California invested millions pushing these careers for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

In 2018, the Legislature agreed to put $10 million each year into a new initiative, the California Education Learning Laboratory, to “close equity and achievement gaps,” including the underrepresentation of girls and women in science and technology. But two years later, the state imposed large-scale cuts to the initiative due to the pandemic. As the state faced more fiscal challenges in 2024, lawmakers cut its budget to about half its former size.

This year, Newsom proposed cutting the Education Learning Laboratory altogether. After negotiations with the Legislature, Newsom agreed to fund the initiative through next year, at which point it’s set to close unless new funding is secured.

“While I think women are faring better in college generally, I would be skeptical that we can say ‘mission accomplished’ in terms of achieving parity for women in STEM undergraduate degrees,” said Lark Park, the director of the Education Learning Laboratory, which uses public money to provide grants to schools and nonprofits. “I think we’ve just gotten distracted and the cultural conversation has changed.”

Private and corporate foundations fund numerous nonprofit organizations that support girls and women in STEM, but grant recipients say some money has moved toward other, more popular topics or less controversial ones. “Funders focus on trends and they’re very trendy in how they give,” said Dawn Brown, president of the EmpowHer Institute, which offers education programs to girls and women across Los Angeles County.

One of her programs provides a free, five-week summer camp to girls, including a trip to Catalina Island, where they learn about environmental science and climate change. Since Trump took office, some corporate funders have pulled back support for the organization’s programs, which may be perceived as supporting “DEI,” she said. “The words ‘women,’ ‘girls,’ ‘climate change’ — those are banned words.”

Supporting women in math

When Chloe Lynn, a rising junior at UC Berkeley and a double major in applied math and management science, started taking higher-level courses, she noticed a trend in her math classes: fewer women. “I’ll be one of three girls in a 30, 40-person class,” she said during an interview at the university’s division of equity and inclusion.

UC Berkeley has a center dedicated to promoting diversity in STEM, known as Cal NERDS, which features cozy study spots, a high-tech makerspace and various multi-purpose meeting rooms. The center receives much of its funding from the state but has a few grants from the federal government, some of which are currently on hold.

On a Thursday last month, Lynn was one of 10 students who came to present their summer research in one of the multi-purpose rooms. More than half of the presenters were women or non-binary, and the rest were part of other underrepresented groups in STEM, including Hispanic, Black and LGBTQ+ students. She stood in front of a large poster, waiting for people to stop by and ask about her work.

“Say you’re at an auction, and say there’s n bidders and k identical items,” she said as another student approached. Over the next two hours, fellow mathematicians, classmates, friends and family stopped by, listening as she explained her formula for allocating resources in an optimal way. Some understood her work and asked questions about her variables, formulas or 3-D models. The rest nodded in admiration.

By the end of the event, many students had abandoned their own posters in order to learn about their friends’ research. In her free time, as the vice president of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate math association, Lynn has been trying to build this kind of community among other female math majors by organizing events where students can meet each other. Her end goal is graduate school, either in applied math or industrial engineering. Women are also underrepresented in those graduate programs.

“Creating an inclusive and uplifting community is so important for anyone that’s underrepresented,” she said after finishing her presentation.

How STEM helps people

The lack of women in STEM has nothing to do with their abilities. In fact, women who major in STEM at California State University campuses are more likely than men to graduate, according to data from the college system, and in biology, women are overrepresented. Over 64% of biology bachelor’s degrees awarded in California during the 2022-23 school year went to women, according to the analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Brown said some female alumni of EmpowHer have said that college advisers push biology over other science, engineering or math courses, claiming that it’s “easier.” Better advising could create more parity, she said.

Rosser, who trained as a zoologist before becoming a college administrator, said women’s shift toward biology was a slow process, beginning in the 1970s. “Women are particularly attracted to STEM when they can see its usefulness, particularly to help people,” she said. Biology is often “an entryway to the health care professions,” she added, many of which are predominately female. She recommends that professors promote the application of their research as a way to increase the percentage of women in these fields.

In her studies at UC Berkeley, Lynn said she’s struggled with the relevance of her research. “There’s a lot going on in the world right now and I feel called to help,” she said. “Even though I did theory research this summer, I’ve been thinking about ways to apply this theory to real-world applications I care about.” In particular, she wants her research to help her community in the Bay Area, where she grew up.

“Say you’re an architect and you’re in charge of reinforcing San Francisco’s concrete structures in the event of an earthquake,” she said. “You want to minimize cost in San Francisco, and that’s going to help you choose which building you’re going to reinforce.”

It’s just another resource allocation problem, she said, so it could be solved with a similar formula.

“It does hit close to home,” she said. In fact, the UC Berkeley campus lies on a fault line.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

By ADAM ECHELMAN/CalMatters
CalMatters