Women in Engineering

IEEE WIE, Affinity Group

WIE is largest international professional group dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientist. The idea is to provide the young women with a platform, encouragement and inspiration to come up with confidence and excellence in the technical career of Engineering.WIE is an effort to motivate the women to be a part of science, Technology and Engineering by bringing all men and women with such ambitions to put a joint effort towards this.

IEEE aims to achieve this by taking following steps: Recognizing their achievements in electrical and electronics engineering through IEEE awards. Promoting WIE at major technical conferences. We have also taken a few initiatives like discounts in membership for girls in order to increase the number of participants. Advocate women in leadership roles in IEEE governance, providing assistance and support to the activities of these groups. Facilitating programs and activities for promoting girls' participation. We are planning to organize an interactive session by two of our seniors who were selected in Google, women of India contest.

Administering the STAR program to mentor young women in junior and high schools. IEEE student branch is looking forward to deliver few lectures to the school students of Gandhinagar and Ahmadabad in order to inspire girls to take up engineering as a career.

WIE at DA-IICT: Journey so far DA-IICT IEEE Student branch too has a "Women in Engineering Affinity Group" which was established in 2009. In its first year of existence, WIE organized a workshop on "Digital Image Processing" offering rebate to girls attending the workshop. The event saw an improved participation of girls not only from DA-IICT but also from other student branches.

DA-IICT WIE group had applied for the above mentioned grants for the year 2010 and had been granted the Sangammam Fund for humanitarian activities. The activities planned on the humanitarian front included a visit to a local school "Kadi School" on 23rd September, 2010 to counsel the senior students on the career opportunities they could consider after finishing secondary school. On the other hand, WIE at DA-IICT organized an invited talk by the members of SEWA ("Self Employed Women's Association", an NGO based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat) on the 25th September, 2010 during "i.fest" (DA-IICT's annual inter-college technical fest organized by the IEEE Student branch). The speakers from SEWA talked about the way rural Indian women are being assisted in learning the applications of ICT in their daily lives to make a living and become independent.

This year, we intend to take WIE at a different platform by targeting national participation and helping other IEEE student branches establish WIE affinity groups. Among the various initiatives that the WIE 2011-2012 executive committee intends to take is that of K-sharing or Knowledge sharing. It is live video conferencing with professors, scientists and researchers from other organizations and institutes. WIE Executive Committee hopes to provide benefits of k-sharing to students in rural setup as well.