Our Team
Raafiya Ali Khan (she/her) is the Policy and Research Fellow at the Equality Action Center. Raafiya serves as the project manager for the Center’s ongoing Bias Interrupters research partnerships, assists the Research Director with experimental design, implementation, and analysis, and promotes key findings through social media and articles written for both popular and academic audiences.
During her summer internship at UCSF’s Program Management Office, Raafiya authored a comprehensive research report regarding telework and hybrid work best practices, which sparked her interest in workplace equity. Raafiya also served as Managing Editor of her alma mater’s journalism organization, Prospect Journal of International Affairs, focusing on global issues ignored by mainstream media. These pivotal experiences led her to develop a passion for human rights and employment law. Raafiya graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.A. in Composite Literature.
Francesca Bavaro (she/they) is the Executive Assistant & Office Manager at the Equality Action Center. She helps manage the administrative operations of the organization and provide executive support to the Center’s Founding Director. Prior to joining the Center for WorkLife Law, Francesca had a background in tech startups and city government. Francesca has always been motivated to join services that support and promote the public good. Francesca graduated from Rutgers, The State University of NJ with a B.A. in Political Science. She has also continued her education at CCSF (just for fun!) in Creative Writing and LGBTQ+ studies.
Chelsey Crowley (she/her) is the Equality Action Center’s Development & Communications Specialist, managing our women’s leadership programming including our annual flagship program, the Hastings Leadership Academy for Women. Prior to joining EAC, she worked at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, an internationally recognized center for research on gender, sexuality, and women’s issues, where she worked in areas of both research and publications. She has also interned at Home Street People’s Ministry, a small grassroots organization in Salt River, South Africa, focused on community youth and issues of hunger and poverty. A student of international human rights, Chelsey graduated Phi Theta Kappa from Chaffey College and magna cum laude from UCLA, with high honors and distinction.
Jamie Dolkas (she/her) is the Equality Action Center’s SVP of Strategy and Research and an Adjunct Law Professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Jamie is an attorney specializing in employment and civil rights law, with a focus on sex discrimination in employment and education. She leads EAC’s women’s leadership initiatives, including Hastings Leadership Academy for Women and Women’s Leadership Edge. She also teaches a Leadership for Lawyers course at UC Law SF with Professor Joan Williams, a professional skills course that gives law students tools for career success.
Prior to joining the Equality Action Center, Jamie was a Staff Attorney at Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a national civil rights organization dedicated to advancing gender equity in education and employment, where her practice focused on sex discrimination litigation, best practices training, and legislative advocacy.
Jamie has written several publications, including Expecting A Baby, Not A Lay-Off: Why Federal Law Should Require the Reasonable Accommodation of Pregnant Workers (ERA 2012), and a chapter in the anthology, The Opt Out Revolution Revisited (WorkLife Law 2012), which she co-authored with Professor Joan Williams. Jamie graduated with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, and cum laude from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She also completed the Women’s Policy Institute, a year-long legislative advocacy training program for women leaders.
Henrique Ferreira (he/him) is the Development Associate at the Equality Action Center. Henrique assists in managing outreach and partnerships with external stakeholders, plans special events and oversees long-term projects.
Before joining EAC, Henrique worked as a Research Assistant at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, where he assisted on an international research project documenting the social, professional, and academic experiences of Black educators in Latin America; and at the Black Studies Collaboratory in the Department of African American Studies, where he conducted legal research surrounding Black rebellions as a political tool vis-à-vis American institutions and laws, focused on understanding the epistemological and legal barriers that antagonize Black resistance in American history.
Henrique graduated from UC Berkeley, where he majored in Global Studies with emphasis in Peace and Conflict Studies in the American Continent, and minored in Race & the Law and Public Policy. Henrique is passionate about being an impactful actor of social change by learning and understanding institutions and how they operate, and thinking creatively of how to design critical responses and alternatives to problems of inequality in society — a passion that originates from his personal experience as an Afro-Latino immigrant, as well his academic interests.
Asma Ghani (she/her) is a Research Associate at the Center for WorkLife Law. Asma has a background in Social Psychology with extensive training in experimental and survey research methods. Her research expertise lies in examining how multiple social identities and systems of oppression overlap to create multilayered inequity and how best to mitigate that inequity. She has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
Asma received her B.Sc. in Social Sciences from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. She then got her M.S.Ed. in Counseling Education from Indiana University-Bloomington while on the Fulbright Scholarship. Her counseling experiences with underserved populations sparked her interest in researching prejudice and intersectional identities, leading to the pursuit of a Ph.D. She holds a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University.
Rachel Korn (she/her) is the Director of Research at the Equality Action Center. Rachel is a social psychologist specializing in motivation and group dynamics, with a focus on evidence-based interventions. Rachel’s research under the Bias Interrupters initiative advances gender and racial equity in the workplace.
Rachel partners closely with companies, industry organizations, and academic researchers to investigate how gender and racial bias impact employees in the workplace, and to develop effective solutions to mitigate the effects of bias. With her colleagues, Rachel has guided dozens of organizations through the process of examining their business systems to determine whether bias is playing a role in hiring, performance evaluations, access to opportunities, and informal workplace interactions, and has guided them in making impactful changes to ensure a level playing field for all employees. Rachel has also worked with the Society for Women Engineers, the American Institute of Architects, the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, and other organizations to conduct industry-wide studies highlighting the impacts of gender and racial bias.
Rachel’s writing has appeared in publications ranging from Harvard Business Review and The Atlantic to law reviews, psychology journals, and medical journals.
Prior to joining EAC, Rachel was a Research Consultant at Circadia Labs, where she conducted research on empirical projects examining motivation in dreams using natural language processing. She also worked as Research Director for a city council campaign in Rochester, New York. Rachel holds a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Rochester. She received her Bachelor’s degree at Virginia Tech.
Described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams (she/her) has played a central role in reshaping the conversation about work, gender, and class over the past quarter century. Williams is a Sullivan Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law. Williams’ path-breaking work helped create the field of work-family studies and modern workplace flexibility policies.
Williams’ 2014 book What Works for Women at Work (co-written with daughter Rachel Dempsey) was praised by The New York Times Book Review: “Deftly combining sociological research with a more casual narrative style, What Works for Women at Work offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women.” Following its success, Sheryl Sandberg and LeanIn.org asked Joan to create short videos sharing the strategies discussed in the book. The videos have been downloaded over 975,000 times and are featured by Virgin Airlines as in-flight entertainment, seen literally around the world. Williams co-authored a workbook companion to What Works for Women at Work, available now from NYU Press.
Williams founded Gender Bias Bingo, a web-based project aimed at providing information and tools on gender bias to professors. Williams has explored the parallels and differences between gender and racial bias in two reports. The first, “Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women in Science” has been shared over 40,000 times in the media, and the second, “Climate Control? Gender and Racial Bias in Engineering” was co-authored by the Society for Women Engineers and surveyed over 3,000 engineers.
Williams is one of most influential legal scholars in US (by h-index) and the 11th most cited scholar in both critical theory and employment law. She has authored 11 books, over 100 academic articles, and her work has been covered in publications from Oprah Magazine to The Atlantic and Slate to Fox News. Her awards include the Best Paper Award for “Responsible Research in Operations Management,” Academy of Management Journal (2022), the Families and Work Institute’s Work Life Legacy Award (2014), the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award (2012), the ABA’s Margaret Brent Women Award for Lawyers of Achievement (2006), and the Distinguished Publication Award of the Association for Women in Psychology (2004) (with Monica Biernat and Faye Crosby). In 2008, she gave the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. Her Harvard Business Review article, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class” has been read over 3.7 million times and is now the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history. Her TED talk, “Why Corporate Diversity Programs Fail – and How Small Tweaks Can Have a Big Impact” was viewed over 1.2 million times. Her most recent book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion For Real and For Good (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021), offers a fresh approach to inclusion that is concrete, evidenced-based and actionable. She is the author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.