About Ilana DeBare

Ilana DeBare is a journalist living in Oakland, California, with her husband Sam Schuchat and daughter Rebecca. She is the founding board president of the Julia Morgan School for Girls, an all-girl middle school that opened in 1999.

Before writing Where Girls Come First, Ilana was a newspaper reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she covered workplace and labor issues. Before that, she worked for the Sacramento Bee and covered local politics, state politics, and business. She wrote a 1996 series on women in the computer industry that won the Jane Cunningham Croly award for coverage of women’s issues from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Ilana grew up in New York City, where she attended coed schools. She graduated from Harvard College in 1980 and received a master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley in 1987.