Susan Chira was named senior correspondent and editor, Gender Issues, in September 2016 after 20 years as an editor and senior executive at The New York Times. She was part of the team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of workplace sexual harassment issues.
She was deputy executive editor, overseeing all daily news operations, from September 2014-September 2016, and assistant managing editor for news since September 2011. Ms. Chira was one of The Times’s longest-serving foreign editors, from 2004 -2011, and also served as deputy foreign editor from February 1997-October 1999.
She was editorial director of book development from September 2002- January 2004.
Previously, she was the editor of the Week in Review section at The Times since October 1999.
She advises a newsroom-wide mentoring program.
During her tenure as an editor, she supervised coverage that won five Pulitzer Prizes and many other awards.
Her reporting career included stints as a national education correspondent, Tokyo correspondent and acting bureau chief from October 1984 until February 1989, metropolitan reporter in the Albany and Stamford bureaus, and reporter for the Business Day section. Ms. Chira joined The Times as a trainee on the metropolitan desk in 1981 and was promoted to reporter in July 1982.
Ms. Chira is the author of "A Mother’s Place: Rewriting the Rules of Motherhood," (HarperCollins Canada, 1998). Ms. Chira received a B.A. degree in history and East Asian studies from Harvard University in 1980, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, she was a reporter and later president of The Harvard Crimson. She studied Japanese for a year and a half at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo and at Middlebury College, Vt.
Ms. Chira is married to Michael Shapiro, a writer and a professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They have a daughter and a son.
