IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2015 - 6

Amperes
Current Affairs from Around the World

Inspiring and
Enabling Members
Hashimoto sets goals for 2015

It is my great honor to deliver the inaugural address as 2015 IEEE Women in
Engineering (WIE) chair.
In 2014, WIE celebrated its 20th
anniversary. It commemorated the
year by establishing a strong business plan, organized the 1st International Leadership Conference, showed
a strong Facebook presence, published
an inspiring WIE eBook, supported several conference partnerships, encouraged WIE affinity groups and volunteer
activities, added over 50 new affinity
groups (to bring the worldwide total
to 510), and increased our membership to exceed 15,000 members. These
accomplishments were made possible
by an engaged, vibrant community of
volunteers led by the previous chair,
Nita Patel. I thank Nita for her hard
work that brought such achievements to
WIE as well as the generosity and cooperation she has shown throughout this
transition. I would also like to express
my heartfelt thanks to all WIE members
for their dedicated volunteer work.
For 2015, I would like to steadily
accelerate our business plan to provide an
enhanced member benefit and celebrate
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2015.2408675

Date of publication: 12 May 2015

IEEE women in engineering magazine

cessfully grown over the years. The
number of WIE members has dramatically increased, and we've globally extended our activities through
conferences, workshops, forums, fund
supports, training, publishing, and communication to spread our mission and
message to larger communities. We,
WIE, are an extremely valuable science,
technology, engineering, and math
resource for women and girls, and we
can expand our network globally. We
need to plan and extend our activities
further to realize our dream of building
a zero-gender-gap society, where men
and highlight WIE. I hope to focus on the
and women will work together hand in
following four main objectives:
hand in every corner of life with equal
◗ the successful organization of the
responsibility. We need everyone's ideas
WIE International Leadership Conand opinions for planning such activiference 2015
ties. I would like to request that all of
◗ the launching of WIE Global
you participate actively, to express your
Exchange programs to promote
opinion, your ideas, and your plans
cooperation and exchange among
for improvement and the realization
local WIE affinity groups
of WIE's basic mission of empowerment
◗ the establishment of new comof women.
munications platforms (e.g., Web
This year will provide many opportusite, live chats, and Webinars) to
nities as well as challenges to each of us
interact with our 15,000+ memin our volunteer, professional, and perbers dynamically
sonal lives. As you take advantage of the
◗ providing additional awards, travel
opportunities, challenges will also
grants, special project fundcome invariably with them.
ing, and career/leaderThank you for the opporship resources.
We need
tunity to serve as your
I look forward to meetto plan and
2015 WIE chair. If you
ing with WIE memhave suggestions on
bers around the world
extend our activities
how we can grow our
as we jointly strive
further to realize our
membership, execute
to fulfill WIE's goal
dream of building a
our programs, and
to inspire and enable
zero-gender-gap
effectively serve our
WIE members to sursociety.
members, please share
pass/realize their full
your ideas and thoughts
potential for the benefit
with me.
of humanity.
- Takako Hashimoto
WIE has managed to establish its existence and goodwill world2015 Women in Engineering Chair
wide under the excellent leadership of
my predecessors, and it has also suc-

JUNE 2015

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