Sharon Perley Masling

Sharon partners with employers to conduct workplace culture assessments, using qualitative and quantitative tools, and helps employers devise and implement strategic plans that address leadership, accountability, policies, procedures, and training. She guides companies in understanding the potential costs—including the impact on productivity and job turnover—that can be tied to harassment and misconduct, and she helps employers develop proactive and concrete approaches to creating workplace environments where harassment and misconduct do not occur in the first place. Sharon also counsels employers on a wide range of employment compliance issues.

While at the EEOC, Sharon helped develop, prioritize, and implement the commissioner’s multi-year policy agenda on a broad range of issues, including harassment prevention, disability rights, LGBT rights, and EEOC governance. She also co-led the agency’s Harassment Prevention Action Team, directed the work of the Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, and drafted and edited key sections of the agency’s 2016 report on harassment prevention.

Before serving at the EEOC, Sharon was senior legislative counsel at Workplace Flexibility 2010, a policy enterprise focused on finding common ground between employers and employees on workplace flexibility issues. Previously, Sharon was the director of legal services at the National Disability Rights Network, where she oversaw provision of legal training and technical assistance to attorneys and advocates in the national Protection and Advocacy (P&A) network. She also served as senior counsel on disability policy to Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, Senate sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In that position, she provided legal and political advice on a range of disability issues and drafted related legislative language, memoranda, floor statements, and talking points.

Sharon began her law career as a trial attorney in the Disability Rights Section, Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, where she investigated and litigated alleged violations of Title I (employment), Title II (state and local governments), and Title III (places of public accommodation) of the ADA.