San Diego STEM event links girls to careers that shape health and innovation
Women remain underrepresented in STEM jobs despite making up almost half of employment in non-STEM occupations. In San Diego, the American Heart Association used that disparity as the backdrop for a four-hour program designed to put high school students face to face with the people who work in science, technology, engineering and medicine every day.
Students from Castle Park High School, Sweetwater High School and Southwest High School gathered at the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center for San Diego STEM Goes Red, a local extension of the Association’s Go Red for Women movement. The event combined hands-on breakout sessions with direct exposure to career pathways, then closed with speed mentoring sessions that paired students with local STEM leaders. The format was deliberate: short bursts of interaction, practical demonstrations and real conversations about how professional choices are made.
One sentence captured the urgency of the workforce gap. Women hold just over 29% of the STEM workforce.
That figure has implications well beyond hiring statistics. When young women are absent from the fields that drive biomedical research, health technology, engineering and data science, the pipeline narrows for the very disciplines that influence patient care, prevention and the design of future health systems. Representation in these sectors affects who asks the research questions, who builds the devices, who shapes algorithms and who helps define what equitable care looks like in practice.
Angela Grant, who serves as San Diego Go Red for Women volunteer co-chair and chief legal officer at Palomar Holdings, framed the event around future leadership. She described the value of introducing students to the possibilities within science, technology, engineering and medicine, arguing that diverse perspectives are essential to innovation. Sumi Shrishrimal, the local volunteer co-chair and executive vice president and chief risk officer at iRhythm Technologies, made a similar case, emphasizing that direct connection to STEM leaders and hands-on learning can help students imagine themselves in those roles.
The event’s design reflects a broader reality in workforce development. Adolescents rarely choose a career path because of a single lecture; they move toward fields when someone credible makes the work feel concrete, visible and attainable. A student who sees a biomedical engineer describe device development, or a healthcare leader explain how analytics influence care delivery, gets a very different message than one delivered through a brochure alone. Exposure matters because career identity often begins long before college applications are submitted.
For women’s health, the stakes are especially high. The American Heart Association tied the STEM pipeline to persistent disparities in women’s health, noting that greater representation in healthcare, research and technology can improve how women’s needs are recognized and addressed. In cardiovascular disease, where women’s symptoms, risk profiles and treatment patterns have historically been underrecognized, the presence of more women in the research and clinical pipeline has practical importance. More women in STEM means more potential leaders in the labs, hospitals, product teams and public health agencies that influence detection, diagnosis and treatment.
The AHA also placed the event in the context of a much longer campaign. STEM Goes Red launched in 2017 as part of Go Red for Women, the organization’s flagship movement aimed at improving women’s heart health awareness and advancing equitable research, care and policy. Go Red for Women has operated for more than two decades and continues to focus on cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women. Within that framework, a career event for teenagers is not a side activity. It is part of a longer strategy to influence who enters the fields that will shape women’s health in the future.
A single afternoon cannot correct the pipeline imbalance on its own. It can, however, change the way students see the path ahead. For many attendees, the most important outcome may not have been a specific internship lead or college major, but the realization that STEM careers are not remote abstractions reserved for a narrow group of students. They are accessible, local and connected to community health in direct ways.
The setting reinforced that message. Hosted at a training center usually associated with performance and preparation, the event placed education, mentorship and aspiration in one room. Students heard from professionals whose careers span risk management, healthcare technology, legal leadership and other disciplines tied to the broader STEM ecosystem. That mix matters because it shows how many doors can open from a STEM foundation, including pathways that intersect with medicine, innovation and public health.
For girls deciding what comes next, visibility can be decisive. When the professionals in the room look like them, speak candidly about their own routes into the field and answer questions without polish, the career path becomes easier to imagine. The San Diego program leaned on that simple equation: access leads to recognition, recognition leads to interest, and interest can become persistence.
The American Heart Association continues to position STEM Goes Red as part of its broader women’s health work, with national sponsorship from CVS Health and local support from a group of sponsors and partners in the San Diego area. Even so, the central issue remains the same: women are still absent from too many STEM roles, and those gaps continue to shape health, research and innovation. The program’s value lies in how early it tries to intervene, before students decide those careers are not for them.