The digital economy loves to talk about innovation. It talks far less about access.

As artificial intelligence accelerates, tech valuations soar, and governments race toward digital transformation, one question sits uncomfortably beneath the headlines: Who is being prepared to participate—and who is being systematically left out?

Hermina Johnny is not interested in incremental change. She is interested in structural correction.

Born in Saint Lucia and shaped by years of living and working across the United States and Europe, Johnny has positioned herself at the intersection of education, economic strategy, and gender equity. As Founder and Executive Director of the Aspire Artemis Foundation, she is working to redesign the pipeline into science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM)—with a deliberate focus on girls and underrepresented communities.

And she is unapologetic about the stakes.

“Digital transformation without intentional inclusion doesn’t close gaps—it widens them.”

From Global Policy To Ground-Level Access

Johnny’s academic background spans international relations, economics, anthropology, and international law. She earned her undergraduate degree from Connecticut College and completed an LL.M. in International Law and International Relations in Brussels, later pursuing research in constitutionalism and fundamental rights.

But rather than remaining in policy circles, she moved toward execution.

Global development frameworks routinely articulate commitments to equity. Yet implementation often stalls at the structural level. Johnny saw that disconnect firsthand.

So she built an institution designed to close it.

Education As Economic Infrastructure

Through the Aspire Artemis Foundation, Johnny develops STEAM-focused leadership programs, global symposia, and digital literacy initiatives that go beyond exposure. The organization integrates arts into STEM disciplines—not as decoration, but as strategic design—training young people to think adaptively in a workforce defined by rapid change.

Her framing is deliberately economic.

STEAM education, she argues, is not a social side project. It is workforce architecture.

“If education isn’t treated as infrastructure, we shouldn’t be surprised when opportunity collapses under pressure.”

Under her leadership, the foundation has convened programming connected to international development discussions and United Nations–related venues, reinforcing a simple but disruptive thesis: innovation ecosystems that exclude women are economically inefficient.

The conversation, she insists, must shift from representation optics to structural preparation.

Encouragement is not a strategy. Infrastructure is.

Small States, Global Systems — And Female Leadership

Johnny’s work also challenges geographic bias in global innovation narratives. Participation in forums linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN General Assembly, and the ECOSOC Science, Technology and Innovation Forum places her within high-level policy discussions.

At the Fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4), debates centered on resilience and connectivity. For Johnny, the message was direct: small island nations cannot diversify their economies without digital capability.

And digital capability does not appear spontaneously. It is built—intentionally.

As a woman leader from a small island state, Johnny’s presence in these arenas disrupts two assumptions at once: that innovation leadership belongs to large economies, and that systems change is driven primarily by traditional power centers.

“Geography should not determine destiny. Neither should gender.”

Strategy Meets Execution

Before founding her nonprofit, Johnny built experience in business strategy and legal advisory work, including corporate and intellectual property matters. That foundation shapes her leadership style—analytical, cross-sector, and systems-focused.

But she refuses to operate solely at altitude.

She continues to teach and develop educational materials, maintaining direct engagement with learners. The result is rare: a leader equally fluent in boardroom strategy and classroom realities.

In conversations about women in technology, she pushes back against surface-level diversity narratives.

Representation without preparation, she argues, sets women up to enter systems that were never designed for them to succeed.

Structured pathways, market-aligned skills, mentorship networks, and institutional accountability are non-negotiable.

The Real Leadership Test

The digital economy disproportionately rewards early exposure and sustained access. Johnny’s work is built around intervening before exclusion calcifies into inevitability.

By positioning STEAM education as both an equity imperative and an economic growth strategy, she reframes inclusion not as charity—but as competitiveness.

In her view, the most dangerous myth in innovation culture is that talent naturally rises.

Talent rises when infrastructure supports it.

“The question isn’t whether women can lead in technology. The question is whether systems are willing to evolve fast enough to make room.”

In the expanding landscape of women in leadership, Hermina Johnny represents a category of leader that is increasingly impossible to ignore: not symbolic, not peripheral—but systemic.

She is not asking to be included in the digital economy.

She is helping decide who gets to build it.

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Protesters in New York City in September joined thousands of others around the world in urging governments to act on climate change. Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

The past year has given many of us reason to pause. We are losing in a race to prevent planetary tipping points — the climate is changing faster than expected, and humanity has already breached six of the nine sustainable planetary boundaries (for biodiversity loss; climate, freshwater and land-system change; biogeochemical flows; and novel entities)¹. Summer Antarctic sea ice shrank to its lowest recorded extent in 2023 (see go.nature.com/4f86req), a year that is on track to be the warmest on record (see go.nature.com/4f9ykdj).

People around the world recognize that life is not getting any better. As wars rage, runaway inequality and political polarization are eroding societies’ sense of cohesion. Eight individuals owned more than the poorest 50% of the world’s population, according to an Oxfam report in 2017². Levels of anxiety, depression and burnout are rocketing. Full-time employees are unable to pay rent and must turn to extra part-time work to make ends meet, while employers cut staff and increase workloads.

Crises are now normal in this global economic system that depletes natural and social capital, energy and time in the name of economic growth at all costs.

But, looking to 2024, I’m hopeful that the world can turn in a better direction. For example, a meeting I attended in May on sustainable prosperity particularly buoyed my spirits — and, in my view, signalled a tipping point in thinking and governance. The Beyond Growth conference at the European Parliament attracted more than 2,500 participants in person, as well as 2,000 online. It was sponsored by the European Commission and the Club of Rome (a non-profit organization fostering research and action around pressing global issues).

In a stirring opening address, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said that governments must stop misusing growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as their goal and instead move swiftly and urgently to sustainable well-being within planetary boundaries. She got a standing ovation. Agata Meysner, the young leader of Generation Climate Europe, a coalition of climate and environmental networks across the bloc, concluded the event with a call to join the “movement of movements” to create a new economy based on sustainable prosperity, justice and sufficiency. Everyone rose to their feet.

And an increasing number of organizations and movements dedicated to overcoming our addiction to GDP growth are working together to do just that, including through networks such the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (which also supported the conference). The pursuit of GDP growth at all costs is an outdated paradigm that claims that all people want is more income and consumption with no limits. It assumes that the market economy can grow forever, that massive inequality is justified to provide incentives to promote growth, and that efforts to address climate and other environmental and social problems must not interfere with growth. It supposes that growth is the solution to all ills. It isn’t.

As the European conference emphasized, GDP was never designed to measure societal well-being — only market production and consumption. GDP says nothing about the distribution of income, unpaid work or damages to natural or social capital. The misuse of GDP as a policy goal is driving societies towards an unsustainable future that benefits an increasingly small proportion of the population while impoverishing the vast majority².

Researchers must help to provide alternatives. Here’s how.

Design better measures of societal well-being

Hundreds of indicators of societal well-being are already in use, including by the United Nations, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), non-governmental organizations, countries and academics. Examples include the Genuine Progress Indicator; the OECD Better Life Index; and annual surveys of life satisfaction³. To become a societal goal used by all, and to displace GDP, the world must settle on a new indicator. Broad consensus is needed on what should be included.

For example, it is not just income that matters, but also the ways in which it is distributed. The costs of environmental and social degradation must be included, as should contributors to well-being that are unconnected to income — such as our relationships and communities, good governance, the ability to participate in decision-making and ecosystem services provided by the natural environment. Several research initiatives are beginning to address these issues (including one I am involved with, called MERGE, which is funded by the European Union).

Model the complex dynamics of the economic system

Interactions between social, economic and natural elements of societal well-being must be better modelled and future projections developed to assess their sustainability. National examples include the EUROGREEN model, which has been applied to France, and the LowGrow model of the Canadian ecological economy.

The Earth4All model of the Club of Rome takes a global perspective. It explores two scenarios towards 2050. The first — known as business as usual, or too little too late — looks at what will happen if the world continues current trends of increasing inequality, climate disruption and decreasing well-being, even as GDP continues to rise. By contrast, the second scenario, called giant leap, shows how investing in five areas — renewable energy, regenerative food, reducing inequality, eliminating poverty and enabling empowerment — could ensure sustainable, prosperous and equitable well-being for humans and the rest of nature.

For example, rather than rewarding the fossil-fuel sector with enormous subsidies to maintain economic growth at the expense of climate and social disruption, new policies would focus on moving away from fossil fuels. At the same time, policies to achieve the other four turnaround areas would be implemented to enable sustainable well-being, regardless of the effects on GDP.

Develop policies to support sustainable well-being

The EU and the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) group that includes Scotland, New Zealand, Wales, Finland, Canada and Iceland have begun to implement measures of sustainable well-being and policies to achieve them. Researchers need to analyse these plans and offer lessons to help other nations adopt them. What are these policies? There are many versions, but an open letter I signed in May — together with more than 400 leading economists, scientists, policymakers and activists — provides starting points in four areas. These are biocapacity (protecting the planet), fairness (a more equal society), well-being for all (basic services and rights) and active democracy (see ‘Beyond growth policies’ and go.nature.com/47z3v6s).

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AMAC acts and speaks on behalf of its members, protecting their interests and offering a practical insight on how to best solve the problems they face today. AMAC’s advice to Seniors: Live long and make a difference! More information is available about AMAC at: http://amac.us

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