Since 2022, she has served as CEO of Equality Now
Last week, the Kolkata-born daughter entered the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York – the cradle of the American women’s-rights movement – becoming only the second woman of Indian origin to receive the honour, after former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. It is a fitting destination for a woman whose journey has taken her from Kolkata to Smith College, Wall Street, corporate America and, ultimately, the global campaign for women’s equality.
At 18, she left India for Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating in economics and art history before earning an MBA from Columbia Business School. She became a leader of Women Moving Millions, a network of women philanthropists whose members have committed roughly $1 billion to organisations working for women and girls. At Smith, her alma mater, she became a trustee and helped lead the Women for the World campaign, which raised approximately $486 million.
Her Hall of Fame induction is therefore more than another accolade for a prominent philanthropist.
It is a long-distance answer to the question that confronted the little girl in Calcutta: What might that “wrong” daughter become if nobody put a ceiling on her? She entered Wall Street as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and later moved into corporate America, working for companies including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Elizabeth Arden. It was a world of balance sheets, brands, mergers and markets — seemingly far removed from the women’s-rights movement. She co-founded Raising Change, which helps social-impact organisations strengthen fundraising and organisational capacity, and helped establish the Asian Women’s Leadership University. Sinha’s story offers an unusually Indian lesson about the evolution of feminism. She did not begin by marching in the streets; she began as a daughter in a Kolkata household, went to an American women’s college, entered investment banking, learned corporate strategy and eventually turned those skills toward changing institutions. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.