Shawna Curran, founder and CEO, STEM ENRG

“I help women of color break down the social and emotional barriers that are keeping them out of STEM careers,” says Shawna Curran, founder and CEO of STEM ENRG, based in Worcester, Mass.

The six-month career pivot program combines technical skills and life skills to set graduates up for long-term success.  

The idea for the company, which launched in 2020, came out of Curran’s own experiences. When she began her career in tech sales two decades ago, Curran forged a path developing and building global teams. As her career direction shifted and job responsibilities expanded, she realized two things: “Often my team was the sum total of the diversity at the organization. And, on the U.S. side, I was the only person in the room that looked like me.”

Throughout her career, in addition to her regular job, Curran says she found herself having to fight for her rights as well as the rights of other women of color trying to make it in the tech world. “There were a lot of misconceptions about how people were, their capabilities, and what they were able to do,” she says. “I had to break all of that down, fight for that equity for those folks. Also for myself.” 

And she was good at it. She taught companies to recognize the value of a diverse group; to see, specifically, how it led to innovations they may never have conceived alone. It also made her realize she wanted to make a bigger impact. Instead of working with one company at a time, Curran launched STEM ENRG to help women of color see themselves within the tech space so they could collectively go out and do the work she’d been doing — explaining the importance of a diverse tech workforce to companies while thriving in their own careers. 

While her program teaches key tech skills, such as how to code, most importantly, Curran says she is teaching women of color how to succeed in tech, not just exist there. 

Women of color are a “very, very, very underrepresented group” in tech, Curran says, and that means they, “have to move a little differently.” For example, participants at STEM ENRG learn about financial wellness and the gender pay gap, which is especially large for women of color. 

Inequalities like this leave many educated women of color with a “perception that, ‘maybe I don’t belong,’” says Curran. 

By the time they’ve completed the program at STEM ENRG, Curran aims for her graduates to have an understanding of the kind of impact they can make on their community through technology. “There is space for them in STEM,” she says. “I want them to leave knowing their value.”