Russell, on the State Department mezzanine. Photograph: Mark Finkenstaedt.

Since August 2013, Catherine Russell has served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, the second person appointed to the post by President Barack Obama following its creation in 2009. Her job is to ensure that women’s issues are fully integrated into U.S. foreign policy, or, as she recently described it, “to push people every day and say, What about the women and girls? How does your work affect them? How are they being included?” She reports to the Secretary of State.

Russell’s portfolio includes gender-based violence (as a senior advisor to the foreign relations committee in 2007, she helped draft the Senate’s ill-fated International Violence Against Women bill). And, with U.S. embassy officials and USAID, her office has secured more than $70 million in private and public funds for women’s advocacy groups in 85 nations.

On a more or less typical June day in Washington, D.C., Russell traveled across town to give a talk on education at the Brookings Institution, in which she noted that from 1999 to 2011, the number of girls out of school at the primary level had dropped from 62 to 31 million, worldwide; she delivered remarks to a room filled with young American women at a Girl Up summit sponsored by the UN Foundation (topic: the linked challenges to women posed by entrenched traditions and legal systems and, often, by subpar living conditions); and she visited the Japanese embassy for a meeting on intergovernmental cooperation to address gender violence and expand women’s entrepreneurship.

A philosophy major at Boston College, Russell earned a law degree at George Washington University, then served as counsel to Senator Patrick Leahy (D–VT). Later, she became staff director of the Senate judiciary committee. She was associate deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration before taking off some 10 years to spend time with her daughter and son (now teenagers). During that period, she volunteered with Women for Women International, a nonprofit that aids women in war zones, on behalf of which she travelled to Bosnia and Rwanda.

This year, from January to July, Russell visited 12 countries, including China, Jordan, Sierra Leone, Nepal, and the United Kingdom. When she travels, she says, she always seeks out conversations with local women and girls. But she also tries to meet with boys and men, “because we can’t just talk to ourselves.”

Dana Liebelson is a Mother Jones staff reporter.