RECOGNITION IS GREAT …

But it’s even more important to celebrate women and their importance every day

It’s not rocket science to achieve gender parity — do what you can, when you can, every day, not just on International Women’s Day, March 8.

Dr. Olympia LePoint has boldly gone where no woman has gone before — well, very few — and against all odds. She had to overcome poverty, failing math and science in high school, gang violence, and facial disfigurement to later become an award-winning rocket scientist working at NASA.

“The only way that you can change your life is by changing the way you think about yourself, people and situations,” LePoint says. “Boldness comes from choosing a new way to see the world. When we take actions based on new, courageous thoughts, the power of our lives unleashes itself to change the world.”

She’s a modern-day Hidden Figures character. And just like the unsung NASA team of African-American women portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film who helped launch astronaut John Glenn into space in 1962, she faced adversities and challenges while breaking gender and science boundaries.

When she first started out working as a rocket scientist at Boeing, she was only 21 years old. That was in 1998. “At times, I was the only woman in a room filled with 200 male engineers.”

She rocketed forward through rampant workplace sexism using her math skills to help calculate the probability of catastrophic explosions in space flights, and has since helped launch 28 space missions in her nearly 10-year tenure at NASA, including Endeavor, Atlantis, Columbia and Discovery.

LePoint’s journey began when she was six years old: “I went to a school field trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. I told myself I wanted to be like the men I saw launching rockets.”

That launched her passion, but much stood in her way, including an impoverished childhood, being raised by a single mother — and her one meal a day was often at school. “We lived next door to a crack house, and because my mother’s bedroom wall bordered our neighbour, she positioned her bed so that a bullet would hit her feet if it ever came in through the wall.”

In high school, she failed algebra, geometry and calculus. Her Grade 11 math teacher offered to tutor her for free. “That teacher changed the course of my life, because he taught me how to think differently. He helped me realize the true power of my brain and that my biggest roadblock was fear.”

LePoint ended up in the top five of her graduating class of 6,500 at California State University, Northridge.