When Monica and I started the Scientista Podcast, we wanted to do more than interview impressive women. We wanted to understand how they build power, create institutions, and change the systems that so often overlook them.
Ann Drake and MarySue Barrett are doing exactly that.
Ann is the founder of Lincoln Road Enterprises, a philanthropic organization advancing women’s leadership in business, science, technology, infrastructure, and space. Together with MarySue, a longtime civic and policy leader, she’s building something rare: a physical place designed by and for women to do big, serious work — the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay in Wisconsin.
The building isn’t even open yet, but the project already feels alive.
Ann’s path to this work started in a deeply male-dominated industry: supply chains and logistics. She built and led a major company, and she saw up close how often women were isolated, dismissed, or simply not invited in — literally. She tells the story of showing up at an industry golf outing, getting into the cart with her name on it, and watching her assigned partner take one look at her and say, “I must have the wrong cart,” before walking away.
He missed out. But the pattern was familiar: thin networks, closed circles, and the constant choice between pushing harder or retreating back to the hotel room. Ann decided to build something different. She founded AWESOME — Achieving Women’s Excellence in Supply Chain Operations, Management, and Education — to connect women leaders, strengthen their skills, and make sure they weren’t going it alone.
The Women’s Leadership Center is the next chapter of that work, expanded beyond supply chains to four big arenas that shape our future: technology and engineering, infrastructure and design, business leadership, and the growing space economy. Ann is very clear: if women are not part of the frontier of space — its materials, systems, and decision-making — they will be left behind. She refuses to let that happen.
MarySue comes from another world that rarely centers women: public policy and civic leadership. She was chief of policy to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in her twenties, then led a major civic organization in the city. She calls herself a “super connector,” and it’s accurate — she is now applying that skill to help design the Center’s programming and partnerships.
What I love about their approach is that they refuse to wait for a ribbon-cutting to start the work. The Center is still under construction on Geneva Lake, a place Ann has known since childhood (she went to camp there with her classmate Hillary Rodham — yes, that Hillary). But the convening has already begun.
They are running focus groups and small dinners with women across the fields they care about, asking: What do you need? What would a useful convening place look like? What kinds of problems should we put on the table? They are building a database of leaders, mapping networks, and prototyping the types of gatherings they’ll host once the doors open.
And they are doing it with evidence, not vibes. One of the first projects out of the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay is a white paper on responsible AI and sustainability, built from interviews with about 15 women working at the frontlines of technology, data centers, digital twins, and climate tools — from Microsoft to Google to climate-tech entrepreneurs. The paper offers six concrete recommendations that any institution can use, including one that stuck with me: activate your suppliers. If most of your emissions and impacts sit in your supply chain, you can’t outsource responsibility. You have to pull your partners into the work with you.
They’re also using the construction site itself as a storytelling canvas. Instead of a bland perimeter fence, they turned it into an outdoor gallery featuring 18 women in science and leadership over the last 400 years — some historical, some living. The panels alternate between women most people have never heard of and those Ann and MarySue know personally, like astronaut Cady Coleman, who recently came to see the site and posed, delighted, next to her own image and that of Katherine Johnson from Hidden Figures.
It’s a small glimpse of what the Center is trying to do: connect past and present, make women visible in the physical landscape, and create a sense of momentum before the building even opens.
If you want to learn more about their work, you can visit Lincoln Road and the Women’s Leadership Center at womensleadershipcenter.org and lincoln-road.com. And if you’re a woman leading with science — or you know one — this is a place you’ll want to watch.
The future they’re building needs all of us.
