Building Blocks of Stem Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1665, the Building Blocks of STEM Act, which supports STEM education research focused on early childhood education.

There is a lot of discussion about the gender disparity in the STEM workforce and the leaky pipeline that widens the gap as women and girls continue through school.

Although women make up half of the U.S. workforce, they make up less than a quarter of those employed in STEM occupations.

The Building Blocks of STEM Act addresses these disparities by ensuring an equitable distribution of STEM education research funding for projects focused on young children and helping us understand why girls are encouraged or discouraged from participating in STEM activities.

It also ensures that the National Science Foundation grants are awarded to entities that are working in partnership, such as research universities with local education agencies, to increase participation in computer science education.

Computer science is particularly struggling to recruit and retain women, who make up less than 18 percent of the computer science workforce. The number is trending down, not up.

This has a ripple effect on our country's ability to fill the high- skilled jobs of today and tomorrow. We need the next generation of young women to pursue STEM degrees, and we are not seeing the numbers we need.

It is critical that we continue to work on STEM opportunities for middle-school-aged children and older, but we also need to ensure our Federal resources start at the beginning and support research on STEM education of younger students, starting at the beginning of their educational career.

We know this all too well in Michigan. We know the structural and cultural barriers that exist for women interested in STEM from a very young age. Lack of support, unconscious or conscious gender bias, and stereotype threats are just a few.

In several studies, when children were asked to draw a mathematician or a scientist, girls were twice as likely to draw a man as they were a woman, while boys almost universally drew men, often in a lab coat.

The science is clear that children who engage in scientific activities from an early age, before middle school, develop positive attitudes toward science and are more likely to pursue STEM experiences and career opportunities later on.

We need to be working toward interventions to increase the number of girls and women in these fields, and that is why I am so proud to sponsor this bill.

I thank Chairwoman Johnson for her leadership on the House Science Committee toward increasing STEM opportunities for women, particularly for women of color.

I introduced this bipartisan legislation with my colleague, Congressman Jim Baird, along with our counterparts in the Senate, Senators Jacky Rosen and Shelley Moore Capito. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and in both Chambers of Congress to support this bill and send this important legislation swiftly to the President's desk.

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