Camille Moody McCue, PhD, is Director of Innovation at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, where she teaches innovation courses spanning computer science, engineering, and entrepreneurship. Previously, she served as High School Principal at The Adelson School, where she built a K-12 Startup Incubator and led a schoolwide innovation program. A longtime Dummies series author for Wiley, Camille writes the Most Likely to Succeed blog at camillemccue.com, where she explores how schools can cultivate the next generation of innovators. Across thirty years in classrooms, Camille has championed early, equitable STEM experiences for every student.
Our nation rises and falls on its supply of innovators – intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs in STEM, including computer science – and women are the largest untapped source of them. The case for getting more women into STEM has been made for decades, but the strategy of starting earlier has not gained sufficient traction. Women are roughly half the U.S. population and more than half of all college graduates. Yet, according to the National Science Board’s 2026 report, women are just 27% of America’s scientists and engineers. We’re losing half our innovators.
Even as artificial intelligence reshapes the computing workforce, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects STEM occupations will grow approximately three times faster than non-STEM fields over the next decade, driven in part by demand for AI development itself. With a median annual wage above $100,000 – more than double that of non-STEM work – these are among the most economically rewarding careers a young person can pursue. The country is paying the price of women’s absence from these careers, and the reasons start much earlier in school than most conversations about STEM tend to acknowledge.
How early does the gender gap in STEM begin? It takes shape in the earliest years, as children explore, build, and figure out how things work – experiences that carry into preschool. Yet most efforts to close the gap come a decade later, aimed at teen girls and college women entering advanced STEM pathways. That work matters – but by then, the gap isn’t forming; it’s already formed. If we want different outcomes, we have to go back to the moment when interest first begins to diverge. And increasingly, that moment points to preschool, long before we even think of it as a STEM environment.
And the research backs this up. Gender stereotypes around STEM begin forming as early as age two. By ages three and four, children can reliably sort toys and activities into “boy” and “girl” categories. In other words, children arrive at the classroom door already carrying these assumptions – and early childhood teachers see the effects of them every day. I’ve seen them firsthand. A few years ago, I observed a 4-year-old classroom with a colleague. We set out buckets of Lego bricks along with several books showing castles, oceans, and space builds – colorful, simple photos the children could copy or remix. The boys dove in confidently, fishing through bins and either inventing their own designs or using the books as blueprints. Far fewer girls did. Several of the boys shared excitedly that they “had Legos at home!” The girls more often asked how to put the bricks together and what they should make. A meaningful gap in comfort with building materials was already visible inside this preK classroom.
Free choice rewards prior experience. The children who already feel at home with building materials use them, while the others pick something else. Even Montessori classrooms rely on teachers to introduce unfamiliar materials when a child is ready, rather than leaving children to stay with what they already know. The reason this matters is that block play, which builds spatial reasoning, is a predictor for success in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. A preschool girl not encouraged to create with blocks is missing a cognitive development opportunity that compounds year by year. By kindergarten, some children have years of building experience and others have almost none, and the gap only grows from there.
Why does the gap keep widening? Because STEM doesn’t level out – it climbs. Think of STEM as a ladder. Every rung, from the first set of blocks and puzzle toys to the first programming class and robotics kit, requires hand-over-hand effort to level up. By the time a girl in middle or high school discovers an interest in building and creating, many of her male classmates have been climbing since preschool. Those boys have been steadily pulling themselves up the ladder through afterschool programs, summer camps, coding clubs, and peer groups. A student who joins the climb later is reaching for rungs the others passed years ago. The catch-up is real work, but what many girls feel most acutely isn’t just the gap – it’s walking into a space where boys seem ahead, more confident, and not always eager to include them.
The encouraging news is how actionable this is for educators. Counterstereotyping – when teachers deliberately place trucks, blocks, and engineering kits into the hands of girls – shifts children’s assumptions measurably and quickly. A few examples: invite a specific child to the block corner by name. Set out a half-built tower at the start of free choice, so the first move is continuing rather than starting. Display photos of women engineers and inventors at child eye level. Read books where girls are the builders and innovators. Send a note home about what a child designed today, so the classroom experience carries into family conversation.
The payoff at the top of the ladder reveals why all this matters: gender-diverse teams produce better outcomes. Research from McKinsey & Company (2023) shows that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity in executive teams are significantly more likely to outperform their peers financially. Products built with women’s perspectives serve a wider range of users, from voice recognition that works across a variety of voices to car safety features calibrated with both male and female crash test dummies. When half the population is underrepresented at the design table, needs are overlooked. Products designed by everyone work for everyone.
This instructional throughline from preschool to career isn’t theoretical – it’s the work I do every day. I have spent thirty years in classrooms watching girls light up when handed a circuit board, a 3D printer, a coding challenge, or an entrepreneurial business sprint. At my current school, I teach a downstream pipeline of innovation courses, from Computer Science 6 to upper school DECA. I am working to extend that pipeline in two directions. The first is fortifying the late middle school bridge, a time when girls begin self-selecting out of STEM, even when they’ve had prior positive experiences with it. I am extending the momentum of CS6 with a new Innovation Studio for grades seven and eight, grounded in the idea that creativity drives technological and entrepreneurial advancement as powerfully as it drives the arts. Students will build apps and IoT gadgets – games for good, remote fish feeders, wearables – and pitch them at an Innovation Expo. The goal is a culture that tells every student, and especially every girl, that this is their space.
The second is pushing the starting point earlier. Middle school is a wonderful place to do this work, but as I share, it is nine years beyond the preschool classroom where the first rungs of the ladder are set – and some children are already climbing with more confidence than others. Beginning next school year, I will work with our lower school to build structured time for K-5 Innovation courses, collaborating with teachers on age-appropriate experiences in design thinking, engineering design, computational thinking, and entrepreneurship that cultivate an innovation mindset from the start. From there, we will partner with our beginning school to bring that work to our littlest learners, where the most critical starting point lives.
The interventions work, but the challenge is sustaining them. The strategy is straightforward: start early, make experiences equitable, and build on their momentum year after year. Parity won’t happen unless equal experiences begin in early childhood and continue through every grade. A strong fifth-grade unit can’t compensate for five years of gendered messages about who builds, who fixes, and who tinkers. Every student needs to reach high school STEM with the lower rungs of the ladder already steady beneath them. Because by the time we try to fix the gap, we’re no longer building it – we’re repairing it. And we can’t afford to lose half our innovators before they even get started.