Executive Director

As President Obama signs two new executive orders for Equal Pay Day, Tuesday, April 8, 2014, we FEATURE Equal Rights Advocates Executive Director Noreen Farrell. Equal Pay Day is the date that symbolizes how far into 2014 women must work to earn the same amount of money men earned last year. Noreen has written extensively on women’s economic issues, including discrimination based on pregnancy, pay, and caregiver status. She plays a leadership role in state and national coalitions advocating for the development of policy and legislation to assist working families and expand workplace fairness, including the Equal Pay Today! Campaign. She has appeared on NBC, The New York Times, Times Magazine, ProPublica, and the Huffington Post, among others.

Managing Director

As India begins voting today in the world's biggest election, we FEATURE Shazia Z. Rafi, secretary-general of Parliamentarians for Global Action, an association of more than 1,350 individual legislators from 131 national parliaments. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Fletcher School, Tufts University, Ms. Rafi is an expert in building representative, accountable, international political systems based on the rule of law. PGA programs promote peace, democracy, justice and sustainable development around the world. As a direct implementation of the Beijing Platform of Action, PGA became the first parliamentary organization to appoint a woman as secretary-general and to amend its constitution with a 60:40 gender rule for executive committee elections.

Motivational Speaker & Author

As we remember the Rwandan genocide 20 years later, we SPOTLIGHT Consolee Nishimwe, an author and motivational speaker, and a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. (Find more experts on Rwanda here.) Today, Consolee is a committed speaker about genocide and sexual violence and is an advocate for survivors like herself who suffered physical and emotional torture. She is a staunch defender of women’s rights. In 2012, Consolee released her memoir Tested to the Limit: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Pain, Resilience and Hope. She has been featured in The Atlantic, FOX 5 TV New York, The Huffington Post, POZ Magazine, and numerous radio programmes. She has appeared as a panelist and speaker at the United Nations and at a number of educational institutions of higher learning including Yale, NYU, Columbia, Lehigh, Marquette, Brandeis and Georgetown Universities.

Director of Research Projects in Democratic Practice

In response to the Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, we FEATURE election reform expert Tova Andrea Wang. She is Senior Democracy Fellow at Demos, a Fellow at The Century Foundation, and a consultant to organizations working to improve democracy around the world, such as the National Democratic Institute and The Carter Center. She is the author of numerous election reform reports. Her commentary on this subject has appeared in numerous print media outlets and she has frequently appeared on national radio and television, including NBC’s the Today Show, ABC Nightly News, ABC Good Morning America, CBS Morning News, CNN, C-Span’s Washington Journal, MSNBC, CBS Evening News, and NPR.