If you owned a small business and I told you that 50 percent of your potential resources were languishing in a corner, just waiting to be tapped to serve your bottom line, it's likely you would jump right to it. What if I told you that right now, in Central Texas and across the country, half our current workforce is fighting to demonstrate its potential to drive our country to sustainable success?

Women and girls are our economy’s most underutilized resource. Central Texas must tap the power of this creative, committed and innovative workforce.

Women comprise 50 percent of the Central Texas and U.S. populations. Yet only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and women make up on 15 percent of corporate boards. Only 17 percent of the U.S. Senators, representatives and governors are women. While women are starting new companies at a rate 1.5 times higher than the national average , only four to nine percent of all deals go to women entrepreneurs, and less than ten percent of companies with female co-founders have been venture funded.

We know, however, that girls want to lead. A national study conducted by GFK Roper on behalf of Girl Scouts USA shows that the vast majority of girls seek role models and mentors to help them attain leadership. That study shows that three in five girls think they will rise up in a company, but also think they will rarely get the opportunity to be promoted to the top position in that company. Study findings also show that 8 year-old girls consider themselves leaders but, by the time they are 16, they lose their confidence in that capacity.

If Central Texas wants to maintain its economic growth and competitive workforce, we simply cannot afford to let this potential for leadership lose its confidence.

To commemorate its 2012 centennial as the Year of the Girl, Girl Scouts of Central Texas has joined a national movement, ToGetHerThere.org, which aims to turn this underutilized resource into an economic engine that will keep our country producing and thriving competitively. We are dedicated to changing the composition of leadership in the United States within one generation.

Girl Scouts has a century-long proven record of cultivating successful leaders and launching them into the world as powerful sources for change. Eighty percent of female business leaders in the country are among Girl Scout alumni. Seventy percent of women in Congress and almost every female astronaut is a former Girl Scout.

In the past year, Girl Scouts designed a robotic arm that allowed a girl without an arm to write her name for the first time. They also helped build a heli-pad to bring emergency medicine to a remote rural area.

This is creativity, commitment and innovation that we must tap, mentor and direct toward leadership of our country and our communities.

Watch the leadership panel conversation "What must we do to get her there" by

• Debra Roberts, ABC News
• Connie Lindsay,  Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Northern Trust Chicago
• Jean Chatzky, personal finance expert
• Michelle Kwan, figure skating champion, member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition
• Joanna Coles, Editor in Chief, Marie Clare magazine
• Linda Descano, President and CEO of Women and Company, a division of Citibank
• Kristen Sanchez, DeLoitte LLP