Margot Carrington is a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State, where she currently serves as the Deputy Director in the Office of Rightsizing.  She was the recipient of a 2010-2011 Una Chapman Cox Sabbatical Leave Fellowship to conduct research on the challenges faced by working women. She was also a 2010-2011 International Women’s Forum Leadership Foundation Fellow.  The Foundation grooms women leaders to prepare them for greater responsibility and help shrink the gender gap.

Until July of 2010, Carrington served as the Principal Officer for the U.S. Consulate in Fukuoka, Japan, which covers a district of 15 million people with an economy comparable in size to that of Sweden. As the first female officer with children in that position, she was a sought-after speaker on women's issues such as work-life balance, which is one of the topics of her current research. Raised in a diplomatic family, fluent in four languages, and having lived on four continents as a child, she can be called a global citizen.  Carrington began her 17-year career as a diplomat with the United States Information Agency.  After two years of Japanese language study, she served as the Deputy Director of the Tokyo American Center, during which time her first child was born. The post was followed by an assignment to Kuala Lumpur as Cultural Attaché, requiring one year of Malay language study at the University of Malaya. During that posting, Carrington was appointed Chairperson of the bi-national Fulbright Commission, and the reforms she implemented earned her a State Department Meritorious Honor Award. Her second child was born towards the end of her tour in Malaysia. Carrington then returned to Japan as Deputy of the Cultural Affairs Office, where she developed programs on U.S. policies and society, including women’s issues, for the five U.S. Consulates in Japan. While in Tokyo, she helped spearhead the first regional conference on international trafficking of women and children that included participants from the NGO sector, earning her a second Meritorious Honor Award.

Carrington graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Florida with a Master’s in International Relations and a minor in International Economics.  While in graduate school, she taught French to undergraduates at the University of Florida. Her undergraduate degree is in Political Science with a minor in French.