150 Years Later: How MIT Changed the World with Ellen Swallow Richards’s Legacy

Friday - January 5 2024, 05:46 UTC - 10 months ago

In 2022, Sawaka Kawashima Romaine became the first female president of the MIT Club of Japan. In 2023, she organized a series of nine events across Asia to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Ellen Swallow Richards graduation from MIT. The events featured talks about women leading the way in STEM and a STEM workshop in Japan for female students in grades 5 to 7.

When Sawaka Kawashima Romaine '01 became president of MIT's Club of Japan in 2022, she was the first woman to hold the office in the club's more than 110-year history. Understandably, she felt a lot of pressure. "I had just given birth to my first child, and I had also recently changed jobs, so it was a crazy time with a lot of change, but I realized that if I didn’t take the role, the chance for another woman to be president might not come again soon enough," says Romaine, who had been the club’s vice president for the previous three years .

"I feel a lot of responsibility as the first female president for everything to go well and succeed, because I want others to follow and because I feel that female representation is super important." Upon starting her three-year tenure, Romaine says, she had a clear vision for what she wanted to achieve. In addition to diversifying the board and creating an online presence for the local public—tasks she has already accomplished—Romaine wanted to find a way to inspire young women .

"Knowing that there is such a big gender gap in STEM, I wondered if there was something I could do about it," she recalls. While brainstorming and digging into historically important MIT dates, she realized that 2023 marked 150 years since the graduation of Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend and earn a degree from the Institute. (See "Ellencyclopedia," MIT News, September/October 2007 .

)Romaine decided to honor Richards’s accomplishment with a leadership event in Japan for women in STEM. She then shared the idea with MIT’s alumni network in Asia, contacting other club leaders with the help of the Alumni Association to gauge interest. Soon a collaborative effort was underway in the region. Monthly calls among the organizers ultimately led to nine successful events hosted by the MIT clubs of Beijing, Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand between March and October of 2023 .

The series kicked off with a virtual presentation by the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) featuring a historical perspective on Richards, who—along with being an advocate for women’s education and professional opportunities—was a trailblazer in building the foundations for sanitary engineering, food science, home economics, and ecology. Although the events ranged in format, they aligned in celebrating women leading the way in STEM and society—from talks about entrepreneurs in Thailand to pioneers of innovative education in Shanghai .

With Romaine at the helm, the MIT Club of Japan held two events. The main event featured a keynote and panel discussion titled "Breaking the Barriers in STEM and in Leadership." The club also held a STEM workshop for the local community with the help of the MIT-Japan Program. "We chose to hold the event for female students grades five to seven, since this is an age when young girls might still have the opportunity to be impacted about the career they might choose," Romaine explains .

The event was very popular, quickly filling to capacity. "We really wanted to inspire these young girls in Japan and give them ideas about possibilities with STEM in the future," Romaine says. In addition to lecturing about her work and the various benefits of science, the other panelists described their work in product nutrition development, aviation technology, medical research—and, of course, their own individual stories of overcoming obstacles .