Sylvia Acevedo is CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

One of the most enduring lessons I learned as a Girl Scout growing up in poverty in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is that once you believe you can do something and you develop the courage and confidence to persevere, you can be fearless.

When my Brownie troop leader encouraged me to earn my Science badge, I decided to try to build and launch an Estes model rocket at age 7. There was a lot of trial and error trying to overcome gravity's grip, and I failed over and over to achieve liftoff. But I refused to give up. When I finally successfully launched the rocket into the New Mexico sky, I felt such a sense of accomplishment, and I took something so powerful away from that experience — I could do science and math, and I wanted to do more.

I started taking science and math electives in school and went on to study engineering in college. After graduating, I had the amazing opportunity to work at NASA on the Voyager 2 flyby of Jupiter and two of its moons and on the Solar Polar Solar Probe, now known as the Parker Solar Probe. I then got my master's in systems engineering at Stanford and pursued a career in technology.

The persistence I learned in my early years as a Girl Scout came in handy as I navigated the male-dominated tech industry in the '80s. When I was working for IBM, for example, there was a management opportunity in Latin America that I felt I was perfectly suited for: I had both the sales and marketing background and the technology background.

I went to talk to the hiring vice president, and he said, "I can't have you in that role. You're a woman." When I asked him why, he said, "Well, I feel like you wouldn't be safe — it's very dangerous there."

Read More