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. 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 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.
Publications
* F Girard, (2019) [https://ssir.org/articles/entry/philanthropy_for_the_womens_movement_not_just_empowerment#https://ssir.org/articles/entry/philanthropy_for_the_womens_movement_not_just_empowerment# Philanthropy for the Women’s Movement, Not Just ‘Empowerment],’ Stanford Social Innovation Review
* F Girard, (2017) Implications of the Trump Administration for sexual and reproductive rights globally, Reproductive Health Matters,
* Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli, Joar Svanemyr, Avni Amin, Helga Fogstad, Lale Say, Françoise Girard and Marleen Temmerman, “[https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(14)00428-5/pdf Twenty Years After International Conference on Population and Development: Where Are We With Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights?]” Journal of Adolescent Health 56 (2015) S1eS6
* F Girard, (2014) Taking ICPD beyond 2015: Negotiating sexual and reproductive rights in the next development agenda, Global Public Health http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2014.917381
* F Girard, “,” in The Remaking of Social Contracts, Feminists in a Fierce New World, Gita Sen and Marina Durano eds., Zed Books, 2014
* Françoise Girard, Nathan Ford, Julio Montaner, Pedro Cahn, Elly Katabira, "Universal Access in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS", Science vol. 329 (9 July 2010)
* Joseph J. Amon, Françoise Girard and Salmaan Keshavjee, "," Health and Human Rights: An International Journal 11/1 (2009), Perspectives.
* F Girard, “,” in Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, Mindy Jane Roseman and Laura Reichenbach eds, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009
* Astrid Bant and Françoise Girard, “,” Gender & Development, Vol. 16, No. 2, July 2008

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