Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel

Emily Martin

Emily Martin is Vice President and General Counsel at the National Women's Law Center, where she undertakes cross-cutting projects addressing women's health, economic security, and education and employment opportunities. She also provides in-house legal advice and representation to the Center. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Martin served as Deputy Director of the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she spearheaded litigation, policy, and public education initiatives to advance the rights of women and girls, with a particular emphasis on the needs of low-income women and women of color. She also served as a law clerk for Senior Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge T.S. Ellis, III, of the Eastern District of Virginia and previously worked for the Center as a recipient of the Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship. She has served as Vice President and President of the Fair Housing Justice Center, a non-profit organization in New York City. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School.

Expert in: Issues Before the Courts, Platform for Progress, Treaty on the Rights of Women, Supreme Court, Voter Education, Women & the Constitution, Unemployment, Employment
  • Printer-friendly version
  • Send by email

My Take

Yesterday, Women Showed Up

Posted by Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel | Posted on: November 07, 2012 at 04:54 pm

While we only know of one woman who made sure to cast her vote even though her water had broken and her contractions were five minutes apart, she was far from alone in her determination to make her voice heard at the polls yesterday in an election season where women’s health, reproductive rights, and fair pay were frequent flashpoints. Women made up the majority of the electorate on Tuesday—53 percent. Unmarried women were 23 percent of voters, up from 20 percent in 2008. And women’s votes were key to yesterday’s results.

Five new female Senators were elected, resulting in a record 20 women in the Senate. In New Hampshire as of January, for the first time ever in a state the governor, both senators, and all House members will be women.

Women made the difference in rejecting a proposed Minnesota constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Read more...
Tags: 112 Congress, Congress, House of Representatives, LGBT, Senate, Voter Education | 1 comment

Answers the Public Needs to Hear at Tonight's Debate

Posted by Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel | Posted on: October 16, 2012 at 03:26 pm

Thank goodness: we FINALLY heard a question specific to women's health during the candidate debates. The vice presidential candidates laid out stark differences on their tickets' viewpoints on abortion, which is a good start -- voters need much more info on the issues like this that directly affect women. But what's next?

We have no guarantee that the remaining debates (and the national conversation that follows them) will address how the crucial issues at stake affect women.

We're doing all we can to change that, including sharing this list of questions and data with Candy Crowley, moderator of tonight's town hall-style debate. Can you help us spread the word and change the discussion? If you'd like to see questions about women's employment, education opportunities and health addressed, will you share this post with your friends, family and followers?

Read more...
Tags: Voter Education | Add new comment

Debate Wrap-up: The Unanswered Questions That Matter to Women Voters

Posted by
Amy Tannenbaum, Program Assistant
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
| Posted on: October 05, 2012 at 12:50 pm

A few themes have dominated the media after Wednesday’s first presidential debate: was the moderator any good, who “won,” and Big Bird’s future employment prospects. But here’s the question that we have been asking: where was the talk of women? In a piece for The Nation that also asks this question, Bryce Covert points out that the economic issues at hand have critical implications for women, but women are still seen as a special interest group. She writes, “’Women’s issues’ often get lumped into ‘social issues’ and then sidelined as not being ‘core issues’ like the deficit or jobs.”

Covert is absolutely right to point out that the impact of these core issues on women deserved specific attention during the debate. As over 50 percent of the U.S. population, women are NOT a special interest group. In fact, according to the Center for American Women in Politics, women actually vote MORE than men: women have turned out to vote in greater numbers — and proportions — than men in every presidential election since 1980 (PDF). The topics of Wednesday’s debate — the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, education, jobs and the economy — all offered the candidates a chance to articulate what their plans would mean for women. Neither took advantage of that chance. Nor was there any discussion whatsoever of a host of other domestic issues critical to women, from the wage gap, to women’s reproductive health, to child care, to protection against discrimination.

Read more...
Tags: Child Care & Early Learning, Health Insurance, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Family Planning, Employment, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | 1 comment

Back to the Future for Pregnant Workers

Posted by
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: October 04, 2012 at 03:20 pm

As the Huffington Post highlighted last week, the EEOC has filed a recent spate of pregnancy discrimination lawsuits. One case is against an employer that had a written policy requiring termination of pregnant employees in their third month of pregnancy. In another, an employer required pregnant workers to submit a note from their doctors in order to continue working during pregnancy. These rules seem like a throwback to when pregnant women were expected to quit work as soon as they began to “show.” But this kind of discrimination is still happening today, almost 35 years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Too many employers still seem to be relying on an outdated personnel manual. In fact, the past 10 years have seen a significant uptick in claims of pregnancy discrimination. Some employers continue to blatantly discriminate by firing pregnant workers, especially those in physically demanding jobs. Others are a bit more subtle in forcing pregnant women out of the workplace: they refuse to make minor adjustments to job duties for those workers who need such accommodations to continue safely working.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, recently introduced in Congress, would make a big difference. The bill would strengthen the protections in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act by requiring employers to make the same sort of reasonable accommodations for pregnancy that they are already required to make for disabilities.

Read more...
Tags: EEOC, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | 3 comments

Supreme Court Term Begins Today: Why Women Are Watching

Posted by
Amy K. Matsui, Senior Counsel and Director of Women and the Courts
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
| Posted on: October 01, 2012 at 02:43 pm

Today, the Supreme Court heard the first arguments of the 2012-13 Term. A number of cases that the Court will review this Term could have a significant impact on women’s legal rights.

This Term, the Court’s review of affirmative action policies in state university admissions presents a troubling opportunity to turn back the clock, particularly given that Justice O’Connor, a key vote in the Court’s 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in admissions (and its author), has since left the Court. In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the University of Texas’s undergraduate admissions policy, which uses race as one of multiple factors in making admissions decisions, was constitutional under the Supreme Court’s aforementioned 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger.  Affirmative action policies intended to promote not only racial but also gender diversity are particularly necessary in vocational and higher education—for example, by eliminating barriers to women’s entrance into historically male-dominated fields, such as engineering and computer science. The Center submitted an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas, explaining that an educational experience in a diverse community of learners can dispel both race and gender stereotypes, which are often intertwined, and that this diversity is essential to preparing students to succeed as leaders in communities and businesses. Fisher will be argued next Wednesday.

Read more...
Tags: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Issues Before the Courts, Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Judges & the Courts | Add new comment