Maria Beatriz Orlando is Senior Economist and Gender Coordinator for the Latin American and Caribbean Region. She is a Development Economist focusing on gender, labor market, and poverty issues in Latin America. She is currently working on gender mainstreaming in Bank products and projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Before joining the World Bank, she worked as Research Associate at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC with the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality. She was a Professor at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello (Caracas, Venezuela), where she authored several studies about poverty and the informal sector and the gender wage gap in Venezuela. María Beatriz has a Ph.D. in Economics from Tulane University (New Orleans, Louisiana).