WISEST

So I see that WISEST is celebrating its 30th anniversary.  It seems that the core mission still seems to be encouraging girls to consider going into science and engineering...though I'm not sure that encouragement is really necessary in some disciplines.  Certainly the undergraduate classes that I teach are more than 50% female, and I would estimate that about half of our entering graduate class is female as well.  Of course, other disciplines (physics, perhaps?  engineering?) may still have some ground to make up, but I feel that the appropriateness of this gender-specific program to certain fields has largely ended.

I am more interested in this stated objective:

Although we have been pursuing our goals since 1982 and representation of women in science, engineering and technology is most definitely on the rise, a gender balance at decision-making and leadership levels still needs to be reached.

I think that our university generally does pretty well in promoting women at the top--our President, Senior VP (Finance), VP (University Relations) and countless AVPs are women.  But returning to the parochial issue of my own department, I would like to see more women among the tenured faculty.  Of course, with a de facto hiring freeze, there is not much opportunity to address this problem...  But, I wonder if WISEST has sufficient resources to assist in the identification and recruitment of top female job candidates to science and engineering departments?  Sending high school girls into a lab for 6 weeks in the summer makes for some nice feel-good stories, but it's not really doing much to change the underlying culture.