Washington, D.C. Council Chair & Board Advisor,
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
Megan Beyer is a journalist, activist, and life-long advocate of women’s rights and gender issues. She is the founder and chair of the Sister Republics bilateral women’s leadership initiative with the US Embassy in Bern, Switzerland and serves on the global advisory council of the non-profit EDGE Foundation board in Zug, Switzerland. EDGE is the only global certification for workplace gender equality. She is on the board of the Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project and a regular guest on PBS’ “To the Contrary” the only national television program devoted to women’s issues.
In 2015 Ms. Beyer was appointed by President Barack Obama to be Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. In this role, she led the first official U.S. Cultural Delegation to Cuba in 2016, which included directors of four U.S. cultural agencies and prominent artists., including Usher, Joshua Bell, Smokey Robinson, and Dave Matthews. During her tenure, the Committee helped to host the “South by South Lawn” event at the White House.
In 2010 Beyer founded the bilateral Swiss-U.S. project, Sister Republics, to accelerate private market drivers to break the glass ceiling. Ms. Beyer also served as the External Relations Representative for the Swiss-based company EDGE Gender Certification. The company that certifies companies and international organizations achieving a global standard of gender certification.
Ms. Beyer began her career as a reporter covering education and politics for local and national television news programs. She was a regular contributor to Tamedia newspapers in Switzerland from 2010-2013 and in the US, and her essays are found on Motherhood Movement Online, Role ReBoot the Alexandria Times, and the Huffington Post. For the last 15 years she has been a regular panelist on To the Contrary, a women’s political talk show on public television stations nationwide.
Over the last twenty-five years she has served on over a dozen of national, state and local boards including WETA-DC’s public television station, the national board of Reading is Fundamental, Virginia NARAL. She was Finance Chairman of the Virginia Community College System, a Chair of the Women’s Leadership Forum at the Democratic National Committee and the finance Chairman for the Mid Atlantic “Women for Obama.” She currently serves on the board of Meridian International, the Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project and the EDGE Foundation. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum in Washington DC.
