International Women's Day Celebrates Women's Achievements; Strives for More

When I think about "an enabled world" I think about space. The planets, stars, and moon kind of space. Rocket ships and Mars Rovers. Science and math and breaking barriers. And astronauts.

NASA first opened the space program to female applicants in 1978. Six of the 35 people selected from 8,000 applicants were women. One of those six was Sally Ride, a physicist who applied after seeing an ad in the Stanford student newspaper. She became the first American woman in space.

Opportunities for women were ridiculously constrained back the seventies. Sally Ride gave her parents credit for her entrance into science and then space. She told reporters that "anytime I wanted to pursue something, they let me go ahead and do it. Sally's mother said that she and Sally's father simply "forgot" to tell their daughters that there were things they couldn't do.

"An equal world is an enabled world. #EachforEqual" 

Last year, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch completed the first all-female spacewalk. Meir says she was inspired after watching Space Shuttle missions in the eighties on television. "I saw women. I saw men. I saw people from different backgrounds."

"An equal world is an enabled world. #EachforEqual"

A few days ago, Katherine Johnson, NASA mathematician, passed away. President Obama awarded Mrs. Johnson the Medal of Freedom in 2015, but many of us learned the most about Mrs. Johnson and other remarkable women NASA mathematicians from the movie Hidden Figures.