Rangita de Silva de Alwis

Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a globally recognized international women’s rights expert. In 2022 fall, she will be teaching Women, Peace and Security at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. At the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she is Associate Dean of International Affairs, she teaches International Women’s Rights; Women, Law, and Leadership; and the Policy Lab, including the Policy Lab on AI and Bias, and directs the Global Institute for Human Rights. She also leads the Advancing Inclusive Leadership (AIL) program.

In recognition of Rangita’s global work in advancing women’s rights, she was named the Hillary Rodham Clinton Distinguished Fellow on Gender Equity, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.     

On behalf of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession, she is leading the Report on Inclusion, Intersectionality and Male Allyship.

She was appointed Leader-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program (2019-2021). Rangita is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession where she is co-authoring a Study with Under Secretary General Mlambo- Ngcuka on the transformative impact of business leadership, innovation and inclusion on accelerating the SDGs. She is a Fellow with the Private Capital Research Institute at Harvard Business School on a study on diversity and inclusion in private equity (2021-2022).

In 2017, she started the Global Women’s Leadership Project and Women, Law & Leadership Lab under the auspices of UN Women’s Executive Director, Under Secretary-General Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to map the laws that regulate the status of women in the family.

Rangita serves as Special Advisor to the President of Wellesley College and was Distinguished Adviser to the Executive Director of UN Women on global women’s rights and women’s leadership (2018-2021). She also serves on the UN Women High Level Working Group on Women’s Access to Justice and as Advisor to Gender Equality at UNESCO.

In 2017, she was appointed a Global Advisor to the UN Sustainable Development Goal Fund. Most recently, Rangita advised the European Union in directing Foreign Policy and development cooperation in the EU Resolution “Toward an EU external strategy against early and forced marriage” introduced before the European Parliament in 2018. By appointment by the Hon. Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister of Australia, she serves on the Steering Group for the Global Gender and Leadership Index at King’s College, London. At the appointment of the World Bank’s Legal Vice Presidency, Rangita serves as an Expert to the Access to Justice and Technology Task Force of the World Bank.

Before coming to Penn Law, she was the inaugural director of the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative and the Women in Public Service Project launched by Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Seven Sisters Colleges at Wellesley College which then moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Rangita is a women’s human rights scholar and practitioner with over 25 years of experience working globally in over 25 countries with a vast network of academic institutions, government, and nongovernment entities on women’s human rights law and policy making and institutional reform. She has convened several transnational networks including the Women’s Leadership Network in Muslim Communities, the Asia Cause Lawyer Network in India, and the Gender and Law Expert Group with women academics in China. She has worked over 15 years with Chinese gender and law academics and has taught for many years at the China women’s College.

She has lectured at Yale Law School and spoken around the world on gender-based law reform. She was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Wellesley College; Madeline Albright Faculty at Wellesley College; and a Senior Scholar at Wellesley Centers for Women. She has served as Visiting Faculty at the Hong Kong University School of Law in 2017 and 2018. She was also a Salzburg Global Fellow, Fulbright Faculty with the Asian University of Women, and an Honorary Professor of China Women’s University. She has advised UNICEF, UN Women, UNFPA, and UNDP on state accountability under the relevant human rights treaties and the intersections of the different treaties and treaty bodies.

She has published widely with the United Nations the World Bank, and in various leading law journals including with the Oxford Handbook on SDGs, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism; NYU Journal of International Law and Politics; Texas Journal of Gender and the Law; University of Pennsylvania East Asia Law Journal; Duke Journal of Gender and the Law; UCLA Pacific Rim Journal; UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Relations, Michigan Journal of International Law, University of Washington International Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania International Law Journal, Berkeley Journal of International Law, Michigan Journal of Technology and Law, Brown Journal of Global Affairs and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law.

She developed a Gender Supplement to the U.N. Secretary General’s Guidelines on Disability, and a report to the World Bank on Women’s Voice and Agency. Her latest work has been on Gender and Disability Lawmaking for UN DESA.

Rangita has a LL.M and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and was a Teaching Fellow with the European Law Research Institute at Harvard Law School, a Research Fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

She has received many recognitions for her work on international women’s human rights. Most recently she was honored by Harvard Law School as a Woman Inspiring Change, 2015. She serves on several Boards including the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard University, the Landesa Board of Directors, and is a trustee of the Harpswell Foundation for Women’s Leadership in Cambodia.

Rangita’s recent work was featured in the Financial Times (FT). She has also appeared on C-span’s Book TV. Rangita also leads the Thomson Reuters Project on Inclusion and Transforming Women’s Leadership. Most recently, The ABA Commission on Women in the Profession has invited her to write a report on “Intersectionality and Male Allyship in the Legal Profession.” Her work is on expanding the Women Peace and Security agenda to include gender- based intellectual violence such as the denial of women’s education as a security threat.