Changing the Landscape Means Refusing to Step Back

I needed to take a beat to think about how to respond to receiving the 2026 Women & Hi Tech Change the Landscape Award.

I am grateful that women I respect see the work that I and The Startup Ladies have done over the past decade. We have spent years helping women-owned companies become more prepared, connected, visible, and fundable. We have trained investors to understand how to evaluate and invest in women founders, and we have matched founders and funders in rooms designed for serious connection. I am proud to see that work recognized as part of changing the landscape for women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), entrepreneurship, and investment.

I also think this is the moment to evaluate the current landscape and have an honest discussion, because things need to change.

On the morning of October 1, I woke up to WFYI reporting on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” remarks at Marine Corps Base Quantico. My radio alarm went off, I kept my eyes closed, and I listened as he reportedly said, “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.” Then came the line that told us exactly who he thinks does not belong: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

And I thought: this man has no idea what is coming.

He has no idea how many high-testosterone women in perimenopause and postmenopause, women with chin hairs, weight gain from COVID and body changes, caregiving exhaustion, medical bills, payroll pressure, board meetings, investor meetings, and a lifetime of being underestimated, are watching men like him confuse cruelty with strength. He has no idea how many of us are done being quiet while men who fear history, science, humanities, and smart women attempt to define who belongs in public life, business, education, government, and power.

The Me Too movement produced a surge of women seeking justice. Three years later, after George Floyd was murdered, there was another surge of young people, employees, founders, investors, and business leaders demanding justice and equity. In 2020, many people changed their social media profile pictures to a black square for Blackout Tuesday, a public gesture of solidarity with Black communities and racial justice. Some of that solidarity was real. Some of it was performative. But the pressure was undeniable. Corporations pledged billions of dollars toward racial equity, supplier diversity, Black-owned businesses, community investment, and economic justice. McKinsey later reported that companies pledged more than $340 billion toward racial equity after George Floyd’s murder, though much of that money was hard to track and unevenly deployed. (McKinsey & Company)

Then came the rollback.

The rise of Make America Great Again politics, Project 2025, executive orders, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the normalization of authoritarian language did not simply create a vibe shift. It created a formal regression of equity. Federal grants were frozen, cut, delayed, or politicized. The Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had cut or frozen more than $177 billion in federal grants and contracts. (Associated Press) Public health agencies were gutted through mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Associated Press)

Companies that had once issued statements about equity started retreating. Reuters reported that major companies including Meta, Amazon, Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Ford, and others rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. (Reuters) Target ended its three-year DEI goals and renamed its “Supplier Diversity” team “Supplier Engagement.” (Reuters) Business leaders who had once sounded “woke” got quiet, put on the red ball cap, or decided that compliance was easier than courage. Sponsorships disappeared. Women-owned organizations and organizations serving Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled, immigrant, and other underrepresented communities were told, directly or indirectly, that their work had become too risky to support out loud.

Universities began changing names, restructuring offices, canceling programs, or avoiding words that might trigger political punishment. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce documented how colleges rebranded or dismantled DEI offices. (Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce) The University of Florida eliminated all DEI positions and administrative appointments in response to state law. (Associated Press) Across the country, courses, conferences, centers, and campus programs were renamed or reshaped so institutions could survive a regime trying to whitewash history and punish truth-telling. (Inside Higher Ed)

And Indiana has been part of that regression.

Indiana enacted a near-total abortion ban, restricting reproductive freedom and forcing women and pregnant people to navigate one of the most intimate medical decisions of their lives under state control. (Indiana Department of Health) Indiana banned gender-affirming care for minors. (Associated Press) Indiana passed a law requiring schools to notify parents when a student requests a name or pronoun change, making schools less safe for some LGBTQ+ students. (Courthouse News Service) Governor Mike Braun signed executive orders targeting what he called “extreme gender ideology,” including policies affecting transgender athletes. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Indiana advanced anti-DEI legislation aimed at public schools and state agencies. (Indiana Capital Chronicle) Governor Braun publicly called for replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with “merit, excellence, and innovation.” (Office of the Governor) Indiana passed Senate Bill 202, reshaping higher education through requirements tied to “intellectual diversity” and tenure review, raising serious concerns about academic freedom. (Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy)

Indiana also joined the national book-banning movement by making it easier to challenge and remove school library materials, requiring school library catalogs to be posted online, and eliminating legal protections for school librarians and educators accused of providing materials the state defines as “harmful” to minors. The result is not just a policy change. It is a chilling effect. Teachers, librarians, students, and families understand the message: certain histories, identities, bodies, and truths are now politically dangerous to teach, read, or defend. (Associated Press) (Axios Indianapolis)

Indiana continues to make voting harder than it needs to be through restrictive absentee voting rules and registration barriers. (Indiana Secretary of State) Indiana has moved toward requiring school board candidates to declare party affiliation, further politicizing local education. (WFYI) Indiana has pursued restrictions tied to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, increasing pressure on low-income families already dealing with inflation, caregiving demands, health challenges, and unstable wages. (Axios Indianapolis)

And then Governor Braun had the audacity to celebrate Indiana ending fiscal year 2026 with a $1.86 billion surplus and nearly $4 billion in reserves while one in five Indiana children faces hunger, while Indiana declined to participate in the SUN Bucks summer food program that provides $120 per eligible child for groceries, and while disabled Hoosiers and medically complex families continue fighting for access to the medical care, waiver services, and home-based support they need. That is not fiscal responsibility. That is a statement of values. A state budget tells us who leaders are willing to protect, who they are willing to abandon, and whose suffering they believe can be managed quietly. (WFYI) (Feeding America) (WFYI) (Indiana Family and Social Services Administration)

Indiana has also expanded its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Governor Braun directed Indiana law enforcement agencies to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “to the fullest extent permitted by law,” and Indiana State Police later sought nearly $30 million in federal funding tied to immigration enforcement, surveillance technology, vehicles, and investigative tools. ICE is bad for business because it destabilizes workforces, makes workers and families afraid to report abuse or seek help, and weakens the trust local economies need to function. It is unethical and immoral because it treats people who are already part of our communities as disposable. It separates families, terrorizes workers, and turns neighbors into targets. A state serious about economic growth would make it easier for immigrants to become Americans, not harder. It would make lawful status, work authorization, and citizenship more navigable instead of using fear as policy. (Indiana Capital Chronicle) (The Indiana Lawyer)

The silenced story is that undocumented immigrants pay taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, including payroll taxes that help fund Social Security and Medicare, even though many are barred from receiving those benefits. They pay sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes directly or through rent, and in many cases income taxes. At the same time, non-citizens, including lawful permanent residents, cannot vote in federal, state, and most local elections. So immigrants are helping pay for schools, roads, emergency services, health systems, and social services that people born in this country benefit from, while politicians demonize them and deny them political power. That is not just bad policy. It is exploitation. (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) (USAGov)

And yes, Governor Braun wiped out the state’s Minority and Women’s Business Enterprise (MWBE) program as we knew it. His executive order terminated the state’s Supplier Diversity Program, halted new Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) and Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) certifications, halted recertifications, and removed supplier diversity commitments that had been in place since 1983. (Executive Order 26-17)

Why is this significant? Contracts and capital are not separate conversations. They are two of the main ways public dollars decide which businesses get to grow. When Indiana eliminates supplier diversity on the procurement side while continuing to fund startup investment on the capital side, the question is no longer whether state government is involved in choosing winners. It is. The question is whether the state will be honest about who gets access, who gets counted, and whether women-owned and minority-owned businesses are getting a fair shot at the public-dollar pathways that help companies scale.

Elevate Ventures, which describes itself as one of the most successful public-private partnerships in the United States, reports that it has invested $184 million in Indiana startups since 2011. Its 2024 annual report also says that 20 percent of its 2024 commitments went to “women-owned or women-led companies.” That accounting is not good enough. In fact, as an accountability measure, it is misleading and misogynistic because it allows institutions to claim progress for women without proving that women actually own, control, and financially benefit from the companies receiving capital. A company can be women-led and still be majority-owned by men, controlled by men, and structured so men hold most of the voting rights, equity, and liquidity. We do not seem to count “male-owned” and “male-led” companies as if those are the same thing. We should not blur that line when we are talking about women and public dollars. (Elevate Ventures 2024 Annual Report)

And even if 20 percent were accurate, it would still be appalling. It would mean that after more than a decade and $184 million invested, women still receive a fraction of the capital deployed through Indiana’s startup investment infrastructure. It is also unacceptable that there have been long periods of time when women were not meaningfully represented in the investment decision-making process, even as women founders were being evaluated for capital. Entrepreneurs in residence may help founders prepare for their pitch, refine their numbers, sharpen their story, and survive the due diligence process, but they have been kept out of the actual investment decision because their involvement would supposedly be a “conflict of interest.” If the people closest to the founders cannot participate in the decision, then the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) should require a transparent process that ensures women, and people with direct expertise in the barriers women founders face, are part of investment decision-making.

The irony is hard to miss. Founders are run through extensive due diligence and expected to know every number in their business: their revenue, margins, market size, customer acquisition costs, ownership structure, cap table, use of funds, and growth projections. There is no defensible reason the organizations deploying public dollars cannot do the same when reporting how much money and how many investments went into women-owned companies. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation should require women-owned and women-led numbers to be tracked and reported separately. Based on what I have seen in this ecosystem, I do not believe the women-owned number is anywhere near 20 percent. If it is, prove it with the data.

You do not have to share all of my politics to understand what is happening here. If you believe in entrepreneurship, free enterprise, hard work, local business ownership, and Indiana’s economic future, then you should be concerned when the state removes programs that helped women-owned and minority-owned businesses compete for contracts.

You can call it diversity, equity, and inclusion. You can call it supplier diversity. You can call it access. You can call it fair competition. But when those pathways disappear, the result is the same: fewer women-owned businesses get into the rooms where contracts, capital, customers, and power move.

And if we say we believe in merit, then we should be honest about what merit requires. Merit requires access to information, networks, contracts, customers, capital, and rooms where decisions are made. Without that access, “merit” becomes a story people in power tell themselves about why the same people keep winning.

Every human has the ability to change their landscape daily. But changing the landscape requires understanding how power works, who benefits from current systems, and the extreme harm done when people in power use legislation, budgets, procurement, courts, schools, health care, policing, immigration enforcement, public education, and public language to decide whose lives matter less.

It also requires asking ourselves uncomfortable questions. What have you rolled back inside your company to comply with political standards that do not fully value every human? What words have you removed? What programs have you renamed? What sponsorships have you quietly pulled? What employee resource groups have you stopped funding? What founders have you stopped inviting into the room? What organizations have you stopped supporting because their work became politically inconvenient?

And if none of this feels urgent to you, it may be because you are among the small percentage of people with enough money, social insulation, health care access, housing stability, and professional protection to be shielded from the pain most employees and most Americans are feeling. Federal Reserve data show that the top 10 percent of households own more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. (Federal Reserve) A 2025 analysis of Federal Reserve data found that 37 percent of American adults would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense. (Investopedia)

That is the landscape The Startup Ladies was built to change. The organization exists to increase the number of women building scalable startups and to help them secure the investment they need to grow. That sounds simple until you understand the conditions around it: who gets invited into investor rooms, who gets taught the language of capital, who is considered fundable, who is counted as a woman founder, who owns the company, who controls the equity, and who benefits when the company succeeds.

Changing that landscape has required far more than hosting programs. It has required years of unpaid and under-recognized labor: making introductions, coaching founders through investor readiness, explaining ownership and cap tables, challenging funders to ask better questions, building rooms that did not exist, and saying out loud what made people uncomfortable. Some people valued it. Some benefited quietly. Some kept their distance because the work challenged their power. But the work has always been clear: help more women own scalable companies, raise capital, create jobs, and build wealth.

Over the past decade, we have hosted more than 500 programs for founders and funders. We created the Invest In Women Founders Summit. We built an e-learning program. We launched Project BoardUp in collaboration with the Indy Black Chamber and the Indy Rainbow Chamber to help more women, Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ leaders prepare for and access board service. We have helped our members secure more than $1 million in investment. We have helped women founders become more prepared, connected, visible, and fundable.

We have built rooms where women-owned companies meet investors, executives, customers, universities, banks, attorneys, accountants, technologists, marketers, and strategic partners. We have taught founders how to understand their numbers, tell the truth about their businesses, prepare for due diligence, price their work, build teams, ask for capital, and negotiate from a stronger position. We have taught investors how to listen differently, ask better questions, recognize bias, understand different growth paths, and evaluate women founders without forcing them to perform confidence in the narrow ways men have historically rewarded.

We changed the pitch model because traditional pitch events often reward performance over substance. Instead of asking women to stand alone on a stage and compress years of work into a few minutes of theater, we created an interview model that helps investors and audiences understand the founder, the market, the business model, the traction, the capital need, and the opportunity. That is not a small change. That is systems-change work.

This work is not charity.

It is economic development. It is workforce development. It is science, technology, engineering, and math. It is business attraction and retention. It is job creation. It is innovation infrastructure. Women-owned companies create jobs. They attract talent. They retain talent. They build products, services, technologies, and companies that strengthen communities. When we support them, we are investing in the long-term economic health of Indiana.

Some elected officials may be afraid of smart women, honest history, serious science, humanities, and systems that make room for more people to compete. But business leaders do not have to follow them backward. Elected officials come and go, and many of them will be voted out sooner than they think. The founders, investors, employers, universities, banks, professional service firms, executives, and community leaders who choose courage over compliance are the ones who will build what comes next.

This is exactly the time for businesses to step up, not step back.

Businesses have a choice. They can retreat into fear, rename everything that once sounded like equity, and hope no one notices. Or they can decide that this is the moment to support the people and organizations that never changed their values to appease the real cowards in office, the ones afraid of history, science, humanities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Black and Brown communities, disabled people, and smart women.

The Startup Ladies is inviting businesses to do the smart and practical thing: become members, sponsor the Summit, buy tables, show up in the room, make introductions, fund women-owned companies, restore supplier diversity, keep employee resource groups alive, mentor across difference, invest in founders who do not already have inherited networks, sponsor organizations still doing equity work out loud, refuse to erase history, refuse to punish truth-telling, and refuse to let fear become their operating system.

America, Indiana, and our business community need an exit strategy from pretending everything is OK while oligarchs shape public policy and racism and misogyny are written into laws, budgets, procurement systems, classrooms, immigration enforcement, grantmaking, health care, and who gets access to capital.

But we do not need to return to what was. What was did not work for enough people. We need to build a future where every human is cared for in the way they need care, where diverse owners and leaders have systems and resources specific to their growth, and where businesses thrive because more people are included in the opportunity to build them.

Changing the landscape is not a slogan. It is a daily practice. It is a budget. It is a hiring decision. It is a contract. It is a sponsorship. It is a board seat. It is a vote.

And it is still possible. That is the point. We are not powerless. We are responsible.

Thank you to Women & Hi Tech for recognizing this work and for reminding all of us that changing the landscape is not something one person or one organization does alone. It requires people willing to tell the truth, move resources, open doors, share power, and stay in the work when it becomes uncomfortable. I invite you to change the landscape with me.