“Congratulations, you are the 104510th signer of the For Women in Science manifesto’’ – these words have set 2018 on a good note for us at Bashumi Instruments and Control Services (BICS SA) because we know we’ve done something right for the young women that admire us.

“Why’’, you ask.

Well, even though the final number of signers will not have a direct impact on our product sales – it still brings us joy to know that our corporate e-signature could make a life changing difference of whether a young woman in a developing country will have an opportunity to enter a scientific career path or not.

The manifesto “For Women in Science” by L’Oreal and UNESCO touches on some of company’s values pertaining to the field of science. For instance, points like, “prioritize women’s access to senior positions and leadership positions in the sciences’’ and “encourage girls to explore scientific career paths’’ are some of BICS SA pillars.

It is important to us for girls to know that there is room for them in every science lab in the world. It is important that our industry celebrates gender equality through allowing young female scientists the opportunity to participate and be trained in leadership roles. It is also very important for every young woman to know about female scientists – in the days of glass ceilings and gender pay inequality, yet they manage to achieve greatly:

Dr. Shirley Jackson is an African American physicist with a Ph.D. and a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy in New York. Yet some of her greatest accomplishments include making some telecommunications developments, including the touch-tone telephone, the portable fax, caller ID, call waiting and the fiber-optic cable.

Another great female scientist is our nations own, Dr Buyisiwe Sondezi who graduated from the University of Johannesburg in 2014, as a Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental physics of highly correlated matter when she graduated at University of Johannesburg.

She was the first and currently the only African woman with her qualification.

Her thesis was titled, “The physical properties of ferromagnetic CeTX compounds, where T is Copper and Gold and X is Silicon and Germanium”.

Dr Sondezi set grew up in Newcastle, in Kwa-Zulu Natal, which inspires rurally-raised girls to know that they too can reach for the stars if they follow their dreams of wearing lab coats.

These two ladies are a couple of our favourite black female scientists that are captaining industry well into the third decade of the new millennium.

With the pledge https://www.forwomeninscience.com/en/manifesto/73573 that we signed For Women in Science – we’re hoping to see a rise in female inventors and scientists, most especially from Africa.