The #MeToo Movement: Why Now Again? What Next?

Thursday, April 19, 3-4:15 PM (reception to follow)
Herman Meeting Room, Healy Family Student Center

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How do we grapple with the issues and implications of the #MeToo movement? How much has it really changed the culture surrounding sexual assault, and for whom has it changed? Professor Tannen will speak with panelists from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Women’s Law Center, and Georgetown University to examine the nuances behind #MeToo: its political and cultural predecessors, its effect on low-income workers and women of color, and its relationship to systemic inequality. 

Event Co-Sponsored by WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor Leadership), a project of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor 

Panelists:

Chai Feldblum has served as a Commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since April 2010.  She was recently nominated to serve a third term on the EEOC, with a term ending in July 1, 2023.  Prior to her appointment on the Commission, Feldblum was a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center where she founded the law school’s Federal Legislation Clinic and worked on behalf of social welfare and civil rights organizations. 

Throughout her career, Feldblum has focused on social justice issues at the federal level.  She played a leading role in drafting and negotiating the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008.  She helped draft the federal bill to protect LGBT people from discrimination and has led the EEOC in protecting LGBT people under existing sex discrimination law.  Together with her colleague Commissioner Victoria Lipnic, Feldblum co-chaired a Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, which resulted in a comprehensive report issued in 2016 on harassment prevention.  

Feldblum is the first openly lesbian Commissioner of the EEOC and is the fourth person with a disability to serve on the Commission.  She clerked for Judge Frank Coffin of the First Circuit Court of Appeals and for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun after receiving her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. degree from Barnard College.

Professor Deborah Epstein has been the Director of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic for over 20 years. She has spent more than 30 years advocating for the rights of survivors of domestic violence and has represented hundreds of women in civil protection order cases. She co-chaired the DC Superior Court’s effort to design and implement its Domestic Violence Unit, an early, model effort to integrate civil and criminal cases involving intimate abuse. She was a founding Co-Director of the court’s Domestic Violence Intake Center. She serves on the NFL Players’ Association Commission on Violence, and has served as Chair of the DC Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board, Director of the Emergency Domestic Relations Project, and as a member of the DC Mayor’s Commission on Violence Against Women, the DC Superior Court Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, and the D.C. Superior Court Domestic Violence Unit Rules Committee, as well as the Board of Directors of the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence and House of Ruth. She has published numerous articles on domestic violence law and policy, and consulted nationally and internationally on issues of legal and policy reform. Her most recent article is Discounting Credibility: Doubting the Testimony and Dismissing the Experiences of Domestic Violence Survivors and Other Women, 167 Univ. Penn. L.Rev (forthcoming 2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3133066.

Maya Raghu is Director of Workplace Equality and Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. She leads federal and state policy development and advocacy, litigation, education, and stakeholder engagement focused on women’s economic security and employment opportunity, including equal pay, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment. Prior to joining NWLC, she was a senior attorney at Futures Without Violence and a senior staff attorney at Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), focusing on economic security, gender discrimination, and gender-based violence, with an emphasis on immigrant and low-income women. Maya was also previously an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and a law clerk to the Hon. Vanessa D. Gilmore of the Southern District of Texas. She is a graduate of Trinity University and Georgetown University Law Center. Maya has appeared in a number of media outlets, including PBS Newshour, NPR, and The New York Times.

Lisa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University and is affiliated with the Massive Data Institute (MDI) and the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM).  Broadly, her research interests are in data-centric computing – data mining, data privacy, data science, data visualization, and databases. She is particularly interested in understand ways to blend organic and traditional data sets to begin tackling societal scale problems. She has authored/co-authored over 60 peer reviewed publications and book chapters. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the Department of Defense.  Current projects include studying privacy on the web (adversarial inference), developing tools to better understand forced movement due to conflict (event detection, perception detection, movement dynamics), and learning from open source big data for social science research (network analysis, dynamic topic modeling, demographic inference). Dr. Singh has also helped organize three workshops involving future directions of big data research and is currently involved in different organizations working on increasing participation of women in computing, including co-founding GU Women Coders – Georgetown’s female coding group with over 600 members.

Moderator:

Deborah Tannen, a member of the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown University, is one of only six in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University; spent a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and has twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Outside academia, she is best known as the author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into 31 languages. Her books You Were Always Mom’s Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives and You’re Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation were also New York Times best sellers, while Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work was a New York Times Business best seller. Her twelfth book, You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, was published last summer. She has been a guest on such television and radio news and information shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Oprah, the PBS NewsHour, Nightline, Charlie Rose, and NPR’sMorning Edition, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air.  She has been featured in and written for most major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, USA Today, People, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.