She was born in Pyongyang, Korea, grew up in Ann Arbor and holds a bachelor's degree with honors in French literature and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She has worked with UNICEF in Southeast Asia and the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia in New Delhi. She was a board member of the International Advisory Council at the Harvard AIDS Initiative, Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and is currently on the board of the International Foundation for Ewha Womans University. She has worked as a senior consultant for the WHO on women and tobacco issues. She is a member of the steering committee of the C4UN and serves as an expert for the WHO innovation lab for NCDs.^[1] She is the main representative of the International Alliance of Women to the United Nations ECOSOC. In that capacity she was Chair of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, New York from 2011 to 2015 during which the committee launched the Cities for CEDAW campaign. In 2014, she received the CEDAW award for International Comity from the Friends of the Commission on the Status of Women in San Francisco.

She is co-editor with Jonathan Samet of the WHO monograph, "Gender, Women and the Tobacco Epidemic" and former columnist for the EarthTimes newspaper. She has published essays about her life, working with the UN and feminist views on global issues in her book, "Citizen of the World--Soon-Young and the UN" (published by Ewha Womans University Press, August 2021 and in 2022 by Mission Press for the US edition). In 2021, she served on the Advisory Board on Gender Equality of the UN President of the 76th General Assembly, ambassador Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives.

Yoon is married to Richard Mills Smith, former Editor-in-Chief, CEO and Chairman of Newsweek,^[2] and President of the Pinkerton Foundation.

• "Making Rights Real for Future Generations--a CEDAW Workbook",Krishanti Dharmaraj and Soon-Young Yoon, Mission Point Press, 2024.
• "A Feminist Framework for Our Common Agenda", Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Nudhara Yusef and Soon-Young Yoon (eds.),GWL Voices, 2022, online book:https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Feminist-policy-briefs-on-OCA-1.pdf
• "Citizen of the World--Soon-Young and the UN" - Published by Ewha Womans University Press, August 2021 and Mission Point Press, February, 2022.
• Online book: "Citizen of the World-Soon-Young and the UN" www.soon-young.life
• "Gender-Responsive Tobacco Control: Evidence and Options for Policies and Programs", Sarah Hawkes, Kent Buse, Soon-Young Yoon, report summary, UCL Institute for Global Health, October, 2018.
• "Gender, women, and the tobacco epidemic", Jonathan M. Samet and Soon-Young Yoon (eds.), World Health Organization, 2010, ISBN 978 92 4 159951 1
• TEDx talk on global citizenship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXXTayRnS_Q