It was a pleasantly shocking moment that Dara Solomon and Fela Strickland-Smith will always remember. At Black Enterprise’s Entrepreneurs Summit last month, the magazine awarded the sisters a Small Business Award as Family Business of the Year.

The recognition is especially surprising because the sisters launched Satori Interactive in 2004 without any entrepreneurial experience, business advisers or employees. What they did have, though, was confidence, solid family support and successful careers in the male-dominated technology industry, where blacks and women are underrepresented.

“In our hearts it was a stamp of confirmation that the sacrifices we made to get this far were worth it,” Smith says of the magazine’s recognition.

In a 2013 U.S. Census report (pdf) based on 2011 figures, men represented about 75 percent of the workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. African Americans made up just 6 percent of that job sector. As for software development, whites held nearly 60 percent of those jobs, followed by Asians at about 30 percent.

Smith, who graduated from Virginia Union University with a degree in math and computer science, worked for 15 years as a senior information technology professional, managing projects for top corporate companies. Her younger sister studied industrial engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State, later earning a master’s in human-computer interaction at the university. She worked for 18 years in the tech industry, making computer platforms more user-oriented and teaching those skills at the Art Institute of Atlanta.

Read complete article at The Root