Coming from a low-income and difficult background, I did not always have many opportunities growing up. I was a first-generation college student and experienced many challenges.
Staff
October 4, 2022
Birmingham Business Journal
Hometown: Childersburg
What drives you to succeed?
Being able to help others. I have always believed that as we achieve success, we should always extend a hand to lift up others as well.
What challenges have you overcome?
Coming from a low-income and difficult background, I did not always have many opportunities growing up. I was a first-generation college student and experienced many challenges. Entering the male-dominated tech industry I also faced gender-based discrimination.
What can Birmingham businesses do to make the economy more inclusive for women in the workplace?
1. Pay women fairly, hire them and promote them.
2. Create inclusive workplace cultures, which means listening to women and including them in conversations that impact the organization.
3. Actively seeking ways to eliminate gender bias in the workplace. This means finding better communication styles, assessing hiring and performance standards for bias, respecting women’s leadership styles, eliminating stereotypes and speaking up about discrimination or harassment of women in the workplace.
4. Create inclusive workplace policies that respect women’s needs, such as: robust parental leave policies, adequate sick time to support health needs, policies that support caregivers and strenuous protections against gender bias and discrimination.
What would you do differently if you had to do it again?
Over the years I had a number of people who told me not to learn more or to take new jobs, or who told me to stay put and not try to achieve more. Some people told me it wasn’t worth my time, or that I wouldn’t like it, or that I couldn’t do it. Every single one of those people was wrong. None of them knew me or my goals like I did, and the majority of them had self-interested reasons for telling me not to go after my dreams.
What are three things you’ve learned in the pandemic?
1. Don’t be afraid to disrupt the script. Just because you think your life is going in one direction, you might be surprised to learn it’s going somewhere completely different. Embrace the big changes!
2. Identify a goal and then figure out how to overcome every obstacle that stands in your way, even if the obstacles feel impossible. The pandemic was a minefield of hard obstacles I never thought I would face, but none of them were impossible to overcome
3. Prioritize mental health and emotional wellbeing of yourself and your family over everything. The pandemic was very trying, but keeping everyone in our family emotionally healthy helped us to overcome the challenges and keep our goals clear.
What is the most promising thing happening in Birmingham right now?
Our community has been doing more and more work to embrace Birmingham’s diversity and ensure that everyone has access to opportunities. This doesn’t mean we don’t have more work to do, but it has been encouraging to see the community being more and more intentional about these efforts. There’s ongoing work by Innovation Depot, Bronze Valley and Magic City Match getting capital to historically excluded business founders, Prosper, REV Birmingham, Innovate Birmingham, and so many other organizations are putting in the work to do great things for our city and its inhabitants. A rising tide lifts all boats; creating more economic opportunity for everyone is truly the way forward.
What are your goals for the next 10 years?
To continue growing my business, LunarLab; to continue helping Birmingham’s tech ecosystem thrive; and to continue to work towards a more inclusive and ethical tech industry