Dr. Sekile Nzinga
Chief Equity Officer
State of Illinois
Sekile M. Nzinga PhD, MSW was appointed by Governor Pritzker as the inaugural Chief Equity Officer for the State of Illinois. Prior to joining state government, she was a senior administrator in higher education as the former interim Chief Diversity Officer and Associate Provost of Diversity and Inclusion as well as Women’s Center Director at Northwestern University. Nzinga also worked as a professor of Social Work and Women and Gender Studies for 18 years. Her engaged scholarship and teaching have centered on the intersections of race, class, and gender in reproduction and parenting; critical feminist university studies; family centered employment policy and reproductive justice. She is the author of Lean Semesters: How the University Reproduces Inequity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and the editor of Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy (Demeter, 2013). She is a former board chair and current volunteer of the Chicago Abortion Fund and serves on the boards of The Journal of Women Center’s in Higher Education and Radical Mamas. She was the 2020-21 Author in Residence at HigherEd Jobs and is the recipient of the 2019 Evanston-Northshore YWCA’s Women in Leadership Award.
