ABSTRACT
In 1981 the World Bank paper, Design of Organizations for Rural Development (Smith et al. 1980) came to the attention of Turid Sato, as she was taking a sabbatical at Harvard and MIT to study the new area, for the World Bank, of Institutional Development. Turid was one of those unusually colorful, energetic, and effective people that the World Bank produces. Several excellent portraits of such people are provided in Sebastian Mallaby’s Book The World’s Banker (2004). Turid Sato was the first woman to be hired into the World Bank’s prestigious “Young Professional Program” and she delighted in telling the story of how she got there. She was Norwegian and was aware that the Bank had not hired any females into the program when she applied. Her name did not reveal her sex and she took great pains to make sure that nothing else in her application did. However, when she showed up for the interview she was told that the World Bank did not hire women for that program.
