insecure communities.

​

Before her PhD, Sophie obtained a MRs in International Development (Distinction) and a MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a BA (Honours) in Philosophy and Mathematics from Harvard University. At Harvard, she worked as a research assistant at the Radcliffe Research Partnership Program, where she worked collaboratively on research projects with fellows from diverse fields in the social sciences; analysed qualitative interviews using NVivo; and conducted background research and data collection to develop policy recommendations and formulate theoretical frameworks.