A Letter to the Girls Who Are Already Everything

By Dr. Odessa Lacsina, Executive Director, The State of Women Institute

This week, world leaders are gathered in New York at the United Nations. They are talking about trust. About transformation. About a world that delivers for all.

I want to talk about you.

You are eleven. You want to be an astronaut. You want to lead the mission to Mars. You have said this since you were four years old and not one word of it has changed.

But let me start a little earlier than that.

I homeschooled you. When you were small I taught you that math is the language the whole world speaks exactly the same. You heard that and you made it yours. You told me once that math is everything. I believed you then. I believe you now.

When we got to space, something shifted. You watched every documentary. You read every book you could find. You were fascinated in the way that some children are fascinated by things they recognize, not things they are discovering for the first time. Then we read a book about Dr. Mae Jemison. You could not let it go.

At four years old, you met her.

You, who have never once in your life been at a loss for words, went completely silent. And when you found your voice again, you said: I want to be an astronaut. I want to lead the mission to Mars.

That declaration has not changed once. Not in seven years.

While that dream has been growing, so have you. You compete with your robotics team. You compete on ice. You advocate for literacy because you understand that words are power and not everyone has equal access to them. You report on the world as a youth correspondent. And since you were six years old you have been hosting a reading podcast, interviewing guests, introducing books to audiences, building something season by season that is now in its fifth year.

More often than not, you are the most prepared person in the room. You are just not expected to be.

My heart silently bursts with pride when you introduce yourself as the first Madam President of Kids In Action. And I blush with awe when I think of the impact you will have in this world.

Now let me tell you what I know as a scientist, because I think you deserve the honest version.

The years just ahead of you are the ones the research watches most closely. Girls enter school with math confidence nearly equal to boys. By middle school a measurable gap has opened. Not because something changed in the girls. Because something changed in what the world reflected back to them. The cultural pressure that peaks between twelve and fifteen does not just ask girls to lower their ambitions. It asks them to doubt the ones they have held the longest. The ones that arrived early and stayed.

You have held yours for seven years.

There will be rooms you walk into where someone will look at everything you are and quietly suggest you pick one thing. The robotics or the ice. The podcast or the math. The advocacy or the astronaut. They will mean well, most of them. They have been taught that focus means subtraction.

What they have not yet understood is that the most important questions in science — the ones about access and equity and how we build systems that work for everyone — cannot be answered by people who only know one thing. A girl who performs under pressure alone on ice and builds machines as part of a team and has been communicating ideas to a public audience since she was six is not scattered. She is the most prepared person in the room.

She is just not always expected to be.

Research on girls who persist in STEM through adolescence and go on to lead points to one factor above most others: a documented record of competence they can point to when the world starts telling them they don't belong. You have five seasons of that record already in your podcast alone. Season six is being made right now. You built that before anyone told you it would matter.

The United Nations is in New York this week saying that women's leadership is failing to advance globally. That in many countries it is moving backward. They are right, and that matters, and people like me are working on it.

But I am also watching an eleven-year-old who already leads, already advocates, already competes, already reports, already builds teams and stands alone on ice and has held a microphone since she was six and has known since she was four — since she stood silent in front of the woman who proved it was possible — exactly where she is going.

The research does not have a framework for you yet. You are ahead of it.

Some may not be ready for you. Walk in anyway.

With love and with evidence, A scientist (who is also your mom).