Nicole Vorrasi

Founder and Executive Director of Shattering Glass

Local Board Member, Mid-Atlantic

Nicole Vorrasi Bates has spent her life advocating for gender equality. From the first time she was told she could not play organized baseball with the boys, and then throughout her career, Nicole has had first-hand experiences with gender discrimination, gender bias and unequal pay.

Recognizing the disparate toll the pandemic has taken on women, and the minimal progress made towards gender equality in the past two decades, Nicole founded Shattering Glass, on March 8, 2021, International Women’s Day. Its mission is to effectuate much-needed changes to ensure our daughters, granddaughters and their daughters will not be held down by gender discrimination.

Nicole is a licensed attorney. Prior to founding Shattering Glass, she practiced corporate transactional tax law, a male-dominated field, for more than two decades and was a commercial litigator prior to that. Throughout her legal career she has participated in countless mergers and acquisitions, ranging into the billions of dollars, primarily representing private equity funds and their portfolio companies. She also runs a growing real estate development company with her husband.

In addition to fighting for women’s rights, Nicole is dedicated to youth sports and advocating for children. She has coached, volunteered for, and served in leadership of youth sports for eight years and currently sits on the Boards of Directors of Washington, DC Little League and the Positive Coaching Alliance, MidAtlantic Region.

Nicole, a graduate of Hobart and William Smith College (BA), Catholic University Columbus School of Law (JD) and Georgetown University (LLM in Taxation), lives in Washington, DC with her husband, and young son and daughter. In her free time, Nicole loves nothing more than coaching. She recently managed her son’s Little League All-Star team, which came two wins away from making it to the Little League World Series, and plans to coach her daughter’s basketball team this winter.