To mark the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Hon. Naheed Farid, former Member of Parliament and Rangita de Silva de Alwi developed this Policy Brief for the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton University. This is part of a first phase of a study they are conducting on the impact of girls’ secondary school closures on women teachers in Afghanistan. The Policy Brief will be circulated to Security Council members.
This Report is submitted to the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession by the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Fall 2021 Women, Law, and Leadership Class
Working together with the World Bank, Pen America and the World Wide Web Foundation, Penn Law students in the policy lab on online gender-based harassment produce report on “Defying Digital Demons” showcasing the harassment against women in politics and media.
Written by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Professor Rangita de Silva’s class on International Women’s Human Rights celebrated International Women’s Day on March 9, 2021 with Justice Rosalie Abella of the Canadian Supreme Court, introduced by Martha Minow, the former Dean and 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University.
These draft policies were developed as part of a policy lab on sexual harassment taught at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School by Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis.
The following report discusses themes that have emerged from working groups in Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis’s course on “Women, Law, and Leadership” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School as part of an effort to increase female representation in positions of leadership. The report explores the ways in which themes including bias, representation, and allyship affect Black women in the legal field through the data collected from a survey of 30 Black Penn Law students, of which 24 identify as women and 6 identify as men.
In this chapter of the report, the students in the Seminar on Women, Law, and Leadership adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative approach to analyze whether female lawyers in China are satisfied with their jobs, what obstacles they are facing, and whether they perceive their male colleagues as their allies. The data was collected through online questionnaire and covered more than 440 female lawyers in China.
In the Fall of 2020, students in the Seminar on Women, Law, and Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School interviewed nearly 70 male ally peers at the law school. The Students were given a survey instrument but asked to contextualize and modify the questions as necessary. The seminar was taught by Dr. Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Senior Adjunct Professor of Law and Global Leadership. In partnership with Thomson Reuters Transforming Women’s Leadership Initiative, this project was the first of its kind to be conducted in a law school classroom.
Some Perspectives on Inclusion and Allyship from Penn Law School
The Penn Law Women, Law and leadership Class brought over 30 leaders in law and business for in-class interviews. At a time of the twin forces of COVID-19 and a public reckoning on equality, these reflections on leadership provide important roadmap to understanding transformative leadership
Contributing to the research update article: Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Written by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Associate Dean Rangita de Silva de Alwis leads the research on transformative leadership and allyship in collaboration with Penn Law students and Thomson Reuters. The student-led research team: Zahra Keshwani (L21), Research Team Leader; Michael Machado (L20), Chukwufumnanya Ekhator (L20), May Alajlan (LLM 20), Margaret Gallagher (LLM 20), and Lindsay Holcomb (L21)
This research project is developed and supervised by Associate Dean Rangita de Silva de Alwis and led by Penn Law students: Zahra Keshwani, Fumnanya Ekhator, May Alajlan, Michael Machado, Lindsay Holcomb, and Sarah Heberlig
Written by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
A co-authored study from Thomson Reuters and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Principal Author: Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School & Co-author: Natalie Runyon, Director, Talent, Inclusion & Culture, Thomson Reuters
Written by Associate Dean Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Christian Zabilowicz, and Gitanjali Swamy
Written by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Allyship as the New Theory and Practice of Diversity and Inclusion
Written by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women and Rangita de Silva de Alwis Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
A digital space for attorneys of color as the next generation of legal industry leaders to create, author and share career wisdom.
This research update was written by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, the Associate Dean of International Affairs at Penn Law, who leads the research on transformative leadership and allyship in collaboration with Penn Law students and Thomson Reuters.
The OECD Development Centre’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) measures discrimination against women in social institutions across 180 countries.
The Reykjavik Index for Leadership measures how people feel about women in power. It measures the perceived legitimacy of male and female leadership in politics and across twenty professions, as well as how men and women differ in their views, and the extent to which men and women are viewed equally in terms of suitability of individuals for positions of power.
The new 2019 Women, Peace, and Security Index ranks 167 countries on women’s equality, reveals trends in women’s wellbeing across 11 indicators, and offers subnational data for China, India and Nigeria.
The Diversity and Inclusion Index ranks the top 100 publicly traded companies globally with the most diverse and inclusive workplaces, as measured by 24 metrics across four key categories: Diversity, Inclusion, People Development and News Controversies.
The Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work, and education, and contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population.
The GII is an inequality index. It measures gender inequalities in three important aspects of human development—reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status.
Working Report October 2019: Measuring Progress on Diversity and Inclusion Under the Saudi 2030 Plan
Listen to the inaugural episode of “The Make Allies Podcast” with Fumnanya I. Ekhator.
Women’s Leadership, created by Thomson Reuters Legal and the Legal Executive Institute to address structural barriers and creating cultural change needed at the organizational level for women to succeed and advance in the legal industry.
Penn Law student Lindsay Holcomb interviews Anne Weisberg, Director of the Women’s Initiative at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP.
On November 13, 2019, the distinguished Holt speaker Sandie Okoro,Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the World Bank, engaged in a critical global conversation with Penn Law students moderated by Penn Law Associate Dean Rangita de Silva de Alwis. Ms. Okoro spoke on Women’s Leadership and the Global Economy and her own personal journey to leadership.
The Women, Law and Leadership Ideas Lab was an incubator for innovative ideas. It was a platform for students to test ideas, to create, and to experiment. Most of all, it was a space for students to ask questions on the under representation of women in leadership and how that hurts the global economy, hampers the diversity of thought, and undermines the public good.
None of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes, and nor likely will many of our children. That’s the sobering finding of the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, which reveals that gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years.
The compendia of international and national legal frameworks are a set of practical tools that not only inform about existing laws, but also provide a baseline to help countries identify opportunities to intensify their fight across these areas of focus.
Women, Business and the Law (WBL) is a World Bank Group project collecting unique data on the laws and regulations that restrict women’s economic opportunities.
The content on Thomson Reuters’ Transforming Women’s Leadership in the Law page will highlight organizations’ successes in removing barriers to the advancement women and spotlight some of the most powerful women in law, business, government and academia, who will share their experience of their rise to the top.
The Gender Action Portal (GAP) by the Women and Public Policy Program of Harvard Kennedy School is a collection of summarized research evaluating the impact of specific policies, strategies, and organizational practices to close gender gaps in the areas of economic opportunity, politics, health, and education.
The Global Women’s Leadership Project (GWLP), developed under the auspices of Under Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has created a clearing house of information on laws that govern women’s status in the family, as the first phase of the UN Women’s Family Law database.
Working with Associate Dean Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Penn Law students collected and curated relevant protections across the United States. This study was last updated in June 2020. A link to the database can be found here. The full report can be found here.
In the fall of 2019, the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School was fortunate to welcome the UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, to teach a course on the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda.
These profoundly moving meditations by three recent speakers at the law school are reminders to a diverse community of our connective tissues - grounded in the rule of law — and ways to move forward, even when the past wrongs are unalterable.
The research on the barriers to leadership were conducted through interviews with women leaders who have helped to dismantle structural barriers and blazed a trail for other women in law, business and public life.
In the fall of 2019, students in the Women, Law, and Leadership Course at Penn Law interviewed over fifty women leaders in law and business, exploring the concept of gender in leadership and ways in which traditional notions of leadership are undergoing radical change.
Male allyship is critical in the evolution of gender equality programs in the workplace. Indeed, when men are included in gender equality programs, 96% of organizations see progress — compared to only 30% of organizations when men are not engaged, according to the Harvard Business Review.
On Tuesday, September 15, 2020 at 12:00 pm, Thomson Reuters will hold a program featuring a discussion on the ‘first of its kind’, ground-breaking research collaboration between Thomson Reuters and University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.