LEE ANN KLINE
STEM Advantage
Lee Ann Kline is president and founder of STEM Advantage. Kline began her career as a programmer at IBM. As a Mathematics and Computer Science major with an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, she was keenly aware of the lack of women in her field and the need for role models. As her career progressed and she became a consultant at Ernst & Young (EY), she observed firsthand the lack of gender and racial diversity in technology organizations she served. Inspired to create change, Kline leveraged her network to create STEM Advantage in 2012. She left her corporate role at EY in 2020 and is focused on STEM Advantage full-time providing in-kind professional services.
In 2022, STEM Advantage celebrated its 10th anniversary. Kline brought together business, technology, and talent leaders in Southern California to create STEM Advantage and “level the playing field” by empowering talented students, who are mostly low-income, first-generation college students, attending California State University, the largest and most ethnically diverse four-year public university system in the nation, with access to networks, employment, and economic mobility, while providing a vetted pipeline of diverse talent to businesses to fill their workforce needs.
She believed a comprehensive program that was high-touch with high-impact would help students stay in college, earn a bachelor’s degree and persist in a STEM major. Under Kline’s leadership, in 2022 STEM Advantage secured significant multi-year gifts to hire a dedicated program team to ensure the organization is sustainable and positioned to scale. These investments are transformational to advance gender and racial equity.
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