"You can't ask other people to believe you and vote for you if you don't back yourself."
- Jacinda Ardern
Michelle Morkert, PhD is a global women’s leadership expert, independent scholar, feminist writer, speaker, and advisor whose work focuses on gender, power, and organizational life.
After twenty years in higher education, Michelle left academia in the U.S. following a university-wide reduction in force that eliminated the women’s and gender studies program she had founded and led for a decade. At a moment when women’s and gender studies programs and other forms of critical inquiry are being defunded and dismantled, she chose to continue her work outside the institution, building feminist classrooms and stages beyond the constraints of the university.
Her work draws on nearly two decades of studying how patriarchy operates across cultures and institutions, from research on militarism, gender-based violence, and women’s lives in Guatemala to feminist leadership work in Poland and teaching in Croatia as a Fulbright Scholar.
Studying patriarchy has also meant studying the women who disrupt it. Across countries, classrooms, organizations, and movements, Michelle has been interested in what women do when they recognize the systems shaping their lives and decide to challenge, navigate, or simply refuse the rules they have been handed. That question sits at the center of her work today: making the structures of gender and power easier to see, giving people language for what they are experiencing, and translating feminist scholarship into practical strategies for changing what happens next.
Michelle is a lifelong reader of feminist theory, an enthusiastic traveler, and a firm believer that some of the most important learning happens when people sit around a table and talk honestly about what they are seeing and experiencing. She lives in the Chicago area, is happiest sitting outside with a cortado in hand, and returns to Croatia whenever she ca