Celebrating Juneteenth - Part 2

Happy Juneteenth! If you haven't read my previous blog post yet, click here to read part 1 of the Juneteenth blog posts. If you have, welcome back! As I mentioned in my last article, today, I wanted to highlight some incredible stories of trailblazing African American women in STEM.

To set the stage for just how ground-breaking these stories were and still are today, I wanted to list some stats. Currently, women make up 29% of the STEM workforce, 19% of STEM company board members, and, astonishingly, 3% of STEM industry CEOs. And this is in 2022! As if it couldn't get more shocking, the National Science Foundation reports only 11.5% of the STEM field population are women of color. Furthermore, BIWOC (Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Latinx women) are less than 5% of the workforce. If that isn't enough reason for more STEM exposure and funding for girls, I'm not sure what is!

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Katherine Johnson

If you've watched the Academy Award-winning movie Hidden Figures, then you've heard of the mathematician and NASA scientist Katherine Johnson. After discovering her love for learning, Johnson progressed through school rapidly, graduating college at a mere 18 years old. She began teaching after college. She then applied for a job at NASA as a "computer." At the time, NASA was hiring African American women to solve math problems. She actually did not get the job the first time around, but the following year, she applied again and was hired. While she was at NASA, she made a significant impact. She started attending previously male-only meetings, moving her way up and changing NASA for the better. For NASA's aspirations to reach the moon, she worked to solve calculations and determine the path to send a shuttle to the moon and back.

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Madam C.J. Walker (or Sarah Breedlove)

You have most definitely heard of the infamous robber-barons Carnegie and Rockefeller, but have you ever heard of Madam C.J. Walker? Walker was the first female self-made millionaire in America and the first Black millionaire, using her entrepreneurial skills to create her own business. The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company sold cosmetics and hair care products for black women in Indiana, and Walker is known for defining the way to straighten hair with her formula. Her story is truly one of grit and perseverance, and self-made is honestly quite an understatement. Born in the 1860s in an America defined by slavery, she was a sharecropper (a tenant of farmland who pays for the land by giving the owner a share of the crops produced) in Louisiana, born to formerly enslaved parents. With an investment of $1.25, she started her business, growing it to unprecedented heights with her entrepreneurial acumen, while continuing to be an activist and using her money to give back to her community.

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Dr. Gladys West

If someone gave you an address for their house and a physical map of the city, do you think you could find it? Well, good thing you don't have to face that problem because of GPS. For GPS, you can thank Dr. Glady West, who conducted the math that laid the foundation for the creation of GPS. Growing up in rural Virginia in 1930, West's career options were limited, but her work ethic led her to push those limitations. After graduating from the HBCU Virginia State College on a full scholarship, she went on to teach math in racially segregated schools. Later, she used her skills and knowledge as a mathematician to work for a U.S. naval weapons lab - one of only a few Black employees. She continued to break barriers, both as a woman of color and an incredible mathematician, working on groundbreaking computer programs and calculations, including the basis of GPS.

If you are interested in reading more stories like these, check out these posts as well!

Mae Jemison - The first African American woman in space

Xaviera Kowo - The creator of a waste treatment robot that won her a prestigious award

Ivy Barley - The Ghanian entrepreneur who launched "Developers in Vogue"