Greetings GW Engineering Community!
During the month of March, we celebrated the impact of women around the world. Women’s History Month is an opportunity to acknowledge the many contributions women have made to further humanity and the strides we’ve made as a society toward gender equity.
Even with the progress that has been made over the last century, there is still more that can and must be done, and there are many disciplines and industries where women remain underrepresented, including engineering and computer science.
At GW Engineering, we are working to address that. Over the last few decades, our school has worked to create an inclusive community where women can thrive and become global leaders in engineering and computer science. This community now includes an undergraduate student body that is 45% female, which is almost double the national average and top-10 nationwide. While we have much work to do to improve the gender diversity of our graduate students and faculty, we are well above national averages in both, and 55% of our faculty hires over the last three years are women. In addition, two of our three Associate Deans are female, and with the recent election of Dr. Vesna Zderic as BME Chair and the summer arrival of Dr. Rebecca Hwa as CS Chair, half of our Department Chairs will be women. Much work remains, but we are proud of this great progress and are deeply grateful to the many people who have made it possible.
One of those people is Computer Science Professor Emerita Dr. Rachelle Heller, who is the Founding Director of our Center for Women in Engineering (WiE). The Center provides events, mentoring, training, and thought leadership that not only make GW Engineering a top school for female engineers but also promote gender equity in the field of engineering more broadly.
As we close out Women’s History Month, we acknowledge that there is still much work to be done and issues of equity to address. I encourage all of us to consider how we can help create gender-equity in our school, our discipline, our community, and our world.
Raise High!
John Lach
|