SiSTEM Year-in-Review (…Actually 5 Months!)

SiSTEM Year-in-Review (…actually 5 months!)

?Let’s take it back to the 15th of August 2022. It’s?7:28pm?on SiSTEM launch day. Donna and I are about to hit the ‘go live’ button on Instagram for the very first time. Naturally we’re nervous, not knowing if a single person will join in of if it would be 60mins of tumbleweed moments and non-retractable mistakes.

Little did we know, (16 Instagram lives, 4 YouTube recordings, 12 interns, 474 Instagram followers (and counting) later), what the next 5 months would entail for SiSTEM.

Since our launch, we’ve had the privilege to speak to more than 20 black women across the STEM field. Engineers, medical doctors, PhD candidates and graduates, software developers, scientists and even a mathematician/fashion designer, to name a few.?

It’s hard to believe we used to think we were the only ones who looked like us, feeling alone and out of of depth in our respective fields.?

On speaking to the various women we’ve learnt that you may be the only black female in your department/lab group/lecture room/work team but you are no means alone. There are so many of us doing and achieving wonderful, ground-breaking things and breaking barriers everyday.?

We started SiSTEM because we had a dream, we didn’t want to another girl to feel alone or feel like she couldn’t achieve.

Here are some of our 2022 highlights:?

E&T interview and collaborations?

This year we’ve had the honour to be guests on various podcasts, and one of our notable appearances was on the wonderful Dr Shini Somara’s (TV producer and engineer) podcast ‘Innervation’.?

We thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, for the first time we could share our back story - two sisters from Brixton who pursued their science and engineering dreams despite personal failures and institutional barriers.?

In one of those ‘pinch me ‘ moments we were featured in the E&T magazine following this.?

We also collaborated with excellent companies/institutions such as the institution of mechanical engineers (IMechE), with their first Instagram live and institute of biomedical scientists (IBMS), during their black history month campaign.?

It gave us hope that there are companies wanting to increase diversity and inclusion and making moves to close the gaps.?

Visit to UCL?

In November, we were invited to the UCL ACS career fair as a visiting organisation. Until then, our work was solely online and this was the first in-person event. For those who attended the event, I’m sure you could agree when I say you couldn’t miss us! We had a pink table, there were pink balloons, pink merch, Donna even had pink trousers on.?

We loved speaking with the students (both male and female) and talking with other company representatives.?

Words like ‘you make me want to do STEM’, ‘it’s great to see girls like us making it’, ‘you show us we can be ourselves’ reminded us why we started our platform.?

We came away motivated to carry on with our much needed work.?

The IET young woman engineer of the year awards?

Early this month, we got all dressed up to attend the YWE awards 2022 hosted by TV’s Oti Mabuse. It was amazing meeting some of the women we’ve featured on our page and equally being recognised as the SiSTEM girls!?

For me, it was standard to go to conferences and be the only black researcher present.?

This was different, this event oozed diversity! You could see diversity amongst the finalists and the room was full of women from all walks of life, to top it all a British Ghanaian woman won!?

To be in a room with so many talented and intelligent women who were doing ground-breaking work in the engineering world was both inspiring and mind-blowing.

This was what all aspiring STEM girls needed to see, the girl struggling with her physics exam, the woman having to dim down her femininity in a male dominated office, the little girl who already thinks STEM is not for her, they all needed to see these scenes.?

Lessons of 2022

Over the last five months, we’ve learnt there are so many women out there who want change in the STEM field. We are no longer just two of sisters with one dream, we are now a network. A community wanting to disrupt the status-quo.?

We’ve also learnt we can be unapologetically ourselves . That very first live, we were scared of being ourselves, just in case it offended anyone or wasn’t deemed proper.?

But we pride in our challenges and we will not shy away from telling our stories and realities as black women in STEM.??

We’ve found a space where we can be ourselves and give other girls the platform to do so.?

We’ve really appreciated our sisterhood and understand more than ever the power of women supporting one another. Back in 2020, mid-pandemic, I was struggling to write a single sentence in my Word document entitled ‘PhD thesis’ and Donna was struggling to complete her mechanical engineering degree but it was the support we gave each other that kept us going. That was what we wanted to extend to other girls, in creating our platform.?

Ultimately we’ve learnt when you have a dream, do it! 12 months ago SiSTEM was just an idea and a empty Instagram page with a single post and followed by a few of our loyal friends.?

As the year comes to a close we look forward to what the next year will hold. We are particularly excited for our university tours starting with a uni I spent the better part of 3 years separating male and female fruit flies in a tiny, window-less 5th floor lab (read my PhD thesis to understand!). We have more face to face events planned including school visits and planning to meet up with our network in-person. The best part of all it - although we’ve spoken to many women in STEM, there are so many more out there. We look forward to making new connections and learning about careers we’ve never knew existed.?

It’s only the beginning and there is much work to be done when it comes to diversity and inclusion. The solution to the issue is not one way but here at SiSTEM we are committed to do our part.?

Here’s to the next 12 months!?