AAUW's CEO Gloria Blackwell: "There Needs to Be A Reckoning."

Gloria Blackwell, CEO of the American Association of University Women (AAUW)Dee DwyerIn 1986, Gloria Blackwell arrived ambitious and bright-eyed in Cameroon to teach as a Peace Corps volunteer. She had recently graduated from Georgetown University, raised to see herself as an equal to men. Yet Blackwell found herself the only female teacher among about a dozen male colleagues at a rural school in the West African country. Quickly, she realized that her gender was viewed as lesser.

“I entered a space where I wasn’t listened to because the men were really in charge,” said Blackwell. “I wasn’t given much special preference as an American either because, at the end of the day, I was still a woman. I was more or less treated the same way that women at that time were treated in that part of the country. It opened my eyes.” 

Before the Peace Corps, Blackwell thought that she would embark on a career in government as a diplomat. But Cameroon fueled what has become a decades-long career and drive to break barriers for women and girls in international education, particularly among women of color like herself.

“Until you experience something like that first-hand, they are abstract concepts,” said Blackwell on her time in the Peace Corps.

Today, Blackwell is the CEO of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), a nonprofit advancing gender equity through advocacy, education, and research. AAUW’s work includes supporting women in higher education through fellowship programs.

Blackwell became CEO in fall 2021 after joining AAUW back in 2004. This year, she noted that the organization provided over $6 million in fellowships, millions more than when she started at the organization.

At AAUW prior to becoming CEO, Blackwell led several of the organization’s signature programs, including its salary negotiation trainings, which reach about 190,000 people nationwide. For 15 years, she managed AAUW’s fellowships and grants program, which gave more than $70 million to female scholars and programs in the U.S. as well as internationally.