Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (MBA 2006) believes stories “are the best way to reach people you otherwise couldn’t. But storytelling is just a start; you then have to mobilize people and support the push for change through policy.”

As the author of the New York Times best seller The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy program, Lemmon uses this power to make the case that investing in women is an economic, security and development imperative. “I want to reshape the development model. Investing in women creates a safer, more prosperous, and more stable world, which is in everyone’s best interest.”

A former ABC News producer who has also written for the New York Times and Financial Times, Lemmon is the author of the Newsweek March 2011 cover story “The Hillary Doctrine,” on Secretary Clinton’s push to put women at the center of US foreign policy. She has become a forceful voice for the economic and human rights of women, especially in conflict-affected areas. Lemmon spent four years with the investment-management firm PIMCO and in 2011 published The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, about an entrepreneurial young woman in Kabul during the rule of the Taliban. “The story of women is an economic story,” she says.

(Published April 2014)

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