8 Women Changing the World Right Now

Brianna Agyemang & Jamila Thomas

Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas who co-founded #TheShowMustBePaused are two amazing Black American women creating change to the music industry.  After the unjust death of George Floyd, Brianna and Jamila started a reckoning in the music industry to stop accepting racial injustice. Their actions led to Blackout Tuesday, where businesses shut down in solidarity with the Black community, was participated in by nearly all major labels, agencies, and sectors of the industry. Brianna Agyemang is the Senior Artist Campaign Manager at Platoon and Jamila Thomas is the Senior Director of Marketing at Atlantic Records. 

Swati Mohan, an Indian American woman, confirmed the touchdown of Perseverance on Mars. She is a Guidance, Navigation, & Control Systems Engineer at NASA who developed her interest in space from watching StarTrek. 

Sarah Thomas, an American woman, was the first ever female to officiate a Super Bowl. She was also the first woman to officiate a major college football game, and the first woman to officiate a game in a Big Ten Stadium.

Vanessa Warri is a transgender Nigerian-American woman and social welfare MSW/PhD candidate at UCLA. Warri’s activism fights against the violence inflicted upon trans persons in the US.

Chief Pamela Smith has become the first Black woman to lead the United States Park Police, which is the nation’s oldest federal law enforcement agency.

Reshma Saujani is an American woman who founded the nonprofit Girls Who Code. Girls Who Code has reached over 300,000 girls around the world and brought them the tools to learn and pursue a career in Tech. Dr. Tarika Barrett, a Black American woman who has spent her career in the Department of Education in New York City fighting for marginalized students, will be taking over as the new CEO.

Author: Carla Hendershot