APAICS in Conversation: The Honorable Jenny R. Yang

Jenny R. Yang is a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, where she is developing the new Workplace Equity Initiative. As structural and technological changes transform work, she is working to revitalize our country’s workplace laws and employment practices to build a future that advances opportunity for all to work with dignity. She served as chair, vice chair, and commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 2013 to 2018. Under her leadership, the commission launched the Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace to identify innovative solutions to prevent harassment at work. Yang led efforts to tackle systemic barriers to opportunity, including enhancing the EEOC’s annual data collection to include employer reporting of pay data and studying the EEOC’s systemic work over the past decade, culminating in the public report, Advancing Opportunity: A Review of EEOC’s Systemic Program. Yang created new procedures for public input on guidance documents to promote transparency and launched digital systems to facilitate online charge information.

Yang is also a strategic partner with Working IDEAL, where she assists employers in comprehensive harassment prevention efforts, independent investigations, and in the design and implementation of employment practices to promote diversity, inclusion and equality of opportunity.

Moderated by: The Honorable Stuart Ishimaru