Galen Sherwin is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU, which was founded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1972. She focuses on gender equality in education, and has litigated and conducted advocacy around issues related to sex stereotypes, single-sex education, the rights of pregnant and parenting students, and athletics. She also focuses on pregnancy discrimination and the rights of breastfeeding women in employment.
Sherwin began her career as a legislative aide to a New York State Senator, and then served as President of the New York City Chapter of the National Organization for Women and served on the NOW national board of directors. During law school, she worked at Sanctuary for Families/Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services and at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Upon law school graduation, Sherwin clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch, who was then in the Southern District of New York, and then joined the Center for Reproductive Rights as a Blackmun Fellow, where she focused on protecting minors’ rights to reproductive health care and abortion. She went on to join the New York Civil Liberties Union as a Staff Attorney in the Reproductive Rights Project, where she later became the project Director. She joined the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in 2009.
Sherwin is a 2003 graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Stone Scholar and recipient of the Rosenman Prize for academic excellence in public law, and a 1994 graduate of Yale University, where she was awarded the Steere Prize in Women’s Studies.