Irene Tinker

Who is Irene Tinker?

Irene Tinker is Professor Emerita in the Departments of City and Regional Planning & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching from 1989–1998. She was the founding Board president of the International Center for Research on Women, founder and director of the Equity Policy Center and co-founder of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

Professor Tinker earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College in political philosophy and comparative government and her PhD. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in comparative government and development. Her dissertation was on India's first general elections and parliament after independence. With two colleagues, she drove a Ford Anglia from London to New Delhi in 1951. In 1953, she and her new husband drove back to London from Mombasa, Kenya, in an Austin A40. Her travelogue became a book, Crossing Centuries, published in 2010.

Tinker was appointed a United States delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1973. President Jimmy Carter appointed her Assistant Director of Action in 1977. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Nepal and Sri Lanka from 1987 through 1989.