Françoise Girard is the founder of Feminism Makes Us Smarter (FMUS), a communications platform where she promotes feminist activists from around the world and engages in thoughtful conversations about the importance of feminism.
For over 20 years, Girard has advocated for women's rights and gender justice in close partnership with feminist activists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Her advocacy and writing have focused on women's and girls' bodily autonomy and their sexual and reproductive health and rights - critical pre-conditions for all other aspects of women's and girls' lives.
Girard is an author, advocate and expert on women’s health, human rights, sexuality, and HIV and AIDS. A lawyer by training, Girard has been regularly consulted by governments and UN agencies and has been instrumental to ensuring that global policy frameworks include and further women’s rights. She recently concluded 8 years as President of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC).
Girard played a key role in advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights at UN conferences such as the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)+5, Beijing+5, General Assembly Special Sessions on HIV/AIDS and on Children, ICPD+10, the 2005 World Summit (Millennium Development Goals), and the process to negotiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC, and thereafter a consultant for IWHC, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPFWHR) and DAWN, a network of women’s rights activists from the global South. Prior to returning to IWHC in 2012, she was Director of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations, where she was also Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and Haiti in the 1990s.
Girard has served on the board of the Women’s Funding Network and on the advisory committee of Human Rights Watch’s program on health and human rights. She was the Chair of the Leadership Programme Committee of the 2010 International AIDS Conference, a 20,000+ participant biannual scientific conference.
Her articles have been published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Health and Human Rights, Global Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, International Family Planning Perspectives and Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, as well as commentary in New York Times, Huffington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Project Syndicate. Other publications include book chapters “Negotiating Sexual Rights and Sexual Orientation at the United Nations,” in SexPolitics: Report from the Front Lines, 2007; “Advocacy for Sexuality and Women’s Rights: Continuities, Discontinuities and Strategies since ICPD” in Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, 2009, and “Negotiating sexual and reproductive health and rights at the UN: a long and winding road” in The remaking of Social Contracts: feminists in a fierce new world, 2014.
She has been quoted by Washington Post, BBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Associated Press, CBC/Radio-Canada, The New Yorker and The Nation, among others. She was invited to testify on the impact of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy on women’s health before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations in March 2019. Recent speaking engagements include 2018 Aspen Ideas: Spotlight Health and the 2020 International Law Conference of the New York Bar Association and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Social and Economic Cooperation (OSCE).
Girard holds an M.A. in Political Science (Soviet Politics) from McGill University and an LL.B. from the Université de Montréal. She was a law clerk to Justice Charles Gonthier of the Supreme Court of Canada. She speaks French, Spanish, and Russian. She is a devotee of baroque music and opera and chairs the board of American Friends of Les Arts Florissants, the baroque ensemble based in Paris.
