Luz Rivas was pleasantly surprised to discover that her science background was an asset the first time she ran for office. “‘You’re the one [who] went to MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], right? You must be smart,’” she says potential voters told her as she campaigned for and won a seat in the California state legislature in 2018.
An engineer by training and the founder of DIY Girls, an after-school science program for girls in the Northeast San Fernando Valley where she grew up, Rivas never planned to pursue public office. But when a state assembly seat became vacant, Rivas realized her science accomplishments were “something tangible to show the voters what I’m capable of”—and something to build on to serve constituents.
After three terms, the 50-year-old Democrat parlayed her skills as a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) leader, community organizer, and savvy politician to win office last month in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rivas is one of only four of 63 new House members with science backgrounds, excluding physicians.
Rivas was drawn to science in the fifth grade, when her teacher taught the class how to program an Apple IIe computer. The daughter of Mexican immigrants being raised by a single mother, Rivas was fascinated by the blinking green cursor and the process of controlling a machine with simple commands. “All of this was very new to me, and foreign, and I really liked it,” she recalls.
Rivas loaded up on computer science, physics, and math classes in middle and high school, doing well enough to consider applying to top universities. Her math teacher helped her through the process, and a family friend loaned her $300 to fly cross-country to visit MIT. She graduated in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and joined Motorola, designing navigation systems for automobiles.
Being the only woman or woman of color in the room at work often felt isolating, so she began to volunteer as a mentor at a community center and discovered “the kids had no idea what I did, like what’s an engineer and how to get there.” So Rivas decided to leave the corporate world and earn a master’s degree in education at Harvard University with a specialization in technology.
She worked on science education projects with the American Museum of Natural History and managed programs for increasing diversity in STEM at the California Institute of Technology before forming an organization to serve young girls of color. The goal of DIY Girls, she explains, is to provide “early [STEM] exposure in a way that makes it fun and creative” so that “you don’t get to college and just discover physics.”
Since 2012 DIY Girls has provided more than 7500 young girls and other gender minorities with programming such as hands-on electronics projects for elementary schoolers, summer woodworking camps for middle schoolers, and help with applying to college for high school seniors. “Organizations like DIY Girls are critical to expanding the pipeline of future scientists and engineers” to include women of color, says Erica Lim of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, a Los Angeles–based philanthropy that has provided more than $650,000 to DIY Girls since 2018. Lim says about 60% of the students in the alumni network are currently enrolled in or have already earned undergraduate degrees in STEM fields.
Daniela Orozco-Jimenez, a DIY Girls alum and mechanical engineer at aviation startup Skyryse, says the program “helped keep me on the path into mechanical engineering” as she struggled with imposter syndrome as an undergraduate at Stanford University. Her mentors taught her that “even though [engineering] is not easy, that doesn’t mean it’s not meant for me.”
DIY Girls also gave Rivas the chance to meet community leaders, including Representative Tony Cárdenas (D–CA). Also an electrical engineer by training, he “was excited that an organization like [DIY Girls] was in his own district,” Rivas recalls, and endorsed her for state legislature.
During her 6 years in state government, Rivas sponsored legislation that now requires California public schools to teach climate change to grades one through 12 and secured $10 million for a biotechnology institute at Los Angeles Mission College.
Cárdenas’s decision last year to not seek a seventh term in Congress opened the door for her candidacy, which he also endorsed. Last month, Rivas easily won her race against Republican Benito Bernal to succeed Cárdenas in the predominantly Hispanic district, becoming the first Hispanic woman to hold the seat. “She is a barrier breaker,” says Susana Gomez, DIY Girls’s head of communications. “She shows the young girls that we serve … that they belong everywhere.”
Rivas says her legislative priorities include climate science, artificial intelligence regulation, and water security. To advance those issues, she’d like to win seats on the Science, Space and Technology; Natural Resources; and/or Transportation and Infrastructure committees.
Rivas says she also plans to defend the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM—a current flash point among Republicans. Students from backgrounds similar to hers “can do the physics and they can do calculus,” she says, “but it’s hard [for them] to navigate the institutions” without the help of such programs.
Rivas has already taken a step to raise her profile. Last month, she was elected freshman leadership representative to the Democratic Caucus, giving her a ticket to weekly meetings with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) and other top Democrats. “They told me they voted for me because they respect my science background,” Rivas says.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/advocate-girls-science-can-now-make-her-pitch-congress
