Global Lead - Women's Protection and Empowerment Systems Transformation The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises, helping people to survive, recover, and gain control of their future. The Violence Prevention and Response Unit (VPRU) is one of IRC's four Technical Units, bringing together Child Protection, Women's Protection and Empowerment, and Protection Rule of Law across over 35 countries. VPRU is increasingly strengthening connective tissue across GBV, child protection, and case management through a shared social work systems lens, in service of IRC's Safety Strategy. IRC's Technical Excellence teams offer five core services to IRC country programs: Program Design, Quality Assurance, Business Development, Research and Learning, and External Influence. The Global Lead, Women's Protection and Empowerment Systems Transformation is hired for this moment. They are IRC's organizational leader on GBV prevention and response and women's and girls' empowerment, a core member of the VPRU senior management team, and the person responsible for transforming how IRC delivers, finances, and positions its WPE work at a critical juncture for the sector. The role carries the full authority of a senior staff member and demands intellectual independence, diagnostic acuity, and appetite for institution-building. A deliberate attention to financing is central to the mandate: how services are resourced, how prevention and livelihoods approaches are financed as integral parts of the protection architecture, and how IRC engages donors, governments, and multilateral actors to build more durable financing models for WPE outcomes — whether or not these are delivered by humanitarian actors. IRC's WPE work spans humanitarian response, recovery, and system strengthening, and this role's financing agenda is shaped by that full arc across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. The Global Lead models meaningful localization in how they build relationships with women-led and local organizations. Beyond this, the systems shaping outcomes for women and girls are changed through coalitions cutting across social justice movements, private sector actors, governments, and academia. The Global Lead builds bridges across these divides — connecting women's rights organizations with financing institutions, protection practitioners with public health researchers, feminist movements with social welfare system architects, and humanitarian actors with the domestic systems whose standards ultimately determine whether the structural conditions of violence change or persist. This is not relationship management. It is a theory of change. This role is for someone who loves this field enough to want to see it move beyond itself, and who can hold a clear vision of the shifts it needs without losing sight of what makes it worth fighting for. Someone who has seen what survivor-centered, feminist, rights-based programming can do at its best, and who is equally clear-eyed about the ways the sector has sometimes missed opportunities, been left out of innovations that social services in other contexts have leveraged for better impact and scale, and built protection frameworks that keep women safe in the short term while leaving the structural conditions of violence entirely intact.
Compensation:
(US Pay Rate: $145,000 - $170,000/yr; UK Pay Rate: £73,184 - £86,906/yr). Ranges are based on various factors including the labor market, job type, internal equity, and budget. Exact offers are calibrated by work location, individual candidate experience and skills relative to the defined job requirements.
Equal Opportunity Employer:
IRC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. IRC considers all applicants on the basis of merit without regard to race, sex, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Professional Standards: All International Rescue Committee workers must adhere to the core values and principles outlined in IRC Way - Standards for Professional Conduct. Our Standards are Integrity, Service, Equality and Accountability. In accordance with these values, the IRC operates and enforces policies on Safeguarding, Conflicts of Interest, Fiscal Integrity, and Reporting Wrongdoing and Protection from Retaliation. IRC is committed to take all necessary preventive measures and create an environment where people feel safe, and to take all necessary actions and corrective measures when harm occurs. IRC builds teams of professionals who promote critical reflection, power sharing, debate, and objectivity to deliver the best possible services to our clients.
US Benefits:
We offer a comprehensive and highly competitive set of benefits. In the US, these include: 10 sick days, 10 US holidays, 20-25 paid time off days depending on role and tenure, medical insurance starting at $163 per month, dental starting at $6.50 per month, and vision starting at $5 per month, FSA for healthcare and commuter costs, a 403b retirement savings plans with immediately vested matching, disability & life insurance, and an Employee Assistance Program which is available to our staff and their families to support counseling and care in times of crisis and mental health struggles.
