As Women’s History Month begins, we are thrilled to share some extraordinary news: Marcy Syms has made a transformational gift to endow the ERA Project, which will now be known as the Marcy Syms Equality Initiative, housed permanently at NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center.

This is a landmark moment — not just for our organization, but for the broader fight for constitutional equality. Since Marcy helped launch the ERA Project in 2021 at Columbia Law’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, her visionary leadership has been foundational to everything we’ve built. From our founding, we have served as the nation’s leading innovation laboratory on what it means to add explicit sex equality to the U.S. Constitution in the 21st century. Our work has reached the highest levels of government. We have provided expert guidance to policymakers and courts, built leadership councils with diverse stakeholders, and pioneered a modern, intersectional framework connecting sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, and economic inequality.

As the Marcy Syms Equality Initiative at the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center, we will continue to push the boundaries of gender justice. NYU Law has long been — and remains — a catalyst for gender justice, an institution with a deep history as a champion for women’s rights, starting with its first women graduates (in 1892) and the legacy of Inez Miholland and Crystal Eastman who helped lead the charge for women’s suffrage.

From our home at NYU Law, we are proud to pioneer state constitutional reform, pilot innovative policy agendas, produce rigorous legal scholarship, engage the next generation of advocates, drive culture change through artistic partnerships and storytelling, and define what a robust sex equality provision could mean at the federal level. The Marcy Syms Equality Initiative makes all of this not just possible, but permanent.

We are profoundly grateful to Marcy for her belief in this work. From the very beginning, her vision helped shape what the ERA Project could become — and will now long endure. We could not be more proud to carry it forward under her name. As the Marcy Syms Equality Initiative, we step into a future that is bolder and more ambitious than ever.

The Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center