Our Team

Jill is Equality Now’s Regional Representative in North America and the Global Lead, Adolescent Girls. Her role is to develop and deepen Equality Now’s legal advocacy work in the United States and to be a champion for adolescent girls in the US and around the world. 

She graduated with honours from Harvard Law School, where she was the Executive Editor of the Women’s Law Journal. She has lived and worked internationally for more than fifteen years in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa before returning to the US in 2015.

 She is proud to have played an important role in establishing one-stop sexual violence centres across Southern Africa and creating a replicable model for integrated SV care in low-resource countries. She is also proud of her work to develop a system-wide response to human trafficking in the OSCE region and to pass legislation in her home state of California expanding access to paid family leave for millions of low-wage workers. On a smaller scale, she is proud that as a lawyer, she was able to help dozens of survivors in the US access justice and rebuild their lives following trafficking and/or sexual assault. It is an amazing experience to help another person stand up for their rights. Whether you win or lose the legal case, you know you made a difference in that person’s life. 

Jill feels like she became a feminist when she was 13 years old and moved with her family to Saudi Arabia. That experience opened her eyes to systemic discrimination and later inspired her to become a women’s rights lawyer. It wasn’t until university that she learned the theoretical framework to describe her experience, but the feeling of being a second-class citizen- the vulnerability, disrespect, injustice and outrage- were very real and impacted her deeply. 

She loves dancing, going on safari, and exploring nature outdoors in her free time. She is currently based in Pasadena, CA, not far from her hometown of Los Angeles