It would be nice if more women were genuinely interested in engineering, but there are not very many, especially hardware oriented stuff like EE. Throughout elementary and highschool I cannot recall encountering a single female who had anything other than disdain for "geeks". At the college I went to there was *one* girl in the entire EE program, I don't know if she graduated because I dropped out for various reasons. It's really only in the last 10 years or so that being a nerd/geek/etc seems to have lost much of the stigma.