Françoise Girard (feminist)
Françoise Girard is a Canadian feminist activist, advocate, writer, and speaker. She is the founder and CEO of Feminism Makes Us Smarter, a feminist communications platform and also served as a President of the International Women's Health Coalition from 2012 to 2020. Career. Girard was called to the Bar of the Province of Québec in 1990, and served as a lawclerk for Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1991-1992 before returning to Montréal to practice law (litigation department) at Ogilvy Renault (now Norton Rose Fulbright). Upon moving to the United States  in 1994, she worked at the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations), acting as liaison between the New York headquarters and several foundations in the Soros network in Central and Eastern Europe and in Haiti. She joined the International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC) in 1999 as a Senior Program Officer for International Policy. In that role, Girard was active in lobbying UN diplomats and UN agencies on women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights. IWHC’s coalition building with feminist groups from around the world was instrumental in ensuring that global policy frameworks consistently advanced  women’s health and rights despite fierce opposition from conservative governments and the Holy See. Girard played a key role in advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights at UN conferences such as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)+5, Beijing+5, General Assembly Special Sessions on HIV/AIDS and on Children, ICPD+10, the 2005 World Summit (Millennium Development Goals), and later on, the process to negotiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Girard returned to the Open Society Foundations in 2006 to lead the Public Health program. She helped sharpen its focus on ensuring  that some of the most marginalized populations (Roma, persons who use drugs, people with disabilities, sex workers, trans persons, people living with HIV) have access to quality, affordable, respectful health care free of coercion, abuse and violence. She became President of IWHC in 2012, and rebuilt it into an integrated feminist advocacy and grantmaking organization, tripling the budget of the organization, greatly increasing its grantmaking to feminist groups in the global South, and ensuring staff including senior staff were 50/50 women of color. In 2021, she launched Feminism Makes Us Smarter (FMUS), a feminist communications platform. Girard has been published  in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Health and Human Rights, Global Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, International Family Planning Perspectives and Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters. Her commentary has appeared in New York Times, Huffington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Ms. Magazine and Project Syndicate.