Every once in a while, an event comes along that is genuinely different from everything else on your professional calendar. Not different in the way that every conference markets itself as transformative, but different in the way that you can feel before you even arrive.
Herscension Conference 2026 is that event. Taking place November 14 and 15 in Atlanta, Georgia, Herscension brings together 100 entrepreneurs, executives, professionals, and leaders for two days of bold conversations, real strategy, and the kind of connections that produce actual career and business outcomes.
Among the speakers taking the stage is someone whose work African Women in STEM has been built around for years: Adaeze Iloeje-Udeogalanya. If you have followed her journey, you already know what she brings to a room. If you are discovering her for the first time, this article is your introduction to why her voice in this space matters so much.
Who Adaeze Iloeje-Udeogalanya Is
Adaeze is a mechanical engineer by training. She spent two decades working in the pipeline and oil and gas industry, navigating a field that has never made it easy for women, particularly Black women, to advance at the rate their expertise warrants.
Out of that experience came African Women in STEM, a community and platform she founded to close the gap between talent and opportunity for women in STEM. The premise is simple and the problem is real: women in STEM are exceptionally credentialed, deeply capable, and consistently underadvanced. Not because they lack what it takes, but because they lack access to the information, relationships, and strategic frameworks that translate expertise into career outcomes.
Adaeze built the infrastructure to provide that access. Today, African Women in STEM has helped thousands of women land jobs, negotiate multi-six-figure compensation packages, find mentors and sponsors, and step into leadership roles they were always qualified for. She hosts the Lunch with Leaders podcast, which now ranks in the top 5% of podcasts globally, and she has delivered a TEDx talk on the power of showing up as your full self in professional spaces.
Her focus is what she calls the authority shift: the strategic, deliberate journey from being an expert who waits to be noticed to becoming an influential leader who creates and commands opportunities.
Learn more about Adaeze and her work at the conference here.
Why Her Presence at Herscension Matters
Adaeze brings something to this conference that very few speakers can. She does not speak from a place of having always had access and now wanting to share it generously. She speaks from a place of having navigated the exact systems that most women in this room are navigating, having figured out how they actually work beneath the surface, and having built the tools to help other women navigate them faster.
When she talks about visibility, she knows what it costs to stay invisible and what it takes to change that. Also, when she talks about negotiation, she has worked with women who negotiated their way from underpaid to multi-six-figure packages. When she talks about building influence, she has done it from scratch in one of the most male-dominated industries there is.
Her framework is practical. Her language is direct. And her genuine investment in the advancement of every woman she works with comes through in everything she does.
At Herscension, she joins a lineup of thought leaders and practitioners who collectively represent some of the boldest, most effective voices in professional development for women today.
What the Conference Delivers
Herscension organises its programming around four areas that directly address where ambitious professional women need the most traction.
Money and Resources
Access to funding strategies, resource networks, and financial tools that fuel business growth and career progression. This is not a surface-level conversation about budgeting. It is a deep dive into where the capital is and how to access it.
Growth, Scale, and Acceleration
Practical strategies that move you from your current position to the one you actually deserve. Every session is designed to produce a concrete next action rather than simply an inspiring idea.
Hiring and Contracting
Direct access to decision-makers actively looking for top-tier Black female talent for executive roles and high-value contracts. This is one of Herscension’s most distinctive features, and it reflects a serious commitment to creating real economic opportunity rather than just celebrating potential.
AI for Career and Business Growth
Applied AI strategies that help you sharpen your skills, automate growth-enabling activities, and position yourself strategically in a landscape where AI fluency separates the professionals who advance from those who fall behind.
Every element of this programming exists to produce one outcome: women who leave more connected, more equipped, and more concretely positioned for what they want to build next.
The Community You Build Here Lasts Beyond Two Days
The people you meet at Herscension are not incidental to the experience. They are central to it. One hundred women in one room for two days, all of whom showed up intentionally and invested deliberately in their own advancement: that concentration of ambition and capability produces connections that professional networking events rarely match.
You find the co-founder you did not know you needed. Likewise, you meet the decision-maker who has been looking for someone with exactly your background. You sit next to a woman who solved the problem you are currently stuck on and who is genuinely happy to share how. You find a sponsor, an advisor, or a lifelong professional ally in a conversation that happens over lunch or between sessions.
Adaeze has built her entire community around this principle. African Women in STEM exists because the right relationships change careers faster than almost any other variable. Herscension is built on the same understanding. Every connection made in Atlanta in November has the potential to become a door that opens something that was previously inaccessible.
Your Investment in Atlanta Is an Investment in Everything That Comes After
Your Herscension ticket qualifies as a personal investment in your professional advancement. It also functions as employer-covered continuing education in many organisations and as a tax-deductible continuing education expense.
More practically, consider what two days in the right room with the right people and the right strategies can produce for the next twelve months of your career or business. Clarity on your next move. Connections that generate real opportunities. Strategies for funding, hiring, and AI adoption that you implement immediately upon returning home.
That is the return on a Herscension ticket. Not inspiration that fades by the following week, but concrete, actionable advancement that compounds forward.
Come See Adaeze in Atlanta
If you have been following Adaeze’s work through African Women in STEM, through the Lunch with Leaders podcast, or through her TEDx talk, Herscension 2026 is your opportunity to be in the same room and to hear her speak directly about what it takes to build the kind of career and influence that your expertise deserves.
If this is your first introduction to her work, come meet the woman who has helped thousands of women in STEM close the gap between their talent and their opportunity.
Either way, Atlanta in November is where this conversation continues in person.
Register now: herscension.com/#tickets
November 14 and 15, 2026. Atlanta, Georgia.
