On February 28, 2017, President Trump signed H.R. 255 into law.
H.R. 255, otherwise known as “Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act”, was introduced in January and sponsored by Connecticut representative Elizabeth Etsy. From the text of the bill, we see that there is a low level of women in STEM-related fields (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), as well as an increasing demand for commercialization of STEM-related research.
This bill encourages the National Science Foundation to recruit women and support them in their endevours to expand STEM research from the lab to the commercial world. The National Science Foundation has entrepreneurial programs that would benefit from women being in higher positions. National Science Foundation’s mission includes supporting women in STEM disciplines. The Congressional Budget Office reports that, because nothing was assigned to the NSF as a task, implementing the bill would cost nothing. President Trump was quoted as saying, “It’s unacceptable that we have so many American women who have these degrees but yet are not being employed in these fields. So I think that’s going to change. That’s going to change very rapidly.”
This is an important topic because women have been heavily underrepresented in STEM fields for a very long time. It is tough for even the most motivated woman to succeed in a male-dominated field without her government’s support. Reports have shown that women make up half the workforce but only 24% of STEM jobs. Bills like H.R. 255 are important because they show women that the government supports equality in all fields of work, and it also shows that they are willing to do something to resolve this problem.