Tracy Nowski

Tracy Nowski

A.B. '07 Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
J.D. Student, Yale Law School
Tracy Nowski

My experience as a WGS concentrator was defined by active faculty mentorship and the strong community that formed among my fellow concentrators, a group of people intellectually and personally engaged in the pursuit of gender equality from a diverse range of perspectives. I was interested in women's civic engagement, and wrote my senior thesis on gender performance among female political candidates. Professor Robin Bernstein was my thesis advisor, and she challenged me to become a more trenchant thinker and writer as I refined my argument. Because of her efforts, that project was the most intellectually transformative part of my time at Harvard.

After graduating, I worked for several years as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. I started in the firm's Atlanta office, serving private sector clients, then moved to Washington, DC to join their Social Sector Office, serving non-profits, NGOs, and multilateral organizations. My focus was on questions of gender equality: I investigated the impact of climate change on women and girls in environmentally vulnerable countries; developed approaches for the private sector to spur women's economic empowerment in emerging markets; and explored opportunities to scale up vocational healthcare workers in rural areas to better reach underserved women. All the while, I continued to serve on the Board of Directors of Strong Women, Strong Girls, a national non-profit mentoring program for at-risk girls, for which I had volunteered throughout my time at Harvard.

In fall of 2010, I began a J.D. at Yale Law School in the hope of increasing my effectiveness as an advocate for women and girls. I spent my first summer working on litigation with the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, where I focused on cases pertaining to military sexual violence and employment discrimination. I currently serve as the Chair of Yale Law Women, an organization dedicated to advancing the status of women at YLS. Wherever I land after law school, I am certain that my work will continue to be informed by intellectual tools and frameworks drawn from my time as a WGS concentrator.

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