Date and Time
THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026 | 2 PM ET/11 AM PT | ZOOM
Speakers
Inimai Chettiar
President, A Better Balance
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Inimai Chettiar is President of A Better Balance. She leads the organization’s pioneering efforts to advance fair and supportive work-family policies like paid family and medical leave, paid sick time, and fair and flexible scheduling, and to combat discrimination against pregnant people and family caregivers in the workplace. She is a leading civil rights attorney and justice advocate with more than two decades of experience leveraging the law to advance transformative reforms. With deep experience in litigation, advocacy, coalition building, and communications, Chettiar’s approach to serving as A Better Balance’s President is framed around the intersectionality between social justice, racial justice, and workplace policies that advance meaningful change for women and families. Her personal experiences also drive her passion for A Better Balance’s mission to build a future where all workers can care for themselves and their loved ones, without risking their economic security.
Chettier was appointed as President of A Better Balance in 2024. Previously, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the Justice Action Network, the nation’s largest bipartisan criminal justice reform organization. Her leadership and coalition building helped secure the passage of the First Step Act, which released over 30,000 people from prison, the Fair Chance Act, and other key federal legislation. Chettiar also served as the Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she established the Center as a national leader in ending mass incarceration, authored groundbreaking reports on crime and incarceration, positioned criminal justice as an issue central to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the national narrative, and worked to transform law enforcement. Through Chettiar’s leadership, mass incarceration became recognized as more than an issue of criminal justice reform and was successfully framed around the deep and generational impact it has on families. She also served as Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity, and Litigation Associate at Debevosie & Plimpton LLP. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Chicago Law School, is widely published in numerous journals, reports, and books, and is quoted extensively across top tier national media outlets.
Elizabeth Gedmark
Vice President, A Better Balance
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Elizabeth Gedmark serves as the Vice President of A Better Balance based in Nashville, TN. As a staff member at A Better Balance since 2011, Elizabeth Gedmark has leveraged the power of the law to help families suffering from discrimination at work and to advance more family-friendly laws and policies, particularly in the South since A Better Balance’s Southern Office was launched in 2014.
Kameron Dawson
Legal Director, A Better Balance
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Kameron Dawson serves as the Legal Director of the Southern Office at A Better Balance based in Nashville, TN. A member of A Better Balance since 2019, Kameron leverages the power of the law to write, advance, and implement more family-friendly laws and policies in collaboration with advocates at the federal, state, and local level on issues ranging from pregnancy accommodations to paid leave, and builds sustainable community partnerships and coalitions with organizations across the region. Additionally, Kameron supports A Better Balance’s legal services and strategic litigation efforts, ensuring workers in the South who are suffering from discrimination understand their legal rights and have the resources needed to enforce those laws.
In the South, Kameron has worked on several campaigns to expand access to pregnancy and lactation accommodations and paid family and medical leave to workers in the region, especially in the public sector. Kameron has presented at numerous trainings and panels, including All In Together’s Black Women Lead, DOL & EEOC’s Black Women at Work, Louisiana Status of Women for the Governor’s Office, and the National WIC Association’s Annual Conference.
Kameron graduated from the University of Georgia, and earned her J.D. from the University of Tennessee College of Law, where she served as an executive editor of the Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, the candidacy process editor for the Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy, and a student attorney in the Community Economic Development clinic. She also served as Chair in the school’s Student Council on Diversity & Inclusion, creating engaging programs that focused on issues of diversity and the law. Prior to joining A Better Balance, Kameron served as a 5th grade educator with Teach for America.
About the Session
Every year, too many mothers and babies in the United States die — and Black women bear the brunt of this crisis, experiencing pregnancy-related deaths at three times the rates of white women. These tragedies aren’t inevitable. They are preventable policy failures.
The good news: there is rare bipartisan political will to act now. The question is how.
Fortunately, the research is clear. Workplace justice policies like pregnancy and postpartum accommodations, paid family and medical leave, and paid sick time are not just overwhelmingly popular, they are among the most powerful tools we have to keep mothers and babies alive. When workers can rest during a high-risk pregnancy, recover after birth, or stay home when they’re sick without losing a paycheck, lives are saved. Policies like paid leave and paid sick time give pregnant people the flexibility they need to attend essential prenatal and postpartum medical appointments, and workplace accommodations like weight lifting restrictions and the right to sit have been proven to meaningfully reduce miscarriage rates.
A Better Balance has spent years turning this research into reality, working in deep collaboration with federal and state partners across the country. We helped pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act — landmark federal protections for workers nationwide. We’ve won paid leave and paid sick time laws in more than 20 states, including across the South and in conservative-led states. And we don’t just pass laws: we implement, enforce, and defend them and we empower workers to use them.
This session will explore how birth equity and workplace justice are inseparable — and how advocates, policymakers, and partners can seize this moment to drive change that saves lives.
About the Organization
A Better Balance promotes justice in the workplace, especially for women, caregivers, and people with health needs of their own. They work across every level of government to pass and enforce policies that combat poverty, advance birth equity through a lens of racial and gender justice, and protect workers’ ability to care for themselves, their children, and their loved ones. They do this through policy advocacy, strategic litigation, mass communications, and by maintaining a nationwide presence which allows them to mobilize across the country.