E.J. Graff

E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher running Gender & Justice Project at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, is an author and journalist whose work appears in such outlets as the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Good Housekeeping, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Slate.com, and the Village Voice. She collaborated on Evelyn Murphy's book, Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005), and is the author of What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999, 2004). Graff is a Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center resident scholar.

Graff’s investigative reporting and reported commentary focus especially on under-covered or mis-reported social injustices to women, children, families, and LGBT people. Her recent work includes in-depth investigations into, and reporting on:

• gross sexual harassment of teens in their after-school, weekend, and summer jobs;
• corruption in international adoption, in which Western adoption agencies send grossly outsized sums into poor countries, inducing unscrupulous locals to buy, defraud, coerce, or kidnap children away from their birthfamilies;
• media miscoverage of issues facing working families;
• marriage equality (both for same-sex couples and for husbands and wives);
• employment discrimination law, especially as it affects women;
• social science investigations into the causes of the gender wage gap.

Graff has earned such prestigious awards and fellowships as the 2008 Society for Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Magazine Investigative Reporting; the 2008 James Aronson Social Justice Journalism Award; a 2007 “Special Honor for Excellence in Reporting on the Media” by the Council on Contemporary Families; a 2001 The Nation Institute Investigative Fund Research Award Grant; a 2000-2001 Harvard Law School Liberal Arts Fellowship in Law and Journalism; and a 1998-2000 Visiting Scholar position at the Radcliffe Institute, where she wrote her first book. As an expert in social policy, she has appeared in several documentaries; is regularly interviewed by public and commercial media outlets such as NPR, ABC, CBC, BBC, PBS, MTV, satellite radio, and cable news; and gives talks and engages in debates at universities, conventions, churches, synagogues, and other public forums, in the U.S. and abroad. She holds a B.A. from Ohio University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.