Cabinet Members - Sally Kenney
Sally J. Kenney, Professor, directs the Center on Women and Public Policy. Kenney joined the Humphrey Institute faculty in 1995 after holding joint appointments in Political Science, Women's Studies, and Law at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include judicial selection, feminist social movements, the European Court of Justice, exclusionary employment policies, and pregnancy discrimination. She served as a consultant to the US Congress's House Education and Labor Committee on discrimination resulting from fetal protection policies. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, a B.A. and M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Iowa. She is the author of For Whose Protection? Reproductive Hazards and Exclusionary Policies in the United States and Britain, and is the co-editor of Politics and Feminist Standpoint Theories and Constitutional Dialogues in Comparative Perspective. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Law and Social Inquiry, Political Research Quarterly, Women and Politics, and Judicature as well
as in law reviews. She is currently working on a book on gender and judging.
Kenney worked to pass the Iowa Equal Rights Amendment and re-elect Senator John Culver (both without success) in 1980. She helped staff an abortion referral line and was a member of a collective that produced a feminist newspaper in Oxford, England. She was a Women's Research and Education Institute Congressional Fellow from 1986-1987 working on civil rights and employment discrimination. She has written about the difficulties of being a feminist political scientist and academic discrimination more broadly. She is active in the community working to elect more women to public office, including judgeships. She has served on the boards of the Minnesota Women's Campaign Fund, WATCH, the University of Minnesota Press, and the DFL Feminist Caucus. She is an avid ballroom dancer and birder.
As director of the Center on Women and Public Policy, she heads the concentration on women and public policy at the Humphrey Institute and teaches and advises Masters students. The Center's many projects include encouraging young women to prepare to run for public office, securing the appointment of women to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, running a postdoctoral program on race, gender, and public policy, providing leadership training for executive directors of women's non-profits, and creating public policy case studies on women's issues. For more information on its many programs see: http://www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/wpp/index.html.