It's done all the time. We are constantly running camps and weekend events and all sorts of stuff. Some attitudes by some people in the school systems tend to steer women away. Most women I meet tell me a guidance counsellor told them at some point that physics was not for them. Our goal sometimes is to make sure that girls take all the science classes they need to before the end of grade 12 so they don't limit themselves.
The other thing is to make our profession appealing. By putting a twist on what their profession does, engineers serve society. Most people don't understand that. It's our own fault as engineers that we haven't been promoting the profession that way.
When you say you're going to be doing biomedical engineering you have no problem getting women in. It's fifty-fifty for the students and fifty-fifty for the profs as well. If you have a computer science class and you say you're going to talk about counting cells and doing statistical analysis of medical data, you have all the women coming. But if you say it's particle physics, they're not coming.
I have a new Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant with a professor in education where we want to concentrate on what would happen if you sold engineering as something that serves women, technologies designed for women. Would you have more people coming into those fields? I hope that's going to be successful.