Toronto, Canada
By Day She Leads Technology and Product Strategy for Global Organisations. By Night She Is Publishing Research on Why Violence Against Women and Animal Cruelty Share the Same Root, and What Policy Gets Wrong About Both
New research by Antarjot Kaur Arora makes an argument that sounds provocative until you look at the data. Violence against women and cruelty toward animals, she contends, are not separate problems requiring separate policies. They grow from the same root. And governments in Canada, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom have been getting this wrong for years.
Her paper, Linkages Between Animal Welfare and Gender Equity Policies, is built on evidence that is difficult to dismiss. In domestic violence shelters across multiple countries, more than half of survivors said their partners had harmed or threatened their animals as a deliberate act of control. Between 40 and 50 percent of women in those studies said they stayed in violent homes longer than they wanted to because they had nowhere safe to take their pets. A gender gap of 20 to 30 percentage points in support for stronger animal protection laws holds steadily across all four countries, with women far more likely to support those protections than men. The pattern, Antarjot Arora argues, is not coincidence.
Her proposed One Welfare framework calls for animals to be included in protective orders, for animal cruelty to be treated as an early warning sign in domestic violence risk assessments, and for shelters to build pathways for survivors who will not leave without their animals. The infrastructure meant to keep women safe, she writes, cannot keep ignoring the animals that abusers use to keep them trapped.
“The same structures that allow harm to go unchecked in one place allow it to go unchecked in another. Policy keeps filing these under different departments. That is not an administrative problem. It is a values problem.”
The Researcher Who Also Runs Enterprise Portfolios
Here is what makes Antarjot Kaur’s story worth paying attention to. She is not writing this from a university office. She is a first-generation immigrant from Patiala, Punjab, who built a 14-year corporate career at IBM, McKinsey and Company, and across enterprise clients globally. Today she leads technology and product strategy, managing portfolios that generate tens of millions in annual revenue. Academic research on feminist policy is not what her calendar is built around. She does it anyway.
Her commitment to gender equity was shaped early. Growing up in Punjab, she saw what happens in communities where women’s safety depends on the goodwill of people around them rather than on any system built to protect them. That observation became a conviction. It has not faded.
Her relationship with animal rights has a different origin. As a child in India, she began questioning the choices her family made around food and how animals were treated. She became vegetarian. Years later, after moving to Canada, she understood things about the dairy and egg industries that she had not fully known before. She went vegan. She talks about it openly, on Instagram at @antarjot_kaur, alongside her gender equity work, building an audience one honest post at a time.
Long before emigrating, Antarjot Arora was already doing this work in India. She advised a welfare organisation and led corporate social responsibility programmes focused on gender equity. The thread runs long.
Beyond the Corporate Boardroom
Antarjot Kaur Arora serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of Contact Hamilton, a nonprofit supporting children with developmental difficulties across the Hamilton and Niagara region, where she led a governance overhaul that rebuilt the board from the ground up. She is also a board member of Interval House of Hamilton, a crisis shelter and support organisation for women and children leaving violent situations. She sits on Hamilton’s Community Partnership Action Table, a City of Hamilton body that advises on housing affordability and policy. The issues she researches are the same issues she works on. Just in a different room.
Her policy engagement extends across borders. She was selected as a delegate with Voice for Rights International. She was invited to forums at Wilfrid Laurier University. She took part in the Ideas4GenderEquality workshop organised by Women and Gender Equality Canada, a department of the federal government. She has participated as a delegate at the World Bank Youth Summit 2024.
Two Lives, Run in Full
Most professionals at her level pick one public identity and commit to it. Antarjot Kaur Arora has not done that. The corporate career is serious. The research is serious. The board work, the advocacy, and the Instagram account that has nothing to do with enterprise software and everything to do with what she actually believes. All of it is serious. She has simply decided that being a complete person in public is not something she needs to apologise for.
“I do not think of these as separate parts of my life,” she says. “The research, the board work, the products I build. They are all asking the same question about the same problem. I just ask it in different rooms.”
Antarjot Kaur Arora shares her thinking on gender equity, animal rights, and social justice on Instagram at @antarjot_kaur. Her work in product strategy, consulting, and policy is on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/antarjotarora.
Last modified: March 13, 2026
