Jenny Yang left the Urban Institute in January 2021.

Jenny R. Yang served as a nonresident fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute. She was chair, vice chair, and commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 2013 to 2018. Yang led efforts to tackle systemic barriers to opportunity, including launching a Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, enhancing the EEOC’s annual data collection to include employer reporting of pay data, and studying the EEOC’s systemic work over the past decade, culminating in the public report Advancing Opportunity: A Review of EEOC’s Systemic Program. Yang created new procedures for public input on guidance documents to promote transparency and launched digital systems to facilitate online charge information.

As an Open Society Foundations Leadership in Government Fellow, Yang is exploring policy, organizing, and enforcement responses to the challenges faced by the growing workforce in nonstandard and precarious work arrangements. In addition, she is studying the impact of technological disruptions on working conditions and economic advancement opportunities for low-wage workers. Yang is a strategic partner with Working IDEAL, where she assists employers in comprehensive harassment prevention efforts and in the design and implementation of employment practices to promote inclusion and equality of opportunity.

Before joining the EEOC, Yang was a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. From 1998 to 2003, she was a senior trial attorney with the US Department of Justice, and before that, she was a fellow at the National Employment Law Project.