Devi Rao, Fellow

Devi Rao is a Skadden Fellow for Educational and Employment Opportunities at the National Women's Law Center, where she focuses on using Title IX to promote safe school environments, including preventing gender-based bullying. Devi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. Prior to joining NWLC, Devi served as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. During law school, Devi was a staff member of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, served on the board of the Columbia Law Women's Society, and interned at Legal Momentum, a women's rights legal organization. In her summers, Devi interned with the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California in the White Collar Section, and worked as a summer associate at Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian, a civil rights law firm in Oakland, California. She is happy to be back in Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after college.

My Take

President Obama Endorses Bills to Protect LGBT Students from Bullying and Harassment

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: April 23, 2012 at 04:15 pm

On Friday, President Obama officially endorsed two crucial pieces of legislation currently pending in Congress — the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA) and the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA). The bills are aimed at improving the climate in our nation's schools, especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students.

SNDA would outlaw discrimination in K-12 public schools on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. And the bipartisan SSIA would require schools to undertake affirmative efforts to prevent bullying and harassment in schools, including conduct based on a victim's sexual orientation and gender identity. These bills are essential — a 2009 study by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) found that nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment in schools.

Here at the National Women's Law Center, we have been working actively with our coalition partners to advance SNDA and SSIA. Just last month, NWLC was among a group of seventy LGBT, civil rights, education, labor, and faith groups that sent a letter to President Obama urging him to publicly support and endorse SNDA. And he did!

The Administration's announcement of its support of SDNA and SSIA was timed to coincide with a screening of the new documentary film "Bully" at the White House. I was lucky enough to attend the screening, where Lee Hirsch, the director, and many of the students and families featured in the film spoke poignantly about bullying and harassment in schools, and urged audience members to work to eradicate it.

Taking Birth Control Does Not Make You A Slut (And Other Observations)

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: April 11, 2012 at 05:18 pm

Yesterday the National Women's Law Center hosted a tweetchat with women's health advocate Sandra Fluke and Law Students for Reproductive Justice. The chat provided a great opportunity for university students and employees to learn more about their contraceptive coverage under the health care law and the Obama Administration's proposed accommodation for religiously-affiliated employers.

And although the actual chat conversation was lively and informative, unfortunately a few vocal "participants" attempted to "hijack" (their word) the chat and launch hostile, offensive, and sexist ad hominem attacks on Sandra Fluke and any person who dares to ask his or her school or employer to provide contraceptive coverage. (The worse examples of the comments can be found here.)

So, apparently a woman who advocates for equality in health care exhibits "whorish behavior and a slutty lack of respect." Charming.

Newsflash: Sex-Based Harassment in Schools Not Okay

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: March 07, 2012 at 06:05 pm

On Monday, the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Justice (DOJ), six student plaintiffs, and the Anoka-Hennepin School District just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, filed a landmark consent decree that resolved the plaintiffs’ claims that middle and high schools in the district failed to address pervasive bullying and harassment of students who failed to conform to gender stereotypes. The students alleged violations of a number of laws, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination — including sex-based harassment — in schools that receive federal funding.

In the Anoka-Hennepin School District, students who were or were perceived to be LGBT endured near-daily sex-based harassment, in some cases for years on end. They were subjected to awful slurs, were told by their peers that they were “sinners,” would go to hell, and should kill themselves. Tragically, some student in the district did take their lives as a result of the bullying and harassment. (For further details of harassment targeted at LGBT teens in the district, see the recent Rolling Stone article.)

The consent decree, if approved by the district court, will put in place many essential protections against sex-based harassment, including requirements that the district hire an expert consultant to review its policies and procedures, develop a comprehensive plan to prevent and addressed student-on-student sex-based harassment, provide improved training for both staff and students, and submit annual compliance reports to the DOJ and ED for five years.

“Similar in Their Ability or Inability to Work” or: How Not to Discriminate Against Pregnant Employees

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: February 17, 2012 at 12:34 pm

This week, the EEOC held a public meeting on unlawful discrimination against pregnant workers and workers with caregiving responsibilities at which experts, including the National Women’s Law Center’s own Vice President and General Counsel Emily Martin, presented compelling testimony setting out the widespread and often blatant ways in which employers continue to unlawfully discriminate in the workplace. Members of the Commission expressed dismay, if not complete surprise, that nearly 35 years after the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was passed in 1978, discrimination on the basis of pregnancy persists, in the words of EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien, “unnecessarily depriving women of the means to support their families.”

The PDA amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to clarify that—duh!—employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is a type of sex discrimination. (Sounds obvious, right? Well, it wasn’t to the Supreme Court.) The PDA requires employers to treat women “affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” the same “as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work.” This phrase is important—the PDA defines the sole relevant point of comparison between pregnant and non-pregnant workers as the person’s ability to do the job. So what does this mean?

First, consider that pregnancy discrimination claims appear to come up—at least based on the caselaw—most frequently in jobs that require a lot of physical activity like running, lifting, moving, standing, or repetitive motion. Many of the pregnancy discrimination cases arise in jobs traditionally held by men, such as law enforcement and trucking (so, ironically, pregnancy discrimination compounds the existing barriers that women face when attempting to break into many high-paying male-dominated positions), while others appear in female-dominated, often low-wage work like nursing assistance, cleaning, and retail.

Yale and the Bigger Picture: How Schools Must Resolve Allegations of Campus Sexual Violence

Posted by Devi Rao, Fellow | Posted on: February 09, 2012 at 10:08 am

The recent revelation that Yale quarterback and would-be Rhodes Scholar Patrick Witt was accused of sexual assault illustrates the importance of transparent and robust grievance procedures for addressing incidents of sexual violence at schools. The victim filed an informal complaint instead of participating in the school’s formal adjudicatory process for sexual harassment and assault allegations. It is perhaps unsurprising that she would choose the more informal route—even though that route, curiously, offers no possibility of disciplinary consequences for the accused—as those who come forward with allegations of sexual assault on their college campuses often find that the experience of dealing with their schools’ formal, cold, bureaucratic, and often unhelpful processes can be traumatizing. These are the types of barriers that those who experience sexual assault all too often face when they attempt to seek justice through their schools’ grievance processes.

But last spring, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued guidance reminding schools that sexual harassment, including violence, is a form of sex discrimination that schools must take seriously and treat as a civil rights issue. The Guidance was needed to help schools, colleges, and universities more effectively prevent and respond to sexual harassment and violence on their campuses, as required by Title IX.

Marcia Greenberger to Receive Award

NWLC Co-President Marcia Greenberger has been chosen to receive the 2012 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award at American Bar Association's annual meeting on Aug. 5 in Chicago. The award honors outstanding women lawyers who have achieved professional excellence and paved the way to success for others, and previous winners include Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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