Deborah J. Vagins is the Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Programs at The Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights. In this position, Deborah is the lead strategist for the organization’s programmatic civil rights work and heads up its congressional, executive branch, and state advocacy. Deborah brings decades of experience as a guiding voice in civil and women’s rights federal policy advocacy.

Prior to joining The Leadership Conference, Deborah was the National Campaign Director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA) and the Director of Equal Pay Today coalition. In this position, Deborah led campaign efforts on issues around pay equity, workplace harassment, occupational segregation, paid leave, and minimum wage. Recently, Deborah also led the coalition’s defensive federal agency advocacy work.

Prior to ERA, Deborah was the President and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), which represented the 56 state and territorial domestic violence coalitions and offered a range of programs and initiatives to address the complex causes and far-reaching consequences of domestic violence.

Before NNEDV, Deborah was the Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Research at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and earlier, the Chief of Staff and Principal Attorney Advisor for Commissioner Charlotte A. Burrows at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Deborah served as an agency representative on the White House Council for Women and Girls and the White House Equal Pay Task Force.

Prior to joining the EEOC in 2015, Deborah was the Senior Legislative Counsel on civil rights issues for the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office. At the ACLU for a decade, Deborah was instrumental in advocating for enactment of major civil rights laws, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, and the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Act, among others. Deborah successfully designed a strategy to secure the 2014 Executive Order on retaliation for wage disclosure in federal contracting and the 2014 DOJ and Department of Education guidance on racial disparities in school discipline.

Before joining the ACLU in 2005, Deborah served as the Acting Deputy General Counsel and Senior Attorney-Advisor at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), and as an associate in the employment discrimination and civil rights practice group at Cohen Milstein. While at Cohen Milstein, she litigated high-profile nationwide civil rights class actions, including the largest pay discrimination case in history, representing 1.5 million women employees against Walmart.

In 2019, Deborah was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in England, for her contributions to gender and racial equity in the United States. Deborah and her work have appeared in the NBC Nightly News, The New York Times, C-SPAN, Washington Post, AP, CQ, NPR, The TODAY Show, USA Today, Time, and The New Republic, among others.

She has drafted articles with, and for, civil rights icons, including Lilly Ledbetter and Rep. John Lewis, and was profiled in the 2016 film, Answering the Call, on work protecting the Voting Rights Act, and consulted on the film script for LILLY, the biopic on Lilly Ledbetter.