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Building Equal Futures, Connecting Women and Girls to STEM Opportunities

September 24, 2013 at 3:36 PM ET by Katie Dowd and Kumar Garg
Summary: 
Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the Equal Futures Partnership—a global collaboration aimed at advancing women’s and girls’ economic and political participation. For the United States, stepping up to this challenge has included important work to open doors to quality education and high-paying career opportunities for women and girls in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the Equal Futures Partnership—a global collaboration aimed at advancing women’s and girls’ economic and political participation. The Partnership was launched on behalf of the United States by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Valerie Jarrett in September, 2012, in response to a call by President Obama challenging heads of state to break down barriers to the economic and political empowerment of women.

For the United States, stepping up to this challenge has included important work to open doors to quality education and high-paying career opportunities for women and girls in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Since 2012, much progress has been made to advance women and girls in STEM and yesterday, new commitments were announced to advance the ball even further.

Teaming up to help bring award-winning STEM education opportunities to girls across the country, Girls Inc. and Discovery Education are working together to provide girls access to Discovery Education’s STEM Camp – a dynamic series of STEM curricula built around the National Academy of Engineering's grand engineering challenges. This partnership will further Girls Inc.’s efforts to encourage girls’ participation and achievement in STEM fields. Additionally, this new effort will create opportunities for educators and mentors to participate in a series of Discovery Education professional development opportunities and receive training on best practices for implementing innovative STEM curricula.  

Within the Administration, NASA’s Digital Learning Network (DLN)—which brings NASA professionals together with students across the country through digital tools—will enable in-depth exploration of STEM topics through a series of events targeted just for women and girls during this year’s Women’s History Month. In addition, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will engage researchers across a number of NSF research, development and workforce programs to encourage submissions of proposals focused on advancing women and girls in the area of STEM education.

We are excited about this continued progress and new efforts to empower women and girls in STEM fields. 

You can learn more about yesterday’s event here and read about the new commitments here. 

You can engage in the conversation about women and girls in STEM by signing up for updates from the White House Tech Inclusion website; by following @whitehouseostp on Twitter; and by visiting OSTP’s Women in STEM webpage.

Katie Dowd is Senior Advisor at OMB and Kumar Garg is Senior Advisor to the Deputy Director at OSTP