On July 21, SHPE CEO Suzanna Valdez-Wolfe joined leaders on Capitol Hill for “250 Years of Women Breaking Barriers and Building the Future in STEM,” a congressional panel hosted by the House STEM Education Caucus and the House Women in STEM Caucus, and organized by the office of Congresswoman Luz Rivas. The conversation brought together Kari Byron, former co-host of MythBusters, Karen Horting, President and CEO of Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and Suzanna, to reflect on women’s achievements in STEM and the work needed to ensure the next 250 years bring even greater representation, retention, and leadership.
The panel opened on a personal note, with each speaker invited to name her STEM “shero.” Suzanna chose astrophysicist Wanda Díaz-Merced, who lost her sight while studying the field and later developed a method for translating astronomical data into sound. Known as sonification, that technique has helped astronomers detect signals in large datasets that might otherwise be missed. Her story set the tone for an important discussion that both honored the women who have thrived and broken barriers, while addressing what is needed of the STEM ecosystem to keep that progress going in the future.
Suzanna turned to the challenges that continue to hold women back. She pointed to a striking figure, where the National Partnership for Women & Families reported an estimated $1.9 trillion lost in the U.S. economy each year because women are not paid equitably. A gap that not only undervalues women’s contributions across the workforce but also continues to be a missed economic opportunity. Additionally, while women enter STEM careers in growing numbers, too many who enter leave within the first five to ten years, just as they begin enjoying the height of their career experience. As we focus on increasing STEM education access and college readiness opportunities to attract more women into STEM fields, we must urgently focus on retaining them and avoid losing trained individuals in critical fields of work.
She framed retention as an opportunity that requires every part of the STEM ecosystem to work collaboratively with employers, educators, policymakers, and nonprofits each playing a role in building pathways that help women advance, lead, and remain in the field long enough to become the mentors, executives, and lawmakers who carry this work forward. Suzanna called on the room to track where women’s careers stall, make promotion criteria transparent, and pair mentorship with meaningful sponsorship. She also urged earlier investment in hands-on STEM learning and stronger bridge programs to support students as they move from school into college and from college into the workforce. On the policy side, she pointed to the need for legislation that incentivizes and helps women stay in the workforce at every career level, including support for childcare, paid leave, returnship programs, and pay transparency. She noted that nonprofits like SHPE sit at the nexus of this ecosystem, providing the student and professional support that connects education, employment, and policy into a continuous pathway.
As the group discussed the future of global competitiveness, artificial intelligence was also part of the conversation. Suzanna described AI as the next test of our shared commitment to workforce development, warning that without deliberate action, the field risks carrying forward the same representation imbalance that already exists across STEM. Currently, women hold only 22 to 30 percent of AI related jobs worldwide, a gap that will only widen if the talent pipeline supporting AI isn’t addressed directly.
For Suzanna, the solution is not to build an entirely new pipeline, but to make better use of the abundant talent we have already in the country. Latinas illustrate a great example of both the urgency and the opportunity, as they make up nearly one-in-ten people in the United States yet represent just 1.6 percent of the engineering workforce. Closing this gap among our workforce talent is central to strengthening the country’s innovation capacity and competitiveness.
As we celebrate our nation’s 250 anniversary and many years of progress, she closed with an important message noting that we should renew our commitment to developing the talent that will shape the next era of STEM. This collective goal should honor how far the field has come and also ensure the pipeline keeps producing the innovators the country will need for the next 250 years.
