How can we best support women and girls in STEM?
Leah Ellis: The best way to support women in STEM careers is for every workplace to commit to prioritizing performance and hiring the best people for the job, while upholding zero-tolerance policies for harassment. This means making data-driven decisions. By focusing on a track record of performance and outcomes, people of every background can shine.
Laura Lammers: In my experience, the greatest attrition of women from STEM starts when we start raising children. Developing secure pathways for women to hold their positions and responsibilities, while giving them time to bond with their newborns and breastfeed, is by far the biggest thing we can do in my opinion to keep women in STEM. I actually think the pipeline of girls in STEM is really strong!
Marta Sjögren: STEM isn’t just about who gets a seat at the table—it’s about who gets to shape the future. If we want more women and girls in STEM, we need to go beyond recruitment and fix the systems that push them out. That means funding STEM education early, challenging biases in hiring and leadership, and leveling the playing field on parental policies. At Paebbl, we’re building a company where talent defines who leads—where competence speaks louder than convention. The industry needs to do the same: make inclusion structural, not optional. Remove the barriers, set clear criteria for success, and let talent rise on merit.
How will your technology shape the future of construction?
Leah: Sublime has created a technology that decarbonizes cement by cutting out two major emissions sources: fossil fuels and carbonate minerals. Instead of traditional methods, we use an electrochemical process to extract reactive calcium, what we call Sublime Lime®, and silicates from abundant raw materials. Combining these, we make Sublime Cement®, our low-carbon, one-to-one replacement for Portland cement.
Laura: At Travertine, we’ve developed an electrochemical process to recover sulfuric acid from industrial mineral byproducts while permanently sequestering carbon dioxide into the residue, creating carbon-negative materials for cement. Our technology could eliminate hundreds of millions of tons of chemical waste annually while reducing the need to mine new rock for cement production, an environmental and economic win-win.
Marta: Paebbl transforms CO₂ into CO₃, turning a gas into stone through mineralization, just like nature has done for billions of years. But we don’t wait millennia, we do it in hours. This locks carbon away permanently, while our material also has cementitious properties – meaning it adds beneficial properties to the concrete mix while turning it into a carbon sink. By embedding this technology into construction materials, we flip the script. Instead of emitting CO₂, the built environment becomes a massive carbon sink. One of the hardest-to-abate industries can now be one of the biggest climate solutions.
February 11, 2025
February 4, 2025