Economic Equality Panel

Eileen Boris, the Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and Professor of History, Black Studies, and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes on the home as a workplace—on domestic, industrial, care, and mother workers—and on racialized gender and the state. She is the President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University in the History of American Civilization. Her books include the prize­winning monographs Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States [Cambridge University Press, 1994] and, with Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, co­edited with Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford University Press, 2010). Caring for America became the basis for an amicus brief to the Supreme Court filed in support of the state of Illinois and SEIU in Harris v. Quinn. She now is writing a book tentatively called, Protection and Precarity: Global Standards, Gender Difference, and the ILO, which considers how the characteristics associated with women’s work have moved from the periphery to the center with transformations of the global economy and intensified regimes of precarity. Rosanna Hertz is the Classes of 1919 – 1950 Reunion Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and the current Chair of the WGST department. In broad terms Hertz researches families in a changing economy and how social inequality at home and in the workplace shape the experiences of women and men. Presently she is interested in the pivotal moments that influence certain kinds of women leaders. Her research, “Productive Rule Breakers and Innovators” is based upon interviews with women leaders in China and India. Professor Hertz also researches the complexity of “modern families” created through the use of donor gametes in the U.S. and the E.U. and how the Internet is both revolutionizing the choices for people seeking to enter into third­party reproduction arrangements and creating new possibilities for connection. Her most recent book is Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice. Recent article have appeared in Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Social Science and Medicine and Journal of Family Issues. She is quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. She appears in the broadcast media commenting on social problems for local news specials. Professor Darren Rosenblum serves as the Executive Director of Commercial and Private International Law Programs and the Faculty Director of the Institute for International and Commercial Law at Pace Law School. His scholarship focuses on comparative and international private law and sex equality. His recent scholarship examines the burgeoning movement for corporate board quotas for women. In 2011, he was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship for France, where he performed an empirical study on the French quota involving board members of leading French companies. In June 2015, the French National Assembly hosted a conference on the corporate board quota at which he presented his research in French as the guest of honor. He has also presented his quota research at the Federal Election Commission (U.S.) and the European Commission Justice Department. He has presented his work in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) in fifteen countries. Deborah J. Vagins is the Chief of Staff and Principal Attorney Advisor at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for Commissioner Charlotte A. Burrows. In this capacity, Deborah serves as the principal legal and policy advisor to the Commissioner rendering legal interpretations regarding federal civil rights laws governing equal employment opportunity and providing policy advice on agency actions. In addition to other duties, she also serves as a liaison for the Commissioner with high-level officials of the Commission, the White House, other government agencies, and congressional staff regarding complex legal and policy matters. Prior to joining the EEOC in 2015, Deborah was the Senior Legislative Counsel on civil rights issues for the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office. In this position, Deborah was instrumental in advocating for major civil rights laws, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, and served as co-chair of the national Paycheck Fairness Act coalition. She helped design and successfully advocated for recent executive action on employment discrimination issues, including the recent executive order banning punitive pay secrecy policies in federal contracting. Before working at the ACLU, Deborah was the Acting Deputy General Counsel and Senior Attorney-Advisor to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and prior to that, an associate in the Employment Discrimination and Civil Rights Practice Group at Cohen Milstein, where she litigated high-profile nationwide civil rights class actions. She represented more than 1.5 million women from Wal-Mart in the largest Title VII employment discrimination class action in history