Chai R. Feldblum

Chai partners with employers to conduct workplace culture assessments, using qualitative and quantitative tools, and helps employers devise and implement strategic plans that address leadership, accountability, policies, procedures, and training. She guides companies in understanding the potential costs—including impact on productivity and job turnover—that can be tied to harassment and misconduct, and she helps employers develop proactive and concrete approaches to creating workplace environments where harassment and misconduct do not occur in the first place. She also engages in workplace investigations and counseling on a range of employment issues.

During her service on the EEOC, Chai co-led the Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace and coauthored a groundbreaking report on harassment prevention released in June 2016.  Chai is also an authority on a range of employment civil rights issues, including the employment of people with disabilities, accommodations for pregnant workers, and prohibitions on sexual orientation and transgender discrimination.

Chai was the first openly lesbian commissioner of the EEOC and the fourth person with a disability to serve on the commission. She played a leading role in helping to draft and negotiate the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, as well as bills to prohibit discrimination against LGBT people.

Prior to her appointment to the EEOC, Chai was a professor at Georgetown Law, where she founded the law school’s Federal Legislation Clinic, which represented organizational clients focused on social justice issues. She also founded Workplace Flexibility 2010, a policy enterprise focused on finding common ground between employers and employees on workplace flexibility issues. Chai clerked for Judge Frank M. Coffin of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for US Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun.