Trailblazers like Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist and CEO of STEMBoard, and Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls CODE, are breaking barriers and inspiring the next generation. From creating accessible STEM education tools to bridging gender and racial gaps in tech, these women exemplify excellence. Here are 5 Black female CEOs leading the charge in tech.
Aisha Bowe
Aisha Bowe is a Bahamian-American aerospace engineer, entrepreneur, and STEM advocate, as well as the Founder and CEO of STEMBoard — an award-winning woman-owned tech company — and LINGO, an educational tech company. Though her high school guidance counselor recommended that she become a cosmetologist, Bowe took a mathematics class at her local community college, which later allowed her to transfer into engineering programs.
After completing her undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering in 2008 and master’s degree in space systems engineering in 2009, Bowe worked at NASA. She assisted in the development of algorithms in support of Air Traffic Management. While at NASA, she also served as a liaison to the Mathematics, Engineering, Science, and Achievement Program, where she mentored students and helped run interview workshops.
Her youth tech education company, LINGO, makes project-based activities for kids, which include coding kits that teach hardware and software design. The first kit taught children to create and code a backup sensor for autonomous cars.
Kimberly Bryant
Kimberly Bryant is an African-American electrical engineer who previously worked in the biotechnology field. She excelled in mathematics and science in school, which earned her a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University. She initially wanted to become a civil engineer, but her interests shifted towards microchips, personal computers, and portable cellphones, so she switched her major and earned a degree in electrical engineering and minors in computer science.
In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code to rectify the underrepresentation of African-American girls and women in tech careers. Black Girls Code is a non-profit organization that focuses on engaging African-American girls and other youth of color with computer programming education, with the goal of placing one million girls in tech by 2040. It’s worth noting that she turned down a sizable donation from Uber, calling their offer disingenuous and “PR-driven.”
Joy Buolamwini
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab. She grew up in Mississippi, attending high school in Tennessee. Her pursuit of tech education and career was inspired by Kismet, an MIT robot she saw when she was nine — after which she taught herself XHTML, JavaScript, and PHP. She later studied computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and worked at the MIT Media Lab, where she helped identify bias in algorithms and developed practices for accountability during algorithmic design.
In 2016, Boulamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), a digital advocacy non-profit that aims to increase societal awareness regarding the use of AI in society, as well as the harms and biases that AI can potentially pose. The organization was named one of the ten most innovative AI companies in the world. She also worked with AI ethicist Timnit Gebru to release a study on both racial and gender bias in facial recognition algorithms developed by major companies, such as Microsoft and IBM.
Joy Buolamwini
Angelica Ross is an American actor — you might’ve seen her in Her Story and American Horror Story — a businesswoman, a transgender activist, and a self-taught computer programmer. After graduating high school at 17, she joined the US Navy. Upon coming back home after her six-month service, she worked as a waitress before starting her own web development and graphic design business.
She learned graphic design and photography using online videos and courses, and she used her skills to take photos for rappers and design backstage passes. In 2014, Ross founded TransTech Social Enterprises, acting as the company’s CEO. The company is an incubator for LGBTQ talent focused on economically empowering transgender people. Ross is also a founder of the TransTech Summit, an annual online event that is specifically aimed at fostering skills in the tech industry, especially for trans people.
Timnit Gebru
Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist working in the field of AI and algorithmic bias. She was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and her family fled the country during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. Her family came to the United States, and she attended high school in Massachusetts, where she experienced racial discrimination; some teachers even refused to let her take certain advanced placement courses despite her academic prowess.
She was later accepted at Stanford, where she earned a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer vision. Gebru and Google made headlines in 2020 in the field of AI ethics after she refused to pull the paper that highlighted some “inconvenient truths” that involved Google employees. Gebru is a founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and a co-founder of Black in AI, a non-profit that teaches computer programming and algorithms to Ethiopian high-school students.