Economic Infrastructure Commentary Series
Originally drafted 2021 by Abigail Dubon. Updated by the Drake Institute Editorial Team, August 2025.
Commentary
In 2021, the Drake Institute’s fellows highlighted a troubling reality: although women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and hold half of all undergraduate degrees, they continue to represent only a fraction of the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals. At that time, women accounted for just 28 percent of science and engineering personnel, and fewer than one in five bachelor’s degrees in computer science and engineering were awarded to women. Researchers pointed not to ability but to confidence gaps as a key factor in this persistent segregation. This uneven representation was not only a matter of equity; it revealed a structural weakness in our economic infrastructure.
Federal policy over the decades has attempted to close this gap, from the passage of Title IX in 1972, to the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1987, and later efforts such as President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign and the STEM Education Act of 2015. Bipartisan legislation under both Democratic and Republican administrations—including the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act, the INSPIRE Women Act, and the Building Blocks of STEM Act—sought to expand mentoring, entrepreneurial pathways, and early exposure for girls in STEM. States also acted, with California, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts introducing symbolic designations like “Women in STEM Week” as well as more substantive proposals to support women’s entrepreneurial programs and teacher pipelines. These initiatives reflected an emerging consensus: that the underrepresentation of women in STEM was a policy problem requiring coordinated solutions.
Four years later, the problem remains urgent. By 2023, women represented only 26 percent of the STEM workforce, with their participation clustered in biological and social sciences. In fields driving the fastest growth—computing and engineering—women’s share hovered at just 25 percent and 16 percent, respectively. The disparities were even sharper for women of color: Black and Latina women combined made up less than 5 percent of engineers and computer scientists. Researchers now emphasize retention, not just recruitment, as the core challenge; while young women enter STEM majors at roughly similar rates to their peers, they leave these fields at higher rates, often citing a lack of belonging or support.
The federal government has recently attempted to respond with a renewed framework. In 2023, the White House issued its STEMM Equity and Excellence 2050 plan, laying out a roadmap to sustain investments in diversifying science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine. States have continued to pass bills establishing STEM weeks, student grants, and teaching initiatives, though many of these measures remain more symbolic than structural. Meanwhile, new research confirms what many women in the field have long said: sense of belonging is one of the most powerful predictors of persistence, especially for women of color navigating underrepresented spaces.
For the Drake Institute, these realities reaffirm our framework that access and inclusion are core to economic infrastructure. The exclusion of women from STEM represents a drain on the nation’s capacity to innovate and grow. Addressing this requires a shift from recruitment campaigns alone toward holistic support systems: ensuring that universities track and improve retention rates for women in STEM majors, expanding mentorship and faculty diversity programs at minority-serving institutions, and creating new pathways for rural women and women with disabilities to enter STEM careers through apprenticeships and community college transitions. Policies like the proposed STEM Opportunities Act and state-level initiatives that provide wrap-around services demonstrate the kind of investment needed to ensure that girls who begin STEM pathways are supported to succeed and thrive in them.
The persistence of gender segregation in STEM is not simply an education challenge—it is an economic one. When half the population is excluded from the fastest-growing, highest-paying industries, the entire economy is held back. For mothers balancing caregiving, for women in rural communities with limited access to mentors and resources, and for women with disabilities seeking pathways into technology fields, inclusion is not just a matter of fairness—it is the foundation of a competitive, resilient economy. Investing in women in STEM is, quite simply, investing in America’s future.
Archival Reference
This commentary draws on Gender-Based Occupational Segregation in STEM (Dubon, 2021). The original version is archived by the Drake Institute. Access the original article here: