Gwen Young

Gwen Young serves as a strategic advisor to Coopersmith Law + Strategy on public policy, global development, and gender equity.

Gwen is the former Director of the Wilson Center’s Global Women’s Leadership Initiative and Women in Public Service Project in Washington DC. She created the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index, a project launched by the Wilson Center in partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) that measures and reports on global progress towards achieving equal participation in public leadership.

Before that, Gwen worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontieres, the International Rescue Committee, and the Harvard Institute for International Development. 

Gwen has devoted her career to the advancement of girls and women, as an advocate, author, trainer, and speaker on gender in political, social, and economic development. She helped run public-private sector partnerships dedicated to women’s entrepreneurship, including improving access to finance. Gwen also  provided humanitarian law and advocacy training and has developed guidelines to deal with gender-based violence and exploitation.

Gwen was a panelist for the Concordia Annual Summit during the UN General Assembly, Quorum Initiative, and the Women Political Leaders Global Forum. She is a TED speaker (“Pathways to More Women in Leadership,” TEDxBoise). She also spoke to COVID-19 Africa Watch about COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on women and what governments and others can do to develop response plans that promote women’s economic and social wellbeing.

Gwen previously lived in Senegal, where she was Country Director for the NGO Africare. She ran public health, agriculture and finance programming and worked across West Africa to look at agriculture development programming.

Gwen is an alumna of Smith College, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and the University of California Davis School of Law.

Gwen is based in Washington, DC. She is fluent in French.