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 and Federal 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, 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.
