Sharmila Mona Sinha Inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame

By Geeta Goindi

October 9, 2026 – Indian-American gender equality advocate and philanthropist Sharmila Mona Sinha has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, becoming only the second woman of Indian origin to receive the distinction.

Sinha, the global executive director of Equality Now, joins a distinguished group of more than 300 American women whose contributions have shaped the nation and the world, including Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She follows former PepsiCo Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi, who in 2021 became the first woman of Indian origin inducted into the Hall.

For the Kolkata-born Sinha, whose career has stretched from Wall Street and corporate America to philanthropy and the global movement for women’s equality, the recognition carries a deeply personal meaning.

“I have spent much of my life thinking about power,” Sinha said in her induction remarks. “I’ve seen it on Wall Street, in business, in philanthropy, and in the fight for women’s equality, where power ultimately comes down to who has a voice, who has a choice, and who gets to shape our lives.”

Her conclusion was one shaped by decades of working to expand opportunities for others: “Power shared is power supercharged.”

Sinha illustrated that idea with a memory from her childhood in Kolkata.

Every morning, she recalled, her mother would reach into the family’s rice container and set aside a fistful of rice for someone in need. It was a simple ritual, carried out without fanfare, but one that Sinha came to understand as a lesson in generosity, responsibility and the power of individual actions to multiply.

“I don’t receive this extraordinary honor as mine alone,” she said. “I receive it as a fistful of rice, placed in my hands with a responsibility to pass it on.”

That philosophy has come to define a career spanning more than 25 years in business, philanthropy, advocacy and social enterprise.

Growing up as the third daughter in her family, Sinha became conscious at an early age of the different expectations society placed on girls and boys.

That awareness deepened when, at 12, she volunteered with Mother Teresa. Sinha has recalled being stunned to learn that the orphanages had few boys because they were rarely abandoned and, when they were, quickly adopted. The experience, she said, made gender bias visible to her “in a way I could never unsee.”

At 18, she left India without her parents’ permission to pursue her education in the United States, eventually graduating magna cum laude from Smith College with a degree in economics and art history. She later earned an MBA in finance and marketing from Columbia Business School.

Sinha began her professional career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley before moving into corporate roles at Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Over time, she increasingly turned the skills she had acquired in business and finance toward advancing women’s rights and social change.

She has since helped launch, lead or advise more than 90 organizations working in social justice and helped catalyze more than $1 billion for initiatives supporting women’s rights, economic opportunity and leadership.

Today, Sinha leads Equality Now, the international human rights organization founded in 1992 to pursue legal and systemic change for women and girls. Working with partners around the world, the organization campaigns to eliminate discriminatory laws, sexual violence and exploitation, child marriage, female genital mutilation and other practices that deny women and girls equal rights.

Since its founding, Equality Now says it has helped reform more than 140 discriminatory laws worldwide.

Sinha formerly chaired Women Moving Millions, a global community of philanthropists committed to advancing women and girls, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition’s Fund for Women’s Equality. She is also a trustee emerita and former vice chair of Smith College, where she co-chaired the Women for the World campaign, which raised $486 million for women’s education.

Her advocacy has extended into film and culture. Sinha served as an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘To Kill a Tiger’, which follows an Indian father’s fight for justice after his teenage daughter is sexually assaulted. Her other producing credits include the documentary ‘Disclosure’ and the stage production ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’.

She continues to serve in leadership and advisory roles with institutions including the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and Columbia University’s Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise.

Her work has also earned her the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Smith College Medal, as well as recognition on Forbes’ “50 Over 50: Impact” list.

Founded in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1969, the National Women’s Hall of Fame is the nation’s first nonprofit organization and museum dedicated to honoring and preserving the achievements of distinguished American women. Seneca Falls holds a seminal place in the history of women’s rights as the site of the landmark 1848 Women’s Rights Convention.

Sinha was one of 11 women selected for the Hall’s 2026 class, alongside Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, author Judith Viorst and others.

For Sinha, joining that historic company appears to be less an endpoint than another opportunity to extend the lesson she first learned from her mother in Kolkata.

“Open a door, invest in an idea, hand her the microphone and watch power grow through her,” she said. “That is how power compounds.”

889 words, 5 minutes read time.