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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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Harnessing Human-Centered AI for Societal Good: Insights from Seattle's Design and Impact Community

Writer: James BernardJames Bernard
Oct 18, 20246 min read

A Malawian farmer uses the UlangiziAI app to better understand how to determine crop health. The app uses a WhatsApp front end to communicate with farmers in a format that is familiar to them.



In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, it's crucial to pause and consider how we can harness this powerful technology for the betterment of society.

  

Recently, the Global Impact Collective brought together members of Seattle's design and impact community to explore this topic. Our event, "Harnessing Human-Centered AI for Societal Good," featured an engaging panel discussion with experts from diverse backgrounds, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by AI. 



Our Distinguished Panel 


We were fortunate to host three remarkable experts: 

 

1. Ruth Kikin-Gil, Responsible AI Strategist at Microsoft 

2. Jennifer Dumas, Chief Counsel at Allen Institute for AI 

3. Greg Nelson, Chief Technology Officer of Opportunity International 

 

Their varied experiences and perspectives led to a rich, thought-provoking discussion that touched on several key themes. 



Key Discussion Themes 


Defining AI: Beyond the Buzzword 

One of the first challenges we face when discussing AI is defining what we mean by the term. As our panelists pointed out, AI isn't a monolithic entity but rather an umbrella term covering thousands of different technologies.  


This complexity underscores the nuances that should be considered when discussing AI's capabilities and implications. For instance, AI can be categorized into narrow AI, which is designed to perform a specific task (like voice recognition or image classification), and general AI, which aims to understand and reason across a wide range of contexts, though we are still far from achieving this level of sophistication. Moreover, the rapid progress in AI research and development has led to a proliferation of techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing, and neural networks, each with its own set of ethical considerations and operational challenges. 


  • The AI Landscape: According to a 2021 Stanford University report, AI publications have grown by 270% in the last five years, indicating the rapid expansion and diversification of the field and the proliferation of new technologies, as outlined above. 


  • Extractive vs. Generative AI  


    • Extractive AI focuses on analyzing and deriving insights from existing data, greatly reducing the risks. Examples include sentiment analysis tools and recommendation systems. Greg Nelson cited an example where Opportunity International is working on an AI-driven agronomy tool, called UlangiziAI, for smallholder farmers in Malawi. Rather than pull from broadly available online information, the model was built using specific data from the Ministry of Agriculture in Malawi, making the information more relevant for farmers in that country. “This way, we know that farmers are getting the best and most relevant data for their own circumstances,” he said. If you’d like more information on this tool, you can read recent articles on Devex and Bloomberg. 


    • Generative AI, on the other hand, creates new content based on learned patterns. It can be used as a creative prompt but shouldn’t be used as a definitive source of the truth. Generative AI includes technologies like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, which can generate human-like text, and GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) used in creating realistic images. These tools, while impressive, may not have the depth for specific AI applications in impact and sustainability. 

 

  • Risk Assessment: The level of risk associated with AI applications varies greatly. For instance, an AI system used for movie recommendations carries far less risk than one used in healthcare diagnostics or criminal justice decision-making. 


  • AI as a Tool: Our panelists emphasized that generative AI should be viewed as a creative prompt rather than a source of factual information. A 2022 study by MIT researchers found that even state-of-the-art language models can generate factually incorrect information in up to 30% of cases, highlighting the importance of human oversight and verification. 



Navigating the Policy Gap 

A significant concern in the AI landscape is the lag between technological development and policy creation.  


  • Policy Development Timeline: Historical precedents suggest that comprehensive policy often lags technological innovation by several years. For example, it took nearly a decade after the widespread adoption of social media for the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to come into effect in 2018. 


  • Legal Liability Challenges: The lack of a comprehensive legal liability rubric for AI poses significant challenges. In the U.S., existing laws like the Communications Decency Act (Section 230) provide some protections for online platforms, but they weren't designed with AI in mind.  


  • Cultural Adaptation: As Jennifer Dumas pointed out, "We released a mature technology without the culture having caught up to that." This echoes concerns raised by scholars like Shoshana Zuboff in her book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," which argues that our social and economic systems are struggling to adapt to the rapid pace of technological change. 


  • Ethical Frameworks: The discussion brought to mind Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, highlighting the need for ethical frameworks in AI development. While these laws were fictional, they've inspired real-world efforts like the IEEE's Ethically Aligned Design guidelines and the EU's Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. 



Ensuring Informed Consent in Diverse Contexts 

The concept of informed consent becomes increasingly complex in the context of AI, especially when considering global applications, and users from diverse backgrounds, some of whom may not even be familiar with major technological platforms like Google.  

 

For instance, in many developing countries, the lack of digital literacy can lead to users unknowingly consenting to data practices that exploit their information. Additionally, the concept of informed consent is not uniform across cultures, which complicates the ethical deployment of AI systems globally. Engaging local communities in the design and implementation of AI systems is crucial to ensuring that their voices and needs are prioritized. 

 

  • Digital Divide: According to the International Telecommunication Union, as of 2023, approximately 2.7 billion people worldwide still lack internet access. This digital divide raises questions about how to ensure informed consent in regions with limited exposure to technology. One way to overcome this, according to our panelists, is to use existing technologies, such as WhatsApp, as the front end for AI-generated tools on the backend. 


  • AI in Emerging Markets: There's a risk of perpetuating digital colonialism through AI implementation in emerging markets if practitioners don’t involve local communities in decision making.  


    Getting information on crop health using the UlangiziAI app in Malawi.

A 2021 report by Mozilla highlighted how AI systems trained primarily on data from Western countries often perform poorly when applied in different cultural contexts. Greg Nelson reinforced this notion by talking about the importance of using locally available datasets and local language to train models.  


  • Stakeholder Identification: Our panelists emphasized the importance of considering all stakeholders affected by an AI system, beyond just the immediate users. This aligns with the concept of "stakeholder theory" in business ethics, which argues that companies should create value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. 


Building Trust in AI 

Trust is fundamental to the widespread adoption and ethical use of AI yet remains a significant barrier for broader adoption.  


  • Current Trust Levels: A 2022 global survey by Edelman found that only 37% of respondents trust AI companies to "do what is right." This underscores the point made by Ruth Kikin-Gil that "the technology hasn't earned the trust yet." 


  • Misinformation Risks: The potential for AI to generate and spread misinformation is a significant concern. A 2020 study published in Nature Machine Intelligence found that AI-generated text was rated as more credible than human-written text in certain contexts, highlighting the need for robust detection and verification systems. 


  • AI in Critical Decisions: As our panelists noted, when people's lives depend on AI, such as in healthcare or criminal justice, the margin for error must be extremely low. A 2016 ProPublica investigation into COMPAS, an AI system used in criminal risk assessment, found significant racial biases in its predictions, underscoring the importance of rigorous testing and oversight. 


  • Inclusive AI Development: Building trust with underrepresented groups who have historically been marginalized by technology is crucial. Initiatives like the AI for Good Foundation are working to ensure AI benefits all of humanity, not just a select few. 


AI in the Broader Context of Technology 

Finally, our discussion touched on how AI fits into the broader landscape of technological advancement: 

 

  • Over-reliance on Technology: The tendency to over-rely on new technologies, as exemplified by early GPS adoption, is a well-documented phenomenon in technology adoption studies. A 2022 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that people tend to defer to AI recommendations even when they conflict with their own judgement. This means that developers, policymakers, and users must fully understand the limitations of AI and remain critical thinkers when using it. 


  • Amara's Law: Named after Roy Amara, this principle suggests we tend to overestimate technology's short-term effects while underestimating its long-term impact. This is evident in the history of AI itself - the field has experienced several "AI winters" where hype outpaced actual capabilities, followed by periods of significant but less publicized progress. 



Join the Conversation 


This event was part of an ongoing series aimed at professionals working at the intersection of human-centered design and social impact. Our next event, focusing on food waste, is scheduled for January 2025. 

 

To stay informed about future events, follow the Global Impact Collective on LinkedIn. If you're interested in learning more about our work or discussing potential collaborations, visit our website or reach out to us at info@globalimpactcollective.net. 

 

As AI continues to shape our world, it's crucial that we engage in these discussions and work together to ensure that this powerful technology is harnessed for the greater good. We invite you to be part of this important conversation. 



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