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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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Unlocking the creative potential of mission-driven organizations

Writer: James BernardJames Bernard
Dec 19, 20234 min read

At its core, design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to problem-solving that places empathy for end-users at the forefront. In many ways, it maps perfectly to the mission of social sector organizations.


Over the last several decades, design thinking has emerged as a potent tool driving innovation and problem-solving across diverse industries. Companies in dozens of sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, agribusiness, and consumer packaged goods have applied the concepts of design thinking or even built entire internal design organizations to better support their business.   

 

If you are a leader in a mission-driven organization, you may have heard or read about design thinking and wondered how it could apply to your organization.  The good news is that social sector organizations—NGOs, nonprofits, charities, and other mission-driven entities—are recognizing the transformative potential of design thinking to address complex societal challenges.  


By launching the Global Impact Collective, we seek to capture this important momentum by teaming a diverse group of world-renowned design experts with social impact and sustainability experts. We believe that together, we can help mission-driven organizations unlock their creative potential to solve some of the biggest challenges facing people and the planet.  


Here’s why incorporating design-thinking methodologies can be a game-changer for social sector entities. 

 

At its core, design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to problem-solving that places empathy for end-users at the forefront. For example, when our co-founder, Steve Kaneko, was designing keyboards and mice for Microsoft, his teams would talk to dozens of consumers and end users before ever considering product features. They then apply the design thinking process to better define the problem, ideate solutions, prototype, and test—all aimed at building products that would be both innovative and functional. Design thinking encourages creativity, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the root causes of problems. 

 


Below are six reasons that you should consider design thinking as a part of your organization’s planning and program development: 

 

1. Embracing Human-Centric Solutions 

Social sector organizations are dedicated to serving communities and addressing critical societal, environmental, equity, or economic issues. Design thinking aligns seamlessly with these objectives because – by its nature design thinking places the needs and experiences of beneficiaries at the center. At the end of the day, social sector organizations serve people. The programs you create must be relevant to those people. Using this process and empathizing with the people you aim to help, these organizations can gain profound insights, leading to more effective, contextually relevant interventions.  

2. Iterative Problem-Solving 

Complex social challenges often lack straightforward solutions. For example, a lack of affordable housing in many US cities, combined with a lack of mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, has led to a greater number of homeless people. Design thinking thrives in such ambiguous and complex environments because it fosters an empathetic, iterative, and collaborative approach.   Following the pandemic, Surya Vanka, a partner at the Global Impact Collective, was asked by the City of Seattle to organize and facilitate a series of workshops focused on homelessness in the region. These sessions included input from advocates, government organizations, non-profits, neighborhood groups, and the unhoused themselves. Through this process, solutions were continuously refined and evolved based on feedback, learning, and real-world testing, culminating in a new understanding of the issues surrounding homelessness, especially for women, and innovative new solutions.

3. Encouraging Collaborative Innovation 

Cross-disciplinary collaboration is a hallmark of design thinking; in fact, you will land on better results if you involve organizations and stakeholders from outside your own.  By involving diverse perspectives—ranging from beneficiaries to stakeholders, volunteers, experts, and community members—organizations can unlock a wealth of creative ideas and approaches. This collaborative environment encourages fresh insights and promotes a collective sense of ownership in addressing societal problems. 

4. Flexibility and Adaptability 

Social sector organizations often face evolving external challenges that can be influenced by multifaceted factors. In the Seattle example above, organizations were dealing with much post-pandemic uncertainty, a slow economic recovery, an increase in opioid addictions, as well as a new mayoral administration. Because design thinking is a very adaptable and adaptive process, organizations can pivot and adapt swiftly to changing circumstances. It encourages a mindset that welcomes change and embraces experimentation, fostering resilience in navigating uncertain environments. 

5. Problem Redefinition and Deep Understanding 

Design thinking challenges organizations to redefine problems by delving deeper into their root causes. It encourages reframing issues, asking probing questions, and seeking nuanced insights. This process often unveils unconventional solutions by challenging preconceived notions about the nature of the problem. 

6. Impact Measurement and Validation 

For social sector entities, demonstrating impact for funders, board members, partners, and beneficiaries is critical.  Design thinking emphasizes prototyping and testing solutions in real-world settings. This approach facilitates continuous feedback loops, enabling organizations to measure the effectiveness of interventions and validate their impact, thus ensuring resource allocation towards solutions that truly make a difference. 


 

While the benefits are evident, adopting design thinking in the social sector comes with challenges. Limited resources, hierarchical structures, and resistance to change might impede its implementation. However, overcoming these hurdles through leadership buy-in, capacity-building, and a commitment to fostering a culture of innovation can pave the way for its successful integration. 

 

In a landscape fraught with intricate societal challenges, social sector organizations stand as catalysts for positive change. Embracing design thinking methodologies empowers these entities to innovate, collaborate, and craft sustainable solutions that truly resonate with the communities they serve. By placing empathy, creativity, and adaptability at the forefront, design thinking becomes not just a methodology but a mindset—an approach that fuels transformative impact in the pursuit of a better world. 

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