I didn’t come by women’s rights advocacy by chance. I grew up in a home where the women were the emotional center of everything, intuitive, steady, loving, practical, and yet the world constantly signaled that their needs somehow mattered less, which never computed for me.

One moment from my childhood has never left me. I was around ten when I watched my mother — capable, bright, resourceful — cry because my father wouldn’t “allow” her to have a credit card. That was the late 1960s, before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 finally permitted women to get credit cards in their own name, and even as a kid, I knew something was outrageously wrong with a world where a woman needed permission to control her own financial life (if anyone should’ve needed permission to spend money, it should’ve been my Dad).

My mom had been discouraged from college. She’d been shut out of certain jobs because they “weren’t for girls.” Those early and obvious injustices shaped my sense of what needed fixing.

After law school, I carried that mission straight into the courtroom. I became a public defender in New York, representing justice-involved youth and people who had no one else to fight for them. Those years at Legal Aid — in packed arraignment courts, on overnight lock-up shifts, in hard-won jury trials — taught me how to listen, how to stand up for people pushed to the margins, and how to try cases under real pressure. When I later moved into assigned counsel work while building my own practice, I kept serving indigent clients because that was — and still is — the heart of why I became a lawyer. Those experiences hardened my resolve and sharpened the skills I’d eventually bring to women’s workplace rights.

So when I opened my practice in 1998, I built one of the first law firms in the country devoted solely to women’s workplace rights. Long before “gender equity” was a buzzword, I saw clearly how pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, unequal pay, retaliation, and (now) menopause discrimination weren’t side issues — they were the quiet engine rooms of inequality.

Over the years, I’ve represented women from every part of the workforce — Black women navigating the relentless intersectional double-bind of racism and sexism; Latina and Asian-heritage women confronting cultural and workplace hurdles that those in power rarely acknowledge; LGBTQIA+ employees punished simply for being who they are; pregnant employees pushed out or quietly sidelined; new mothers shoved off the promotion track or hit with the motherhood penalty; menopausal women mocked or written off because their bodies no longer perform on someone else’s schedule. And then there are the countless women — across identities, industries, and income levels — who come to me exhausted from being interrupted, underestimated, dismissed, or told to stay quiet. I know these experiences intimately because I’ve lived them alongside the women who’ve trusted me with their stories.

Pregnancy rights became a major focus early on. I took positions long before the law caught up — insisting that pregnancy discrimination was real discrimination, not an HR issue to be “managed.” I taught continuing legal education programs to help other attorneys prosecute these cases, because someone had to.

My menopause advocacy grew from the same roots. For too long, menopause was treated as a punchline or something to endure silently. But menopause discrimination is a real workplace barrier — one that hits Black and Latina women especially hard. That’s why I’ve been working with members of Congress, New York legislators, and national organizations to secure meaningful legal protections for menopausal employees.

My videos and commentary have reached a wide and growing audience of women seeking clear, compassionate information about their rights. Public education has become a central part of my mission, and I speak on podcasts, webinars, and panels nationwide about pregnancy, postpartum rights, pay equity, retaliation, menopause, and the full spectrum of women’s workplace health.

My approach is feminist, womanist, and unapologetically intersectional. Women’s workplace rights include all women — Black, Latina, Asian, white, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, immigrant — and real equality means protecting the people who face the worst discrimination.

I believe no woman should ever have to sacrifice her dignity, her health, her security, or her voice just to keep a job. And until we reach a world where that belief is simply understood, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done: fighting beside women, amplifying their stories, challenging the systems that fail them, and helping them reclaim power that was always theirs.

Women’s rights are human rights — and one day, if we keep pushing, we won’t have to remind anyone of that.