RELEASE: CAP’s Growing Women’s Initiative Announces New Hires

Washington, D.C. — The Center for American announced the hire of three experts to its Women’s Initiative: Jodi Enda, Jamille Fields Allsbrook, and Sarah Jane Glynn. The Women’s Initiative is a comprehensive effort to marshal CAP’s broad expertise and promote public policies that enable women to participate fully in the U.S. economy and society. Its work, reflected in the expertise of each of the team’s new additions, focuses in three core areas: women’s economic security, women’s health and rights, and women’s leadership.

Jodi Enda joins the Women’s Initiative as a senior fellow. She is a nationally known, award-winning journalist specializing in politics and policy. Previously, she served as editor in chief of ThinkProgress; spearheaded CNN’s 2016 election book, Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything; and covered the White House, Congress, presidential campaigns, and national news for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Knight Ridder newspapers. Enda has won awards for investigative reporting, deadline reporting, White House coverage, and media coverage. She is a former president of the Journalism and Women Symposium and a former member of the White House Correspondents’ Association board of directors.

Jamille Fields Allsbrook joins the Women’s Initiative as the director of women’s health and rights, where she will oversee CAP’s strategy and policy development related to women’s health and rights, including racial disparities in maternal health and access to abortion and contraception. She was previously a senior policy analyst at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where her portfolio focused on advancing and defending access to reproductive health services in health care reform policies. Subsequently, she was instrumental in the organization’s effort to defeat attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and defund Planned Parenthood. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and she previously held a clinical fellowship and the If/When/How Reproductive Justice Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation and the National Health Law Program, respectively.

Sarah Jane Glynn is returning to CAP and joining the Women’s Initiative as a senior fellow. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Vanderbilt University and is a researcher focused on economic policies that affect women and families. She is a nationally recognized expert on paid family and medical leave, gender wage inequality, and family economic security. She has worked with states on implementing their paid family and medical leave programs. She is the former director of women’s economic policy at CAP and a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

“With unprecedented momentum surrounding women’s issues, and more women leading than ever before, we are thrilled to be growing the Women’s Initiative staff so that we can continue to put women’s voices and needs at the center of the most crucial public policy debates,” said Shilpa Phadke, vice president of the Women’s Initiative at CAP.