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Olivia B

Mar 12, 2025

7

min read

Women's History Month 2025: Five Women Who Shaped Our Food Systems

For Women’s History Month, we’d like to honor five women who changed the world through food systems, agriculture, and innovation.

Women's History Month 2025: Five Women Who Shaped Our Food Systems

Dr. Maria Andrade shows off her biofortified sweet potatoes.


As we celebrate pioneering women across all industries and fields this Women’s History Month, we would like to acknowledge those who helped create the agricultural world as we know it. From Victorian citizen scientists spearheading ecology from their gardens to modern lawmakers directing government food policy, women have shaped our understanding of sustainability, agricultural science, and conservation throughout history. Here are five of the many whose hard work and knowledge suffuse our food systems to this day. 


Harriet Williams Russell Strong (1844-1926): The Walnut Queen of Whittier

Harriet Strong’s story was laced with adversity from the start. When her husband died by suicide following a chain of failed business ventures, 39-year-old Strong was left with four daughters to support, a mountain of debt, ongoing spinal issues, and a ranch in Whittier, California now threatened by foreclosure. Strong was not one to be cowed by the situation, however, and she quickly set about educating herself on soil, agriculture, irrigation, and business. She decided to plant walnuts, a highly profitable but incredibly thirsty crop. To satiate their water needs, she took advantage of the area’s regular flash flooding to create a novel system of water collection and control structures. Her 1887 patent for dam and reservoir construction featured a series of ascending dams constructed so that when the lower basin filled, water pressure supported the dam above it, acting as both a reserve of water and a reinforcement. 


These inventions allowed her water-hungry walnuts to flourish. Within five years, her walnut farm became the largest in California, and subsequent patents earned her two prizes at the Chicago World’s Fair. Soon her ventures took her to the realms of government and activism, where she spearheaded the Los Angeles Flood Control Act of 1915, served in public office before she even had the right to vote, and attended the US Chamber of Commerce convention as its first female delegate. Alongside Susan B. Anthony, she travelled across the country promoting women’s causes. After her death, the government used her work to build the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal, which she had urged lawmakers to construct throughout her life. 


Today, Strong’s work has rightly led to her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame. As her daughter Hattie put it, “She had the brains to think up a way out and the courage and perseverance to carry her ideas to completion.” 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Mary Engle Pennington (1872-1952): The Ice Woman

Refrigeration is a cornerstone of our food system. Ensuring that transportation maintains an adequate “cold chain” of perishables is critical to our health and the availability of countless foods, such as dairy, meat, and fish. We have Mary Pennington to thank for the abundance of these staples on our shelves. 


Gender barriers in college did not dissuade Pennington from pursuing a robust education. Although she completed the requirements for a BS in Chemistry with minors in zoology and botany, the University of Pennsylvania did not grant degrees to women at the time and instead gave her a certificate of proficiency in 1892. Three years later, when Penn began offering degrees to women, she returned to earn a PhD.  


Pennington joined the US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry, which would later become the Food and Drug Administration, in 1905. Following the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, she became the FDA’s first female lab chief and turned her attention to developing safety protocols for preventing contamination in chicken and milk processing. An engineer as well as a scientist, Pennington investigated refrigeration cars across the US, created standards for their construction, patented multiple food safety inventions, and later helped design commercial and consumer refrigerators.  


Pennington’s work was applauded by her peers both during her life and after. Herbert Hoover awarded her the Notable Service Medal in 1919; the American Chemical Society, of which she was a member, granted her the Garvan-Olin Medal for her achievements as a female scientist; in 1941, the New Yorker celebrated and profiled her as the “Ice Woman” of refrigeration; and she received numerous prestigious fellowships throughout her career. Posthumously, she was the first woman inducted into the Poultry Historical Society Hall of Fame, and she now also resides in the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Alice Catherine Evans (1881-1975): The Pasteurization Champion

Alice Evans is best known for her research on bacterial contamination in raw milk, and her work was critical to normalizing pasteurization and codifying procedures that keep us safe today. She received a BS in bacteriology from Cornell in 1909 and an MS from the University of Wisconsin in 1910, becoming the first woman to receive a bacteriology scholarship from the college. Instead of pursuing a PhD, she joined the Dairy Division of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the USDA and turned her attention to brucellosis, an infection that causes sudden miscarriages in animals. Though it was thought to pose a risk to humans, the disease was not well understood. 


Evans connected brucellosis to a human condition called undulant fever, identified the bacterium causing the painful condition, and hypothesized that it could be passed from cows to humans by consumption of raw milk. When she published her findings in 1917, her work was met with a fierce wave of criticism. The idea that a female scientist, lacking a PhD, had discovered something that her decorated male peers had overlooked, was unthinkable. Her findings, however, were verified a few years later, and Evans was vindicated. 


Evans was elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists in 1927 but could not attend her own inauguration because she was suffering from brucellosis herself, which she’d contracted during her research. Despite her illness, she continued to advocate for pasteurization of milk and study other bacteria like streptococcus. Even after her official retirement, she continued working in the field, and she became a popular speaker, lecturing on women’s education, business, and scientific careers. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her discovery is now considered one of the most important public health contributions of the 20th century. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Evangelina Villegas (1924-2017): The Maize Maestra

The world would be a hungrier place without Evangelina Villegas’ innovative work on corn and her development of Quality Protein Maize (QPM). Educated at the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, she began working for Mexico’s National Institute of Nutrition in 1950 and initiated the Wheat Industrial Quality Chemical Laboratory in 1957. In the 1960s, she earned an MS in cereals from Kansas State University and a PhD in cereal chemistry and breeding from North Dakota State University, then joined the Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) back in Mexico. 


At CIMMYT, Villegas began working with Dr. Surinder Vasal to develop corn with higher protein and greater nutritional value. Through chemistry and plant breeding, the two produced a QPM variety that not only had high levels of lysine and tryptophan (two important amino acids) but also tasted good. This new maize, which farmers started growing in Ghana and several African countries in the 1990s, quickly proved a success. Children who ate QPM grew faster and had lower incidence of malnutrition disorders than those who did not. For their work, Villegas and Vasal were jointly awarded the World Food Prize in 2000, and Villegas was the first woman to ever receive it. Then-president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo also granted Villegas the 2000 Woman of the Year Award. 


Villegas served CIMMYT until 1989, traveling the globe to educate young scientists and consult for national research programs in Asia, Africa, and other parts of Latin America. Today, over 75% of the maize grown in Ghana is QPM, and Villegas’ research has nourished millions of children in developing countries. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Dr. Maria Isabel Andrade (1958-Present): The Sweet Potato Savant 

Like Evangelina Villegas before her, Maria Andrade set her sights on another staple food that could be bred to reduce malnutrition: the sweet potato. And, like Villegas, she won a World Food Prize for her work, alongside Drs. Robert Mwanga, Jan Low, and Howarth Bouis in 2016. 


Born in Cape Verde, Andrade received her BS and MS in plant genetics from the University of Arizona and started a vegetable planting program back home on the West African island the following year. She began to wonder if the humble sweet potato could be a solution to drought-related famines as it often bore harvests while other crops withered in the Cape Verde heat. When she headed to North Carolina to complete her PhD in plant breeding, the orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) became her focus.  


During and after her doctorate, Andrade bred sweet potatoes for traits that made them drought-resistant, such as thicker stems, smaller leaves, and insulating canopies that seal in moisture. When the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture sent her to Southern Africa, she learned that vitamin A deficiencies were ravaging Mozambique communities. She set about creating more varieties of high yield, biofortified OFSP to combat this issue alongside Mwanga, Low, and Bouis at the International Potato Center (CIP). 


Andrade and her team also recognized that encouraging adoption of the new OFSP was a social matter, not just a scientific one. They launched a campaign entitled “the sweet that gives health,” which entailed creating new recipes for sweet potatoes using local ingredients like sugarcane, donning bright orange wardrobes, and working with farmers to replace the pale-fleshed, vitamin-poor traditional breeds with the resilient varieties they’d developed. OFSP is now grown everywhere from Cape Verde to Bangladesh, and Andrade continues to fight vitamin deficiency and malnutrition through her work. 


Sources & Further Reading 


Learn About More Women Whose Work Changed Food Systems! 

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The Inner Workings of Empathy

Writer: Abby BeachAbby Beach
Mar 29, 20244 min read

The Global Impact Collective embraces design thinking collaboration and human-centered design as a part of our process. At the core of both innovation practices is empathy. By grounding ourselves in an understanding of the realities of the other person’s experience, we can get a better understanding of what they are thinking, feeling, and doing so that we design appropriate solutions. Empathy enables designers to create solutions that are user-centric rather than aesthetic or technical. Many complex problems require empathy to fully define the problem. When users feel seen and heard, they feel valued, which can build a strong connection and even brand loyalty. Taking an empathetic approach allows designers to consider the diverse needs and backgrounds of the people interacting with the product or service, enabling more inclusive design.


As a lifelong nerd, who always wants to know how things work, made me want to understand empathy at a deeper level. What connections are being made? Does the person experiencing empathy change because of those feelings? Are there personal benefits to being empathetic? What is the neuroscience of empathy? Here is what I have learned so far: 


Psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists are continuing to study empathy because it is a complex process that involves multiple parts of the brain. There are two main types of empathy that are combined, as follows:


1.      Cognitive empathy - grasping another person’s perspective.

a. Understanding more deeply what someone feels and thinks.


2.      Affective empathy - having an emotional sharing component.

a. Feeling what another person is feeling. 

b. Then, feeling concern by the other person’s plight.

c. Finally, feeling compassion for the other person, which can trigger helping behavior.[1] 


Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman posit that the final step in affective empathy is actually a separate type of empathy called compassionate empathy, arguing that moving from feelings to being compelled to take an action to help someone are two distinctly different things.   


Neuroscience has been exploring how the brain functions to enable people to understand and share the emotions and experiences of others, involving both cognitive and affective components. Here are some of the top insights from Neuroscience on empathy: 


  • Empathy may be hardwired in humans.[2]

  • Almost 98% of humans feel empathy for others. (The remaining percentage are people with antisocial personality disorder.)[3] 

  • According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, although empathy increases with training, levels may decrease over time after training, suggesting the importance of ongoing skill development. 

  • Neuroscientists refer to the process of empathizing in the brain as simultaneously “bottom up” and “top down,” or as having an emotional response to stimulus combined with cognitive evaluation. And here are the neural mechanisms underlying empathy: 


o   Mirror Neurons: These neurons fire off when an individual performs an action or even when they observe someone else performing the same action. Essentially the neurons facilitate understanding someone’s actions, intentions, and emotions by simulating them in their own brain. 


o   Empathy Network: Neuroimaging studies have identified a network of brain regions involved in empathy including the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction. The anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex are particularly important for emotional empathy, while the medial prefrontal cortex, and temporoparietal junction are involved in cognitive empathy and perspective-taking.


o   Empathy and Theory of Mind: Theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—to oneself and others. Empathy and theory of mind are closely related processes, and both involve the ability to understand and interpret the internal experiences of others. Neuroimaging studies suggest that overlapping brain regions are involved in both empathy and theory of mind.


  • Development of empathy begins in childhood and adolescence and is influenced by both genetics and environment. Brain imaging studies have found that adolescents show increased activation in empathy-related brain regions compared to children, suggesting that development of empathic abilities is ongoing during this period.

  • There is some recent research on empathy suggesting that people may be becoming less empathic. That makes intuitive sense when you think about how society is increasingly divisive and how distracted we are by our digital devices, you can see how we are lessening our attention on others and how they might be feeling. 

Understanding the inner workings of empathy, and how we are wired to engage in it, reinforces for me the personal importance of looking for opportunities to use, practice, and build empathy.  Now, in Human Centered Design and design thinking, empathy is vital to creating solutions that are truly meeting the needs of users, for identifying unmet needs, generating useful insights, and building trust and connection with users.


What are some other benefits of building our empathy skills?


1.       Increases social connections overall. The pandemic demonstrated how detrimental isolation is for humans and empathy in your daily life will build human connections. 


2.      Strengthens emotional intelligence. Empathy encourages us to be more appreciative of other people’s perspectives, encouraging acceptance and open mindedness. 


3.     Reduces prejudice and bias. It can help mitigate prejudice and bias by promoting understanding and acceptance of diverse perspectives and experiences. 


4.      Promotes cooperation and collaboration. When individuals empathize with their team members, they are more likely to offer help, provide support, and work towards common goals, contributing to a more productive and harmonious environment.


5.      Resolves conflicts. Empathetic individuals are better equipped to navigate conflicts and disagreements constructively. 


6.      Enhances the quality of relationships. By paying attention and responding to other people’s needs, you build trust and can deepen your relationships. 


7.      Builds leadership skills. By being empathetic you improve your capacity to communicate well with others and can inspire workers to do their best.  


Overall, empathy serves as a fundamental building block for healthy relationships, effective communication, emotional well-being, and societal progress, ultimately enriching people's lives in myriad ways. Nearly everyone has the capacity to be empathetic and the more you practice empathy, the better at it you can become.

What I enjoy about collaborating in Design Thinking workshops is that it is a way to invite people to be more empathetic. To consciously connect with what someone else may be thinking, seeing, doing, and feeling. 


If you would like to learn more about human centered design or introduce your team to design thinking and empathy building, please get in touch.

 

“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.” – John Steinbeck

 


[1] Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, Hodges and Myers, (2007)

[2] "Human brains are hardwired for empathy, friendship." James Coan, University of Virginia, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience journal (August 2013)

[3] Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It, Roman Krznaric, (2015)

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