Discussion on All-Girl events

[The Swaggy P]

The 2016 IndyRAGE (Robotics All Girls Event) is set!

Saturday October 1
Perry Meridian High School
Indianapolis, IN

24 Teams

<$100 entry fee due to excellent sponsor support!

Stronghold Game - All female drive team required (including coach).

Focus on female volunteers in all roles.

Two Lunch time panel discussions -
* Female Focused - Career, Opportunity, Education, Challenges in STEM
* Male Focused - Unintentional Bias and Actions and The Impact on Diversity

More details, registration and volunteer sign up in August / September.

Hosted by FRC 234 - Cyber Blue.


So, does this mean, as a boy, I should cancel all my educational plans and catch the nearest plane to the salt mines in northern Russia?
For it appears that the planned lunch discussions are biased against males.

Replacing one bias with another does not solve the gender equality issue.

[pilleya]

So, does this mean, as a boy, I should cancel all my educational plans and catch the nearest plane to the salt mines in northern Russia?
For it appears that the planned lunch discussions are biased against males.

Replacing one bias with another does not solve the gender equality issue.

Team 234 is putting a lot of work into organising and running this event let's not take away from that.

The planned lunch discussions are not biased against males. They are simply discussing bias and its effects.

The idea of gender bias is something that you might not want to be discussed, but it is highly important and a good use of time IMO.

Unintentional and Intentional Bias is prevalent in our world and you would have to be quite naïve not to see this.

If you have any specific questions about the discussions I recommend that you Mr Anonymous should PM Chris Fultz

[The Swaggy P]

Team 234 is putting a lot of work into organising and running this event let's not take away from that.

The planned lunch discussions are not biased against males. They are simply discussing bias and its effects.

The idea of gender bias is something that you might not want to be discussed, but it is highly important and a good use of time IMO.

Gender related bias is prevalent and you would have to be quite naïve not to see this.

If you have any specific questions about the discussions I recommend that you Mr Anonymous should PM Chris Fultz


I do not object to gender bias discussions. What bothers me is the format of these discussions, which makes it seem as though all boys are already biased, and only girls are fit to enroll in college and STEM courses.

And I believe you have spelled my name wrong. It is not "Mr Anonymous, it is The Swaggy P.

[Dibit1010]

I think there is a huge misconception about what (a large portion) of women want out of bias discussions. Most of us want equality, for pay, for perception, and just in general. Not everyone is biased but based on my personal experience as a girl who is involved in the engineering field there are still people in high places that refuse to accept the idea that my work as a female is on par with that of my male counterparts. Even with all the scholarships and programs to get women into STEM schools females walked away with only 19.2% of engineering diplomas, and 18.2% in computer science (2014). This number needs to be higher- women are still being pushed away from engineering fields because of biasing. I am supportive of these types of discussions about gender perception because FIRST seems to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. While some teams have a female inclusive team others seem to only allow girls on their cheering squad team (which is fine if you want to cheer- it's great!), but don't try to tell me that 100% of the 35 girls on your team want to only cheer in the stands. Inclusiveness comes not from the leadership, but from the students themselves. The males on the team have to accept the female in the build room, and treat her the same. It sounds like you are- good job! Sorry for the rant but this is something that needs to be talked about. (Great idea for IndyRAGE- would go but I'm in NC)


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[Andy Baker]

What bothers me is the format of these discussions, which makes it seem as though all boys are already biased, and only girls are fit to enroll in college and STEM courses.

And I believe you have spelled my name wrong. It is not "Mr Anonymous, it is The Swaggy P.

What bothers me is a troll who is looking to start a fight behind the veil of anonymity.

Back on topic...

I would like to attend and learn some things from the male-focused session, for sure. Thanks for hosting these sessions.

Sincerely,
Andy B.

[Billfred]

So, does this mean, as a boy, I should cancel all my educational plans and catch the nearest plane to the salt mines in northern Russia?
For it appears that the planned lunch discussions are biased against males.

Replacing one bias with another does not solve the gender equality issue.

I do not object to gender bias discussions. What bothers me is the format of these discussions, which makes it seem as though all boys are already biased, and only girls are fit to enroll in college and STEM courses.

And I believe you have spelled my name wrong. It is not "Mr Anonymous, it is The Swaggy P.

The key word in that panel name is unintentional. I'm not going to claim #woke status, but I know I've said stuff in the past with zero malice that now would have me eating my words.

So no, you shouldn't catch that plane to the salt mines as a boy. But as someone apparently not keen on giving your thought process the three-foot-drop test, maybe it's worth checking Priceline.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I've been on an unintentionally all-girls team--4901's pre-rookie appearance at SCRIW was with all of three girls, literally just enough for a drive team. When a team doesn't look like the community it's based in (on any dimension, not just gender), it's important to ask why that is so*. Good on Indiana for having enough demand to make this a thing.

*I'm not saying you should force a team to look like the community it's based in--but you should ask why it isn't and make a fair attempt.

[Karthik]

I should cancel all my educational plans and catch the nearest plane to the salt mines in northern Russia?

Sure.

I apologize for the giant image, but I think it's worth posting.

http://i0.wp.com/espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/chalabi-datalab-flightattendants-2.png

Unintentional and societal bias are a large reason as to why 92.2% of US mechanical engineers are male, and that the ratios are similarly out of whack in most other engineering fields.

[Monochron]

I do not object to gender bias discussions. What bothers me is the format of these discussions, which makes it seem as though all boys are already biased, and only girls are fit to enroll in college and STEM courses.

And I believe you have spelled my name wrong. It is not "Mr Anonymous, it is The Swaggy P.

Make a new thread to complain and moan if you wish, this thread is about the awesome Indy Rage event.
While your at it, add a team name, and your own name to the account if are claiming that you aren't being anonymous.

[smitikshah]

"The Swaggy P" - I understand you may think that the event is favoring girls and pushing them in STEM, but as some people have brought up, engineering fields are predominantly male. I thought for a while that this was because females just didn't like engineering, but from my personal experiences, I can assure that from my point of view that is certainly not the case.

Quick Storytime:
For this summer, I was accepted into a materials science engineering/bioengineering lab to pursue an idea I had for the future of materials engineering. I was so excited to go into the lab and start working! Within the past week, however, I was a bit turned down by the atmosphere. I am the only female in the lab (of about 15 people), and I feel like there is a lot of unintentional bias going on. For example. just today, all the "bros" (as they like to call themselves) made plans to go out for a lab team lunch, and I was the only one that wasn't invited. I'm sure you will say that this might be due to a variety of other factors - but based on the way they act, I'm sure it's out of unintentional bias. There are a plethora of other examples that would take too long to write out, so if you need more PM me. Again, I'm sure what they are doing is unintentional, and I know that in a professional environment, I shouldn't need to be best friends with everyone I work with, but that environment does make me feel upset and lonely at times. However, since I really believe in my idea, I plan on finishing my work in this lab and trying to fulfill my dream of having the idea published - but I probably won't work at said lab again.

Rambling story aside: Some males might not realize they do it because of the predominant influence of males in the field, but this unintentional bias can lead some of us girls to not feel welcome.

I am thrilled that this event is taking place and hopefully the panel discussions can help better the STEM/Engineering Environment for all of us!

[Ed Law]

Make a new thread to complain and moan if you wish, this thread is about the awesome Indy Rage event.
While your at it, add a team name, and your own name to the account if are claiming that you aren't being anonymous.
I am not defending Swaggy P here. I don't even know him. He may not be intentionally hiding his identity. If you check his previous post, you would know he is/was from 4692. It matches with the city he said he is in. He said his rookie year was 2013 which was when that team started. He may have just graduated and may have removed his team number because he is no longer on that team. That is his choice. Also many people do not put their real name in their CD profile. It is allowed although I think everybody should put their real name but that was just me.

You and I may not like what he said or how he said it or his stance on certain issue. Let's be more gentle in our discussion and stop the red dots.

I have had parents on the team asked me why we offered free STEM camps to girls only and why we ran the Bloomfield Girls Robotics Competition. My first guess as to why they asked which I was always right was that they did not have a girl in their family. Otherwise they would understand why.

[Strider-dan]

This graph says nothing except that females seem to gravitate to certain professions and males to other professions. This graph also reflects past preferences and not what students are doing today. It would take a couple generations to change the demographics, say in mechanical engineering, even if only women were allowed to study mechanical engineering starting today. And most women do not want to be mechanical engineers, although those who do apply to engineering programs are pretty much guaranteed a spot. In my experience as a parent of one girl and two boys, I did not see any institutional barriers but lots of encouragement for my daughter to do whatever she chose to do but I saw and continue to see a lot of overt messages against my sons. In high school my sons and other boys were not included in "technology career visits" to local industries while girls, even those who had no interest, were encouraged to join the visit and find out. Now one son is in college and the information boards on campus are plastered with "girls can do anything" type lectures and "all young men are sexual offenders and need to get sensitivity training" type lectures. And of course there are more girls than boys on campus.

It is amazing to me that no one seems to see the problem that "The Swaggy P" is bringing to your attention so I will pose it in a different way. What would you think if the announcement were as follows:

The 2016 SundayRAGE (Robotics All BOYS Event) is set!

Sunday October 2
Jerry Meridian High School
Minneapolis, MN

24 Teams

<$100 entry fee due to excellent sponsor support!

Stronghold Game - All MALE drive team required (including coach).

Focus on MALE volunteers in all roles.

Two Lunch time panel discussions -
* Male Focused - Career, Opportunity, Education, Challenges in STEM
* Female Focused - Intentional Bias and Actions and The Impact on Diversity

More details, registration and volunteer sign up in August / September.

You think this message might be hurtful to Girls on the teams that want to participate? If so, can't you see that the opposite message is just as hurtful to Boys? Why does the encouragement of Girls have to be at the expense of Boys and vice versa? Instituting new biases that favor girls and harm boys from kindergarten all the way through college and into careers does not make any sense for any society.

As an incubator of future leaders in our society, FIRST has great responsibility to not further these types of biases and instead to encourage all of our children to achieve their full potential in any career they choose to pursue. Team coaches and mentors (including parent mentors like me) have the personal responsibility to uplift all our young people, boys and girls alike.

Team 234 is to be highly commended for putting in the time and energy to organize and host an after season competition. But making it a Girls Only event is not similarly worthy.

[Monochron]

I am not defending Swaggy P here. I don't even know him. He may not be intentionally hiding his identity. If you check his previous post, you would know he is/was from 4692. It matches with the city he said he is in. He said his rookie year was 2013 which was when that team started. He may have just graduated and may have removed his team number because he is no longer on that team. That is his choice. Also many people do not put their real name in their CD profile. It is allowed although I think everybody should put their real name but that was just me. You're right, there are plenty of legitimate reason not to have name / team on one's profile. As he was saying that he wasn't being anonymous I was just challenging him to be even more "non anonymous".

Looks like someone disliked what he said even more than you or I though, his posts are gone now. Anyway, this thread may not be a good place for any of this discussion, maybe he'll make his own like I suggested.

[Strider-dan]

A little while back, I had posted some thoughts in response to the graph put up by Karthik. I had included examples of experiences that my daughter and sons have had growing up to show that there is intentional bias in favor of girls in many activities today and that it is not helpful to the healthy development of our society. It seems that any ideas not exactly in line with the biases of this group are not welcome because my post has been deleted as has the post by The Swaggy P that was the source of much of the discussion. An echo chamber is not healthy for this group either but it seems the forum moderators prefer to keep you in one. Good luck with this game plan.

Again, Team 234 is to be highly commended for putting in the time and energy to organize and host an after season competition. But making it a Girls Only event is not similarly worthy.

[ASD20]

A little while back, I had posted some thoughts in response to the graph put up by Karthik. I had included examples of experiences that my daughter and sons have had growing up to show that there is intentional bias in favor of girls in many activities today and that it is not helpful to the healthy development of our society. It seems that any ideas not exactly in line with the biases of this group are not welcome because my post has been deleted as has the post by The Swaggy P that was the source of much of the discussion. An echo chamber is not healthy for this group either but it seems the forum moderators prefer to keep you in one. Good luck with this game plan.

Again, Team 234 is to be highly commended for putting in the time and energy to organize and host an after season competition. But making it a Girls Only event is not similarly worthy.

If you want people to have a serious conversation with you, use your real account.

[The Swaggy P]

I am not defending Swaggy P here. I don't even know him. He may not be intentionally hiding his identity. If you check his previous post, you would know he is/was from 4692. It matches with the city he said he is in. He said his rookie year was 2013 which was when that team started. He may have just graduated and may have removed his team number because he is no longer on that team. That is his choice. Also many people do not put their real name in their CD profile. It is allowed although I think everybody should put their real name but that was just me.

You and I may not like what he said or how he said it or his stance on certain issue. Let's be more gentle in our discussion and stop the red dots.

I have had parents on the team asked me why we offered free STEM camps to girls only and why we ran the Bloomfield Girls Robotics Competition. My first guess as to why they asked which I was always right was that they did not have a girl in their family. Otherwise they would understand why.


I do have a sister, and she wants to earn her way through life on her own merits and hard work, and does not expect, nor want, special treatment from society.

[Collin Fultz]

I do have a sister, and she wants to earn her way through life on her own merits and hard work, and does not expect, nor want, special treatment from society.

That's great! I would love to think that I have achieved everything that I have because of my own merit and hard work.

Of course, if I'm being honest, I recognize and admit that I have received special treatment from society because of my race, gender, and socio-economic status.

It's because of this that I am so looking forward to this event and hope to learn much from it.

[Katie_UPS]

A little while back, I had posted some thoughts in response to the graph put up by Karthik. I had included examples of experiences that my daughter and sons have had growing up to show that there is intentional bias in favor of girls in many activities today and that it is not helpful to the healthy development of our society.

I'm glad you're worried about bias, as bias is typically bad. But the thing about initiatives like affirmative action and "intentional bias in favor of girls" is that the goal is to negate bias elsewhere that puts people -like girls- at a disadvantage.

I do have a sister, and she wants to earn her way through life on her own merits and hard work, and does not expect, nor want, special treatment from society.

I too enjoy earning my way, because nothing is more frustrating than being told my achievements were only attained because I'm a girl and not because of hard work and long hours that I put into them.

But you know what would suck? If your sister was denied something she had earned because her resume said "Rebecca" instead of "Robert". We still live in a world where a girl's name is perceived as less competent than a boy's name on an identical resume (http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) (click the blue and read the study if you don't believe me). So I wouldn't see it as "special treatment" but instead as "making up for a deck stacked against them."

---

However, this competition has nothing to do with special treatment and more to do with building girls' confidence in STEM, an idea I've explained before (summarized/modified for this conversation):

To explain why all-girls events/teams are not bad, we have to understand that -whether we like it or not- girls are conditioned as they grow up to be submissive and quiet while boys are taught to be loud and "take charge". Consequently, in many situations boys will take on leadership roles/talk more/dominate the space - especially domains like STEM where men are perceived to succeed at higher rates than women. This is not because boys are inherently evil, its just a side-effect of our social environment.

All-girl events are beneficial to girls because without boys automatically claiming the space, they now are able to. This builds confidence, which allows them to be successful when they are in co-ed environments. This is one of the underlying principles behind single-sex education for women. Girls aren’t dumb, they know that they will someday be in a co-ed environment. Having a single-sex environment for developing skills is not a detriment, special treatment, or making them “soft.” It’s just giving them a safe space to grow their confidence and skill set.

For a longer explanation and links to relevant studies, see the whole post (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1487859&postcount=18).

[Monochron]

I do have a sister, and she wants to earn her way through life on her own merits and hard work, and does not expect, nor want, special treatment from society.

Presumably both you and her agree that she already does get negative special treatment because she is a girl correct? Separate from the idea of "girls-only-events" do you agree that society does not give women the same treatment as men in STEM fields? If so, are you in favor of that changing so that we are all treated equally?

I have a feeling that you and the rest of us have some base assumptions that differ and we should probably clear that up before anything else.

[Dibit1010]

Girls only events are not going to help our cause at all. The best we can is to support our women and girls in STEM- exclusion (of all parties) leads to nothing. Maybe have a few seminars about being a lady FIRST-er but don't be exclusive. Then we are just as bad as the people who are excluding us


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[Cothron Theiss]

I am loathe to jump into this discussion, but I don't think this is the appropriate location to debate the merits of All-Female Competitions/Seminars/Whatevers. I'm not suggesting make a thread for it, though if you feel there's a need for it, that's your prerogative. I just think that the volunteers and mentors and students (both male and female) that are putting a large amount of time and effort into organizing this event would like for their thread not to be derailed by a debate in which, most likely, no one's preconceived opinions would be changed anyway.

It looks to be a wonderful event that is a step in the right direction, and this thread is one way they're advertising it. It'd be a shame if the event was forgotten in the wake of a good ol' CD discussion.

[Madison]

A little while back, I had posted some thoughts in response to the graph put up by Karthik. I had included examples of experiences that my daughter and sons have had growing up to show that there is intentional bias in favor of girls in many activities today and that it is not helpful to the healthy development of our society. It seems that any ideas not exactly in line with the biases of this group are not welcome because my post has been deleted as has the post by The Swaggy P that was the source of much of the discussion. An echo chamber is not healthy for this group either but it seems the forum moderators prefer to keep you in one. Good luck with this game plan.

Again, Team 234 is to be highly commended for putting in the time and energy to organize and host an after season competition. But making it a Girls Only event is not similarly worthy.

I've reinstated your post. I'd appreciate it if you'd move discussion of the merit of these sorts of events into a new thread (or one of the many existing ones) so as to keep the focus here on the event itself.

These discussions repeat here frequently and are tedious. Apologies.

[Koko Ed]

This graph says nothing except that females seem to gravitate to certain professions and males to other professions. This graph also reflects past preferences and not what students are doing today. It would take a couple generations to change the demographics, say in mechanical engineering, even if only women were allowed to study mechanical engineering starting today. And most women do not want to be mechanical engineers, although those who do apply to engineering programs are pretty much guaranteed a spot. In my experience as a parent of one girl and two boys, I did not see any institutional barriers but lots of encouragement for my daughter to do whatever she chose to do but I saw and continue to see a lot of overt messages against my sons. In high school my sons and other boys were not included in "technology career visits" to local industries while girls, even those who had no interest, were encouraged to join the visit and find out. Now one son is in college and the information boards on campus are plastered with "girls can do anything" type lectures and "all young men are sexual offenders and need to get sensitivity training" type lectures. And of course there are more girls than boys on campus.

It is amazing to me that no one seems to see the problem that "The Swaggy P" is bringing to your attention so I will pose it in a different way. What would you think if the announcement were as follows:

The 2016 SundayRAGE (Robotics All BOYS Event) is set!

Sunday October 2
Jerry Meridian High School
Minneapolis, MN

24 Teams

<$100 entry fee due to excellent sponsor support!

Stronghold Game - All MALE drive team required (including coach).

Focus on MALE volunteers in all roles.

Two Lunch time panel discussions -
* Male Focused - Career, Opportunity, Education, Challenges in STEM
* Female Focused - Intentional Bias and Actions and The Impact on Diversity

More details, registration and volunteer sign up in August / September.

You think this message might be hurtful to Girls on the teams that want to participate? If so, can't you see that the opposite message is just as hurtful to Boys? Why does the encouragement of Girls have to be at the expense of Boys and vice versa? Instituting new biases that favor girls and harm boys from kindergarten all the way through college and into careers does not make any sense for any society.

As an incubator of future leaders in our society, FIRST has great responsibility to not further these types of biases and instead to encourage all of our children to achieve their full potential in any career they choose to pursue. Team coaches and mentors (including parent mentors like me) have the personal responsibility to uplift all our young people, boys and girls alike.

Team 234 is to be highly commended for putting in the time and energy to organize and host an after season competition. But making it a Girls Only event is not similarly worthy.
Why does this have a very #Alllivesmatter feel to it?

[asid61]

"The Swaggy P" - I understand you may think that the event is favoring girls and pushing them in STEM, but as some people have brought up, engineering fields are predominantly male. I thought for a while that this was because females just didn't like engineering, but from my personal experiences, I can assure that from my point of view that is certainly not the case.

Quick Storytime:
For this summer, I was accepted into a materials science engineering/bioengineering lab to pursue an idea I had for the future of materials engineering. I was so excited to go into the lab and start working! Within the past week, however, I was a bit turned down by the atmosphere. I am the only female in the lab (of about 15 people), and I feel like there is a lot of unintentional bias going on. For example. just today, all the "bros" (as they like to call themselves) made plans to go out for a lab team lunch, and I was the only one that wasn't invited. I'm sure you will say that this might be due to a variety of other factors - but based on the way they act, I'm sure it's out of unintentional bias. There are a plethora of other examples that would take too long to write out, so if you need more PM me. Again, I'm sure what they are doing is unintentional, and I know that in a professional environment, I shouldn't need to be best friends with everyone I work with, but that environment does make me feel upset and lonely at times. However, since I really believe in my idea, I plan on finishing my work in this lab and trying to fulfill my dream of having the idea published - but I probably won't work at said lab again.

Rambling story aside: Some males might not realize they do it because of the predominant influence of males in the field, but this unintentional bias can lead some of us girls to not feel welcome.

I am thrilled that this event is taking place and hopefully the panel discussions can help better the STEM/Engineering Environment for all of us!
I won't be attending, unfortunately (IN is a bit too far...) but I would like to say that this post effected me a lot more than any single talk or speech that I've heard. If I was attending the seminar about unintentional bias I would look forward to stories or examples like these.

The thread is only at 2 pages yet. If people stop arguing, regardless of stances or views, than legitimate questions can be asked and answered about the event.

[Gdeaver]

Discrimination is discrimination. To exclude a group based upon their sex, sexual orientation, culture or religion is discrimination. This is a sexist discriminating event. Further, it may actually be negative in the goal the organizers are trying to address. This is my point of view.

The girls have to learn how to play with the boys and the boys have to learn how to play with the girls. After over a decade of working with diverse FRC team I can say this is very very hard. Every one is focusing on the girls. We need to also focus on the boys. They need to learn how to play nicely with the girls and take this forward in to the work place in the future. The girls also have to learn how to integrate into a team with boys on it. It all starts with respect. Respect, respect, respect.

Our team will not participate in a sexist event.


Go ahead and Flame me. I have my flame resistant suit on.

[Jon Stratis]

Discrimination is discrimination. To exclude a group based upon their sex, sexual orientation, culture or religion is discrimination. This is a sexist discriminating event. Further, it may actually be negative in the goal the organizers are trying to address. This is my point of view.

The girls have to learn how to play with the boys and the boys have to learn how to play with the girls. After over a decade of working with diverse FRC team I can say this is very very hard. Every one is focusing on the girls. We need to also focus on the boys. They need to learn how to play nicely with the girls and take this forward in to the work place in the future. The girls also have to learn how to integrate into a team with boys on it. It all starts with respect. Respect, respect, respect.

Our team will not participate in a sexist event.


Go ahead and Flame me. I have my flame resistant suit on.

If you've ever walked the pits at an event, you wouldn't say boys are discriminated against in FRc, and any single off-season event isn't going to change that. That's like saying adults are discriminated against at movie theaters because Seniors and children get cheaper tickets.

For me, this sort of discussion keeps coming back to something one of my former students wrote: http://makezine.com/2015/05/01/build-better-robot-build-better-team/

Is there a solution? Surely, females must be confident in their ability to perform, and they must display that confidence — or they will never receive respect. As stated by Madeleine Logeais, 2014 FIRST Dean’s List Winner, “Expectation translates to invitation.” When a girl enters a situation guarded, others will perceive it as a lack of confidence in her own ability. (Similarly, boys can be overconfident in their ability, yet it can be driven also by the same underlying insecurity.)

Events like this help to build girls confidence, allowing them to go into a mix gendered situation during the season with that confidence and asserting themselves. Otherwise (and as a 10-year mentor for an all girls team, i've seen it way too often) the girls don't assert themselves in those situations, and so the guys run right over them in their confidence. It's nothing intentional by either group most of the time, but rather a result of typical gender stereotyping we all grew up with - since engineering is a "guy thing", girls generally enter it less confident, regardless of their ability, and that lack of confidence causes a lot of the issues. So bring on events like this, help girls build their confidence so they can assert themselves in other situations.

[Chris is me]

I'm going to put aside directly responding to the ignorant and sexist comments coming exclusively from males who oppose this event in this thread to make a different point for a second. This doesn't mean I agree with them.

But consider this - even if you do think that this event is worthless, a great option is available to you and your team. For the low, low price of $0, you can choose not to attend this event and move on with your lives. That way you won't have to ever consider whether this event is sexist or hurts your team or anything like that. And if it's not your team and it's not your event, it's not your business, right? We say "live and let live" in threads about mentor built robots, but we can't in threads about having women attend a single day of competition without men? Just don't go to the event if it bothers you. Do you really think this event is catering to people who deny sexism against women exists?

This is a one day local off-season tournament for teams that want to give the full FRC competitive experience to women, without men intentionally or otherwise getting in the way of the students' experiences. Women who otherwise wouldn't get to be on the drive team, pit crew, scouting, volunteering, will get to at this event. Whether or not you think this is caused by intentional sexism, unintentional sexism, or you just think it's a giant crazy coincidence that the majority of key roles on FRC teams and key volunteers just happen to be male, in all of those cases women will get an opportunity they may not otherwise have by attending this event. For one day. At an off-season.

If you think this is sexist and unnecessary, I would encourage you to give this event a try, and if you really have to, just sign up for some other offseason and only let the boys go to that one (so it's "fair" to you, whatever). I bet if you compare and contrast the experiences your team gets at those two vastly different events, you'll learn quite a lot about gender dynamics and you'll learn more about subconscious bias.

[Pauline Tasci]

It's really sad to see an event thread get bombarded with ethics questions about females and males in our field.

I would really appreciate moving this discussion to another thread, anyone looking for the thread about an event now has to sit and read through all of this? This is not the place.

[GaryVoshol]

It's really sad to see an event thread get bombarded with ethics questions about females and males in our field.

I would really appreciate moving this discussion to another thread, anyone looking for the thread about an event now has to sit and read through all of this? This is not the place.

Your request is our command. :)

Please keep the conversation here civil - mods are keeping track.

[s_forbes]

Your request is our command. :)

Please keep the conversation here civil - mods are keeping track.

I'm not following all of this discussion, but it looks like this was split off of another thread? Please find a way to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the thread when this is done. It's very confusing to people who see the thread for the first time and gives the appearance that the OP (or not, I can't tell!) is starting drama.

[Liam Fay]

Discrimination is discrimination. To exclude a group based upon their sex, sexual orientation, culture or religion is discrimination. This is a sexist discriminating event. Further, it may actually be negative in the goal the organizers are trying to address. This is my point of view.

The girls have to learn how to play with the boys and the boys have to learn how to play with the girls. After over a decade of working with diverse FRC team I can say this is very very hard. Every one is focusing on the girls. We need to also focus on the boys. They need to learn how to play nicely with the girls and take this forward in to the work place in the future. The girls also have to learn how to integrate into a team with boys on it. It all starts with respect. Respect, respect, respect.

Our team will not participate in a sexist event.


Go ahead and Flame me. I have my flame resistant suit on.

I think you're missing the point here.

This is not about discriminating against young men to put young women on some sort of pedestal. This is not about pushing young men down, it's about raising young women up.

When it comes to these sort of discussions regarding differing treatment towards people of different ethnicity, gender identity, or anything else, we really need to see this as an "issue" (it really shouldn't be an issue) of equity, not equality. This means that this event isn't about giving everyone the same opportunity; it's about giving opportunity to those who have had it taken away from them by virtue of their own gender. Women face many challenges in the STEM fields, and while I'm sure there are some that only men face, the problems that face women are discouraging at the very least and quite often debilitating. This event give these young scientists an opportunity to experience STEM without those hurdles.

Finally, I would like to step off my soapbox for a minute and apologize for speaking on behalf of any women who may feel differently.

[FarmerJohn]

This is not about discriminating against young men to put young women on some sort of pedestal. This is not about pushing young men down, it's about raising young women up.

You are correct, however I believe the argument being made is that if that is the case, don't separate the workshops by gender. Both workshops are important topics, but to say that young women can only attend the "success" workshop and young men can only attend the "learn to fix your accidental bad behavior" workshop makes one push in the right direction and another push in the wrong direction.

Why not offer both workshops to everyone and encourage everyone to attend whichever one they choose, or even mix the two together into a single workshop? Either way by attending one of the workshops the participants will learn something valuable. I think that if a single workshop that covered career success in STEM fields as well as inclusion in STEM was offered, nobody would be complaining.

A final thought: It is no secret that a majority of the difficulties pushing young women away from STEM come from men, even unintentionally, and it is no secret that because of these difficulties entering the STEM fields can be daunting and deterring for many young women. But we forget that sometimes it can also be young women who accidentally make it difficult for other young women to enter the field, and likewise, sometimes young men see STEM as daunting and deterring. It may be a minority, but it still exists. Just as you can't fight hate with hate, you cannot fight gender roles with more gender roles. Inclusion and equality is the only way forwards.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Sure.


Unintentional and societal bias are a large reason as to why 92.2% of US mechanical engineers are male, and that the ratios are similarly out of whack in most other engineering fields.

I've attached two pictures that were derived from this data set, by which I mean, I ordered the jobs by Median income (lower income is on the top)


The second one, I snipped out only engineering.


Point is, percentage is really only half the question. Who cares if a certain group dominates employment in a sector which doesn't pay well such as Library Science?

[smitikshah]

If you want to fix something - do it.

As some statistics have pointed out (that were posted on the thread), most well paying engineering jobs are taken by males. As a woman I reflect upon my experiences and realize I didn't want to do a lot of things because the predominant male influence in the field. Just take an example of say Petroleum Engineering. I don't want to do it because I don't feel comfortable in the field with males unintentional bias against me (they aren't wrong for doing it - it's unintentional after all). Because of that I don't train to be a Petroleum Engineer. I could have been a great Petroleum Engineer that really could have changed the industry. But I refused to because of a culture that didn't harbor an environment for my learning and flourishing. So someone comes along and starts an initiate. "Females in Petroleum Engineering". It helps by fostering an environment I'd want to work in. The reason "Males in Petroleum Engineering" isn't an initiative is because the environment currently supports them in working. Why are you stopping potential females Petroleum Engineers from entering a field when you can fix a easily recognizable problem (unintentional bias)? So by saying "This one guy doesn't feel welcome as opposed to these 50 girls - we should forget about helping the 50 girls optimally". We can combine them but time and resources are an issue. So here is an idea: If you find that there is a problem with promoting Males in a certain field that you would like to see more males in, or if you think Males should also be pushed in FRC - then take your own initiatives to do so! Instead of complaining about how this event, that so many people put so much hard work, time, effort, and emotional costs into is worthless because it doesn't promote real equality - then make your own male counterpart event! In my opinion, people shouldn't so ruthlessly discredit so much work without proposing a realistic and serious alternative.

I'll end with a logic exercise that I used to do in elementary school.

Example.)

Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: I breathe air.
Conclusion: I am a human.
Sound Logic.

Application:

Major Premise: All genders should be promoted in STEM.
Minor Premise: Females are a gender.
Conclusion: Females should be promoted in STEM.
Sound Logic.

Notice nowhere does this say males should not be promoted in STEM. Males should be promoted but this event is about promoting females. Nobody is trying to exchange promoting women in STEM for males in STEM.

Sorry about the rambling some posts on this thread really made me want to rant.

[Liam Fay]

You are correct, however I believe the argument being made is that if that is the case, don't separate the workshops by gender. Both workshops are important topics, but to say that young women can only attend the "success" workshop and young men can only attend the "learn to fix your accidental bad behavior" workshop makes one push in the right direction and another push in the wrong direction.

Why not offer both workshops to everyone and encourage everyone to attend whichever one they choose, or even mix the two together into a single workshop? Either way by attending one of the workshops the participants will learn something valuable. I think that if a single workshop that covered career success in STEM fields as well as inclusion in STEM was offered, nobody would be complaining.

A final thought: It is no secret that a majority of the difficulties pushing young women away from STEM come from men, even unintentionally, and it is no secret that because of these difficulties entering the STEM fields can be daunting and deterring for many young women. But we forget that sometimes it can also be young women who accidentally make it difficult for other young women to enter the field, and likewise, sometimes young men see STEM as daunting and deterring. It may be a minority, but it still exists. Just as you can't fight hate with hate, you cannot fight gender roles with more gender roles. Inclusion and equality is the only way forwards.

I appreciate your point of view, and I agree with a lot of what you've said. I have a couple things to say, though.

While in theory, having workshops available to everyone gives twice the number of people valuable experience, it doesn't work out that way. I'm going to overstep my bounds as someone who is not a woman and say that often the presence of men would unintentionally cause these women to not feel as comfortable fully participating or sharing.

And sure, you make a good point about some women who make the STEM world hostile for other women. However, these women 1) are a minority of women in STEM and 2) would likely also benefit from workshops that encourage making STEM more hospitable towards women.

[FarmerJohn]

While in theory, having workshops available to everyone gives twice the number of people valuable experience, it doesn't work out that way. I'm going to overstep my bounds as someone who is not a woman and say that often the presence of men would unintentionally cause these women to not feel as comfortable fully participating or sharing.

If solely the presence of another gender makes someone feel uncomfortable, regardless of who they are, that's on them. You cannot say that just having a gender exist in an area is enough to rationalize discomfort. If you cannot speak your mind because another gender is present, that is not the fault of the other gender.

Now I would understand if, for a more specific hypothetical example, boys were in the girl's workshop and they started heckling girls or showing clear examples of bias or prejudice, then yes, it would make sense that others would feel uncomfortable. However to make the assumption that allowing boys to participate in the workshop would surely result in heckling and prejudice is prejudice in it of itself.

We use this program to inspire young adults to be mature and educated individuals who are better prepared for the real world than their peers outside the program. We cannot accomplish this if we use reverse discrimination to solve a problem of discrimination, and we certainly cannot accomplish it if we allow prejudiced assumptions to justify the mindset of irrational discomfort solely due to the presence of another gender.

[Jon Stratis]

I'll end with a logic exercise that I used to do in elementary school.

Example.)

Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: I breathe air.
Conclusion: I am a human.
Sound Logic.



Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: My dog breathes air.
Conclusion: My dog is a human.


Some logic may not be as sound as you think. Remember, all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

That said, boys are already promoted in STEM through our general societal expectations, while girls are not. So if we're going to change the culture and grow STEM, catering to girls on occasion is one very valid way of doing it.

[Hitchhiker 42]

Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: My dog breathes air.
Conclusion: My dog is a human.


Some logic may not be as sound as you think. Remember, all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

That said, boys are already promoted in STEM through our general societal expectations, while girls are not. So if we're going to change the culture and grow STEM, catering to girls on occasion is one very valid way of doing it.

Not to get into semantics, but I think what was meant was:

Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: I am a human.
Conclusion: I breathe air.

Beyond that, the second logic exercise was perfectly sound.

I personally think that it is fine for this event to take place. However, we should be promoting not only female leadership in STEM careers, but also female leadership interaction with males in STEM. While I'm not sure how it is best to do this, I'm certain that it'd be more beneficial to cater to female leadership interactions.

[smitikshah]

Not to get into semantics, but I think what was meant was:

Major Premise: All humans breathe air.
Minor Premise: I am a human.
Conclusion: I breathe air.

Beyond that, the second logic exercise was perfectly sound.

I personally think that it is fine for this event to take place. However, we should be promoting not only female leadership in STEM careers, but also female leadership interaction with males in STEM. While I'm not sure how it is best to do this, I'm certain that it'd be more beneficial to cater to female leadership interactions.

Yes - thanks Mark. That's what I was supposed to write.

And I do agree with your second statement. While this event has its place, another opportunity could be to figure out a way to promote integration of females directly in male dominated environments.

[Sperkowsky]

Yes - thanks Mark. That's what I was supposed to write.

And I do agree with your second statement. While this event has its place, another opportunity could be to figure out a way to promote integration of females directly in male dominated environments.

IMHO an event like this would be a lot better if instead of an all women drive team they did a 50/50 drive team. I also think if the end goal is to promote women in Engineering then promoting females in the pits is a good tactic.

A concern no one seems to have brought up yet is the fact that some small teams like ours don't have enough active females to field a drive team. For 10-25 person teams this could very well be the case.

Although I can't give my full opinions on this topic I will end with this. The engineering world is primarily male and will most likely be like this for at least our generation. First is about learning. Whether we like it or not a valid skill for females to learn if they want to pursue engineering is working with primarily men. I also feel an event like this may broadcast a wrong message to females. A message that the only way for them to gain an important positions is to get rid of all the males. That's the exact opposite direction we should be going in.

Lastly I had the convenience of being able to select my Co captain this year. Smiti at the time was not near the most dedicated member nor knew the most about Frc but what I saw was a competent person who would be the best at leading the team. Gender never played a factor and imo if shouldn't. The most competent person should be chosen and I believe was chosen.

[Pauline Tasci]

With this thread growing, I really wanted to share my point of view. Most of you know my opinion about all female events and mass medias obsession with women in STEM, but I thought I'd share it here.

I think there is a HUGE difference in regards to getting women involved in STEM, with showing them they are capable and striving to teach women spacial reasoning skills at a young age (we get dolls, boys get legos) which is why I love Debbie Sterling and her Goldiebloks program. FLL also strives to do the same. Getting ANYONE into STEM at a young age is the key. Showing little girls they are capable of the same skills is key.

I'd also like to point out how difficult it is to be a woman in STEM when STEM jobs and FRC have this strong male culture behind them. I am constantly told I shouldn't be doing this, that I'm in a man's field, and that I chose the wrong path. You know what sucks? When people see that you're a woman at an engineering company or team and assume you're not an engineer, assume you're doing media or outreach. Assuming you don't belong before speaking to you. And with all of that we also have to deal with CONSTANT harassment from our male colleagues, adults, and volunteers. We have to deal with people constantly hitting on us, making sexual advances, and blatant bullying because we're doing what makes us happy. No wonder so many women walk away from the STEM world after dealing with all of that.

But a lot of media just wants women to feel special without understanding the push for girls in STEM, and when you treat a woman special and superior for going through all we have to, people feel like they can underestimate us. How is someone not supposed to think I know less if I could get in with less? How are people supposed to think I am worth the same when I was worth different going into college?? I'm sure many women in FIRST can agree with me when I say, I want to earn things based on merit and not based on my anatomy. As for FIRST, at an educational POV, getting more women involved is great, I didn't know I wanted to be an engineer until FRC and was told I couldn't do it throughout the journey. But treating all women teams or teams with higher amounts of women as these "breakthroughs" make other teams who are majority male based on region seem like they don't matter. Some teams who are all female and perform less will constantly get coverage. So in an effort for media to not be sexist, they are sexist.

Theres a great silicon valley clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY) that sums up my feelings.

As this event itself, I see nothing wrong with encouraging women they can do something they've been told from a young age they can't. The same types of events are present in female dominated fields for men.

I think the key here is this event is showing women they are capable and that they have a role in our STEM world. I don't think this event at all is making it seem like as women we are better or superior. These are real issues a woman has to face everyday, I know I have to.

I'm super excited to see another event showing women they can do something they've been told they shouldn't!

[Ed Law]

A concern no one seems to have brought up yet is the fact that some small teams like ours don't have enough active females to field a drive team. For 10-25 person teams this could very well be the case.

What you said is a fact I am aware of and that was exactly why my daughter and I wanted to start an all-girls event a few years ago. I have heard from many teams who expressed that concern. It encourages the girls on the teams with low female percentages to ask their female friends to join and grow the team. We made exceptions for these teams the first time to let them "borrow" girls from other teams. When the girls saw there are many other girls on other teams who are so excited about FRC, it further encourages them. I have seen this worked.
In our first year, we had no girls on the team. The second there was one brave girl. Now it is about 1/3 of the team. Keep in mind this is with a no cut team policy and anybody can join. It is easy to make it 50/50 by cutting half of the boys on the team but that would be wrong and we will never do that. We encourage boys to go into STEM just as much as girls.

[Steven Smith]

Against my better judgement, and probably to little avail… I've written a lengthy reply to this post.

Regarding Reverse Discrimination

I would like to think I'm open minded enough to understand arguments on both sides of the coin.

For supporters of affirmative action to “move the needle”, whether by hiring, educating, or supporting historically underrepresented minorities in a given profession, the belief is that our current society still lacks fairness. While it might be technically correct to use the term “discrimination” to refer to any group/event that excludes a another group based on gender, such as males not being invited to an all-girls event, let’s zoom out a few hundred years to get a little context of what systemic, societal discrimination really is. In the US, we have been a country for nearly 250 years. For ~150 of those years, women were not allowed to even vote. For ~200 of those years, people of color were not allowed to vote, or there were unofficial policies inhibiting them from voting. In the 1800s, there were laws that said it was ILLEGAL to teach people of color to read or write. There still countries now where people are KILLED, fighting for the rights for women to just go to school. There are countries where people are KILLED for being gay. In recent history, there were policies that encouraged mass abortions/murder of female babies in preference of male children. Discrimination exists, and while thankfully it is far less damaging in the US today than it was 50-100 years ago, it does exist, and past echos are still felt.

This is not white guilt speaking, and I am not trying to blame today’s white males (of which I am one), for being discriminatory. However, I would hope that we can agree that one of the biggest contributors to a child’s success rate are their parents’ education level and income. Yes, there are plenty of examples of poor students from uneducated parents that buck statistics and become wildly successful, but on average, the system is in your favor if you are born to college educated parents, who by extension are more likely to have a higher income level. So if I had active discriminatory policies that forbid the education of a subset of people, and then tomorrow I allow it, while I am no longer actively discriminating against them, I have dropped them into a society that is stacked against them. If they are not educated, they are less likely to have the means to educate their children, and you get a trickle-down effect of that discrimination that will go away with time, but it does persist. Fifty years or one hundred years feels like SO MUCH TIME, so it is hard to fathom for some today that the effects remain, but you are really only talking about 2 to 4 generations.

Affirmative action policies are based around the idea that unless you truly believe that a woman, a racial/ethnic minority, and/or an LBGT+ person is born incapable of learning math, being an engineer, being active in politics, making as much money, etc when compared to a white/straight/male person… then there is no reason why the distribution of income/professions/etc should not reflect the racial/gender makeups of our country. Because it doesn’t, we should push some groups up (knowing full well that mathematically, we have to lower the % of the majority), to close that artificial gap.

I get why that feels so wrong, and I can appreciate the feeling of “reverse discrimination”. If you are up for a job, and are 5% more qualified on paper than another applicant, and hypothetically that applicant gets an edge “to meet a quota”... for the individuals in question it doesn’t matter… it just feels wrong. However, what if that 5% the slightly more qualified applicant had was because more opportunities afforded them, or they didn’t have to work through college and could study more because their parents could afford to pay for it, or any other number of reasons that have less to do with how “good” that individual is, and more to do with their parents and their society. Maybe their parents had two kids, and as the boy, they got all the attention, worked in their father’s shop, and was trained from a young age that “engineering was right for them”, while the girl got Barbie dolls and didn’t realize until later in life that she too really liked engineering and was perfectly capable of doing it as well, but had to play catch-up. Maybe the person that is 5% less qualified on paper has had to work harder to get there, and would make a better employee. Or maybe it’s all backwards and the (hypothetically white male) applicant was the poor one that worked their butt off, and the minority applicant actually had well off parents and got all the benefits plus an extra boost. All that said, it is a fact that these subtle (or less subtle) negative biases exist, and the purpose of affirmative action really just to match them with a positive bias.

The final thing I’ll say on reverse discrimination before a personal story is I also acknowledge that poor white males get the short end of this stick. I could fathom a poor white male feeling reverse discrimination because they feel like they are not receiving these “magic benefits” that people claim they get as a white male, while other groups are being lifted up around them through targeted attention. When I am out there as a mentor, trying to swing the needle in my own community, that extends to poorer students of all races/ethnicities/genders/etc.

I can remember a time in my life when I recoiled at the thought of affirmative action, but beliefs imprinted on me at a younger age keep shedding off as I grow up and see more of the world. I work a large, multinational company in the facilities engineering group. Our company as a whole is consistently ranked in all the lists as being supportive and inclusive of people of all backgrounds, but our particular group is still overwhelmingly white and male. I have heard first-hand people say things about women/minorities like “they were just promoted/hired to meet a quota”, as well as other disrespectful things. This sort of behavior is absolutely hostile, and I think keeps people out of the door, and chases out others that came in. I mention this in no way to try to criticize my company or the leaders' attempts to make a better workplace, but hopefully because others have seen similar issues and can relate.

As a hypothetical situation, as I’m not involved in recruiting and have no directly knowledge of the process, if my company said… hey Steven, go recruit new engineers… where am I going to go? Probably back to my alma mater’s engineering school, which is mostly white/male, because it is the comfortable choice. I know where I’m going, I know the people there to talk to, and it’s just easier. I’m also likely have a slight internal bias towards people “like me”, and probably be slightly more likely to hire a white man. I’d like to think in an individual situation, I’d have no bias, but I know it exists at some level. If all of our recruiters are white males because our group is all white males… guess who we are probably going to hire… more white males. If HR says we really need to consider hiring more women or minorities, at least we have a reason to fight that natural bias. Additionally, we could (and do) send more women/minorities as recruiters, to help neutralize the bias. If there were no affirmative action policies and we just let nature take its course, I truly believe the needle wouldn’t move. This isn’t an issue just because of a mismatch in statistics, it’s an issue because our group would be missing out on a diversity of people and opinions that make us stronger. If you only hire people that think like you and have the same background as you, you get an echo chamber effect.

Regarding Specific Events Targeting Women/Minorities/Etc

Here, I’ll apologize for a little more direct tone, because it really gets under my skin. I see the same argument drummed up every time a group of female/black/Hispanic/LBGT+/etc wants to form a group to talk about shared issues. “Well if they can have a group, why can’t I”. Why is it acceptable to have a Society of Women Engineers (as one example of many), but I can’t start a group called the Society of Male Engineers? The argument is just ridiculous to me. The reason why not, is because there is literally no other point other than spiteful retaliation against the idea of being excluded from something, or perhaps wanting to maintain the current lopsided gender statistics in engineering. SWE provides opportunities for young women to meet working professionals that are also female, to discuss shared experiences of women entering the engineering profession, and to promote diversity. Flipping this on its head to say we should have the same for men, simply so they don’t get their feelings hurt from being excluded is silly. We don’t need a special group to make it easier for men to be engineers, or to recognize the special hurdles than men suffer trying to be an engineer, or trying to find a male role model as an engineer. THIS DOESN’T MEAN, we shouldn’t support men who want to be engineers, groups like FIRST are already doing this, it just doesn’t mean we need a SME because we have a SWE, or an IndyRAGE for Men to "balance" IndyRAGE for Women.

That also doesn't mean because someone is a male, they don't struggle and don't need support. Maybe they come from a family of limited resources. Maybe they were abused as a child, had a parent that abused substances, or had no parents at all. Maybe they have a learning or physical disability. There are a million factors that generate a need for "extra support" and thankfully, a substantial number of great organizations that provide that support to all people, including males.

No one likes to feel excluded though, and I get it. The whole idea of not being “targeted” for generic support as a white male, and not being a part of the discussion, or invited to participate in the event could very well potentially hurt a boy’s feelings. To be blunt though, that is life, and you will be ok. You are no less likely to have a successful career in engineering because you were only invited to 99.5% of the FIRST events. This is not a slippery slope where some day only 25% of the events will allow men. If we were ever to reach the magical number of 50/50 split between men/women in engineering, the women are not going to take over and try to push it to 10/90 out of spite. Please just let it go and quit creating strawman/slippery slope arguments.

The other group is the parents, and the same thing applies. The encouragement of female engineers is not at the expense of boys. Your child is no less likely to be supported in their pursuit of engineering because they were not invited at an all-girls event. You don’t need to claim that mentors are uplifting girls at the expense of boys. This is all a knee-jerk reaction and a slippery slope argument towards a future that simply doesn’t exist. In fact, if you and/or your student would embrace it, you would probably find that future companies would very much rather hire a male student that embraces diversity and supports events like IndyRAGE, than a student that sulks because they weren’t invited to the party. Teaching your students to be graceful, civil, and supportive in a situation where they don’t necessarily agree is probably more important than forcing your way into the event out of some principle.

The comments about gender dynamics on teams are real in my limited experience as a mentor. I’m not an expert, but I can absolutely support the idea some students are more prone to take charge and lead and others are perhaps equally capable, but less confident to try their abilities. I think as a mentor, it is important to put all of my students in a situation where they feel more comfortable stretching their wings. It could be confirmation bias, but I would say I see this problem more-so with the girls in the club, as well as with younger members. Events like IndyRAGE in my mind are no different than having an FTC starter team that “excludes” 11th/12th grade members so the 9th/10th grade students can take a greater leadership role. It is simply carving out extra space for more people to grow, and sometimes to carve out that space you have to remove the existing natural leaders to find new hidden leaders. This doesn’t have to be to the detriment of the existing leaders, they can continue to stretch their wings in the regular FRC season, it just creates a little separate growing space for other people to reach their potential. Once again, I think any attitudes of “well I should be allowed to compete in IndyRAGE”… or “I don’t care it is a 9th/10th grade FTC team, I should be allowed to be on it”… are just knee-jerk reactions to feeling excluded.

At any rate, I apologize for the essay. I sometimes like to write for the benefit of myself, reminding myself what I believe… as much as sharing it with others. For anyone who happened to make it through it all, hopefully it was worth your time.

[ThaddeusMaximus]

Discrimination is discrimination. To exclude a group based upon their sex, sexual orientation, culture or religion is discrimination. This is a sexist discriminating event. Further, it may actually be negative in the goal the organizers are trying to address. This is my point of view.

The girls have to learn how to play with the boys and the boys have to learn how to play with the girls. After over a decade of working with diverse FRC team I can say this is very very hard. Every one is focusing on the girls. We need to also focus on the boys. They need to learn how to play nicely with the girls and take this forward in to the work place in the future. The girls also have to learn how to integrate into a team with boys on it. It all starts with respect. Respect, respect, respect.

Our team will not participate in a sexist event.


Go ahead and Flame me. I have my flame resistant suit on.

*slow clap* (Bolding is mine.)

Spout all theory y'all want, but we're engineers, and we know that theory doesn't hold up in the real world and we must deal with it. The best way is to practice. The worst thing to do to a budding engineer is to give them a false sense of what reality is. I have never coddled, and will never coddle my students- whether it's about discrimination, workload, etc.

(This is about the direction I feel FIRST is going in in general. I feel there's too much hype and superficiality and quite frankly, disconnect from industry in general...)

Someone mentioned that so many females leave STEM fields after joining. Even if bucking up female involvement is a goal, is false advertising somehow NOT hampering retention?

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.

[Drake Vargas]

Sure.

I apologize for the giant image, but I think it's worth posting.

Unintentional and societal bias are a large reason as to why 92.2% of US mechanical engineers are male, and that the ratios are similarly out of whack in most other engineering fields.

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".

[Drake Vargas]

For example. just today, all the "bros" (as they like to call themselves) made plans to go out for a lab team lunch, and I was the only one that wasn't invited.



There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

[Joe G.]

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights.

Just because it's legal to be a rude person, doesn't mean you should be a rude person.

Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them?

Given that she presumably wished to be included, I'm going to go with "yes." Or at least "more than close enough."

The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergaren teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list.

So get upset about this! Do something about it! People are missing out on the opportunity to gain fulfilling employment right now, time is of the essence! Start a program to encourage male Kindergarten teachers, and eradicate the perception that men working with young children are automatically sexual predators! Create initiatives to remove sexist barriers to entry and cultural normalization of dirty, hands on work as "a man's job." But that sounds like work, and it's easier to complain about people actually taking these initiatives in other fields. It'd take real passion and concern for these issues, rather than only caring about them for the purposes of an internet argument in favor of the status quo...

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the same, much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. I mean, we're on a discussion board about a nationwide program to get more people inspired by this career -- I doubt you could find a similarly sized "For Inspiration and Recognition of Garbage Collectors," regardless of gender focus. But maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

[EricH]

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.
Allow me to put it this way:

Your robotics team decides to go out to lunch all together, as a team lunch. They do not tell you, invite you, or otherwise include you--but you hear about it.

Are you, or are you not, singled out for exclusion? There is no third answer. (For this exercise, at any rate. I'm lumping "oops, we forgot" in with "we don't want this person" because if they definitely wanted you, they would have remembered.)

Now, a "workable definition" of discrimination could be phrased as: singling some person or group of persons out for exclusion. Legally, there's somewhere between 10 and 20 different categories that are protected, depending slightly on which state's lists you read--mighty long list, don't you think? The sad part is that all those categories are necessary to be spelled out in the first place...



Let's go back to that exercise. If we assume that you consider that you are not singled out for exclusion, then I find that a little odd--just human nature here, unless there's some mitigating circumstance. If, on the other hand, we assume that you consider the other way (and, to be honest, many people will!), then you may have been discriminated against. On what basis? Well, seeing as I don't know you, or anything about you, per se, I can't say. And, I'm not willing to make anything up. It could have been that for some reason you had some really bad halitosis that day, or it could have been that you were _______ and they were all ______.

That would be what's going on in the post you responded to. And, I'm willing to bet that it WAS unintentional. That doesn't mean it hurts any less! Am I a male? Yep. But... I have had to help deal with the aftermath of what I'll call "unintentional gender bias", with some good engineering-student friends (and it wasn't just me. Several folks were involved in that discussion). All I'll say is that it doesn't just affect those who are on the receiving end, it affects everybody in the group. Eventually. Can I claim that I'm perfect in that regard? NO.


Remember: It doesn't have to BE discrimination to FEEL LIKE discrimination.


Now, in the situation originally mentioned, if they'd asked and been declined, your statement might have had merit. But, they didn't even bother to ask.



As far as your other post: Let's ask Why they aren't saying anything about that. Then maybe something can be determined about what else is going on. Just for the record, I don't have an answer on that--yet. Without knowing what may be behind that IS situation, we cannot know why people are not complaining that it does not match the SHOULD BE situation. (And, TBH: It could simply be that either the men or the women swarm all the openings before the other group can even get an application together. Stranger things happen...)

[Ed Law]

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.
A lot of companies learned that diversity is important, not because they want to look good and can say they have more women and minorities etc. It indirectly affects their bottom line. It is money. Having a more diverse workforce makes a company more competitive. For most products that are not aimed at a certain gender or ethnicity, you want your engineers to think like and be able to relate to the population that you are targeting to sell your product. If half of the buyers are women, it would be a good idea to include women as part of the engineering design team. I am saying this from past personal experience. Female engineers bring a lot to the table.

[Steven Smith]

I'll take a gamble at addressing a few of these. Please take a second to consider that I'm really not trying to say you are "wrong" but to just give you an alternative way to look at it. You are obviously as entitled to your opinions as I am to disagree with them.

Spout all theory y'all want, but we're engineers, and we know that theory doesn't hold up in the real world and we must deal with it. The best way is to practice. The worst thing to do to a budding engineer is to give them a false sense of what reality is. I have never coddled, and will never coddle my students- whether it's about discrimination, workload, etc.

As an engineer, I'm often asked to look at a data set and explain outliers. In my case (and I know you weren't specifically referencing my post), I really wasn't trying to "spout theory", as much as try to explain a known outlier (% of women in engineering), with a combination of what I've read and heard (theory) with what I see (experience. Many of the things I have read do seem to show their head in the real world, and industry.

You use the term "coddling" in a negative way, which is defined as "to treat tenderly; nurse or tend indulgently; pamper". I would argue that almost every FIRST student has been coddled in some way, and the entire purpose of FIRST is to "coddle" students by providing them a safe space to grow their skills. If you would like to not be coddled, we could make it to where if a team loses a regional, the team folds, the members lose their jobs, they lose their houses and belongings. We could make it such that at every season, you do a performance review of the your team and the bottom 10% are laid off. I don't think trying to make FIRST "more like the real world" in the sense of making it more harsh and "survival of the fittest" is fair, when the world (engineering) currently defines the "fittest" as male, regardless of other attributes.

Why is the burden on the girls to integrate with the boys anyway? History? Why is it that if a girl wants to be an engineer, SHE has to learn to work in a system that tries to push her out. What have we done as boys to earn that luxury of king of the hill. No one is arguing that women should be sheltered and protected their entire lives from working with the boys, and/or that they will never have to do so. It is literally a single event, for a weekend, where the girls can see firsthand that all that is amazing about FIRST can be run by girls. They are not going to go start an FRC for Girls league to get away from the boys, they are going to better integrate into the existing FRC program by stepping up for that lead volunteer role, or pit crew lead, or try out as a driver when they wouldn't have before.

(This is about the direction I feel FIRST is going in in general. I feel there's too much hype and superficiality and quite frankly, disconnect from industry in general...)

If you are referring to the push for increased diversity and/or encouraging women in STEM, then I would strongly disagree about a disconnect from industry, being involved in a large multinational company for years and being directly involved with our corporate citizenship and university recruiting teams to witness what/why the policies are. It is not to check a box, it is not to win awards in magazines... it is because a diversity of people brings a diversity of thought and new solutions and ultimately makes us a stronger company. The companies that understand this will benefit.

Someone mentioned that so many females leave STEM fields after joining. Even if bucking up female involvement is a goal, is false advertising somehow NOT hampering retention?

If the thing driving women away from engineering is the feeling that it is a boys club and they are not welcome, then yes, you are correct, advertising upfront that girls aren't welcome will improve retention. Only the most dedicated girls and confident girls will enter in the first place and are more likely to stay. However, retention isn't the sole issue, it is also encouraging girls to join in the first place and give it a try. In that case, instead of advertising that FIRST isn't for them to improve retention, I'd advocate for improving the root issue, by making them feel welcome, valued and respected after they join.

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.

I agree. I just hope you realize that there are probably alot of potential freaking great future engineers that never discover they would have been one, because society told them they weren't welcome.

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".

Choosing to focus a discussion on a subset of a problem does not mean we immediately accept every other problem as "solved". You give the example of kindergarden teachers, I'll add to the example nurses. Nursing is a huge need and a growing field, one that historically men have not been involved in as heavily. I have friends that went into nursing, and there is a degree of "lulz, a male nurse" that is no more acceptable. If a woman wants to be a cement worker, or another physically grueling job, she should be able to. Similarly, there are a lot of other "grueling jobs" on the female side of it, though some perhaps more mentally/emotionally grueling.

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

*Smiti, I apologize for speaking about you in the 3rd person and if I'm offbase speak up and I'd gladly edit it out.

Clearly, there was something wrong with the situation to Smiti, which is presumably why she posted it as an example of when she felt excluded. Her example is not the only one, I've seen many others.

Is it illegal? No. Should the "boys" be "forced" to invite the girls, absolutely not... personal liberties and what not. Should her desire to be included necessarily override their desire not to include her... debatable.

However, based on her post, I know that she was in a lab, working with boys, and the collective group of them probably have an interest in materials science. Smiti likely has a number of other interests that overlap with her peers, and she felt that the lack of an invitation meant she didn't "fit in". I honestly think I probably do have enough of the same idea of "fun" as Smiti, as she probably enjoys robots, engineering, and we'd have plenty to talk about over lunch. I actually did an undergraduate study in computation materials engineering and haven't talked about it in 10 years... so she could probably catch me up on cool new things in the field. None of this has anything to do with the fact that she is female and I am male, nor should it in a professional environment. If the sole reason she was excluded was because the boys didn't want to invite a girl, I'd say that it is a shame they missed out on getting to meet another one of their lab mates.

[Drake Vargas]

Just because it's legal to be a rude person, doesn't mean you should be a rude person.

Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?

Given that she presumably wished to be included, I'm going to go with "yes." Or at least "more than close enough."

I don't see the logic here. But it's a minor point.

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. And maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

It's incredibly naive to think biological factors don't play a role in the distribution of careers. Biology is the single largest determinant in a persons character. Yes, there are societal pressures, but they are driven by our innate biological tendencies. We tend to enforce the norm as guided by our unique neurological makeup. Men are typically more aggressive than women, women are typically more empathetic than men. Meaning that on the whole, a lot of women aren't going to like working in a competitive environment whereas men will. And in science, you need competition.

[smitikshah]

I had a whole post typed up but in reading the updated posts I don't think it is necessary to say the same thing others have said over and over. Joe G., EricH, and Steven Smith: I really appreciate your comments in advocating for me on the topic. It means a lot.

"Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?"

In a professional setting, it isn't about having "fun". It was a lab lunch in which you sit around a table and eat while discussing your current advances in the project. I have been to them before. It's not chilling with your friends. It is like any professional work lunch with your co-workers in a work environment.

"I don't see the logic here. But it's a minor point."
Given that I'm working in the same department voluntarily as the rest of them are (we spend 10 hours a day during our summers researching), yes we do have pretty similar definitions of fun. Again, I'm not hanging out with my BFFs here - professional setting.

Also regarding the other posts you made about males are teachers:
http://www.menteach.org/
(http://www.menteach.org/)
https://www.oct.ca/-/media/PDF/Attracting%20Men%20To%20Teaching/EN/Men_In_Teaching_e.pdf

If you see that there aren't initiatives to push women in labor oriented jobs - then start a campaign if you care about it that much.

About the "it comes down to biology":

Humans are savages by nature. It was embed in our biology to to do whatever we wanted in order to survive and reproduce, including kill. Why isn't it okay to murder if we are biologically wired to do so in times we feel threats on a consistent basis? We are biologically wired to reproduce. Meaning we will try to reproduce as much as they can - being promiscuous. Why is that socially looked down upon now, if we are biologically wired to do so?

[Drake Vargas]

Allow me to put it this way:

Your robotics team decides to go out to lunch all together, as a team lunch. They do not tell you, invite you, or otherwise include you--but you hear about it.

Are you, or are you not, singled out for exclusion? There is no third answer. (For this exercise, at any rate. I'm lumping "oops, we forgot" in with "we don't want this person" because if they definitely wanted you, they would have remembered.)

Now, a "workable definition" of discrimination could be phrased as: singling some person or group of persons out for exclusion. Legally, there's somewhere between 10 and 20 different categories that are protected, depending slightly on which state's lists you read--mighty long list, don't you think? The sad part is that all those categories are necessary to be spelled out in the first place...



Let's go back to that exercise. If we assume that you consider that you are not singled out for exclusion, then I find that a little odd--just human nature here, unless there's some mitigating circumstance. If, on the other hand, we assume that you consider the other way (and, to be honest, many people will!), then you may have been discriminated against. On what basis? Well, seeing as I don't know you, or anything about you, per se, I can't say. And, I'm not willing to make anything up. It could have been that for some reason you had some really bad halitosis that day, or it could have been that you were _______ and they were all ______.

That would be what's going on in the post you responded to. And, I'm willing to bet that it WAS unintentional. That doesn't mean it hurts any less! Am I a male? Yep. But... I have had to help deal with the aftermath of what I'll call "unintentional gender bias", with some good engineering-student friends (and it wasn't just me. Several folks were involved in that discussion). All I'll say is that it doesn't just affect those who are on the receiving end, it affects everybody in the group. Eventually. Can I claim that I'm perfect in that regard? NO.


Remember: It doesn't have to BE discrimination to FEEL LIKE discrimination.


Now, in the situation originally mentioned, if they'd asked and been declined, your statement might have had merit. But, they didn't even bother to ask.

I highly doubt the group of men chose to not invite her because of some "subconscious sexist discrimination bias". If they had wanted her around, they would have invited her. If they didn't ask, they don't want to hang out! It's that simple.

As far as your other post: Let's ask Why they aren't saying anything about that. Then maybe something can be determined about what else is going on. Just for the record, I don't have an answer on that--yet. Without knowing what may be behind that IS situation, we cannot know why people are not complaining that it does not match the SHOULD BE situation. (And, TBH: It could simply be that either the men or the women swarm all the openings before the other group can even get an application together. Stranger things happen...)

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms. A portion of the population feels that this "status quo" is wrong. To them, unless a field is split 50/50 it is unfair. Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. The majority of the people with this point of view are women arguing that men-heavy fields are the most unfair. The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want. When every option is available to women (UC's have a sex split of 50-50), they tend to not choose engineering. Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

[EricH]

Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?
So you're telling us that a fair number of people, simultaneously and independently, decided to hang out together but not with one person, who happened to be different from them? I find it hard to believe that someone didn't at least think to invite that person. Like, really hard to believe.

My crew at work knows that I don't usually hang out with them--but that doesn't mean that I don't get invited, asked, or informed by at least one person!

You're right: Not wanting to hang out with someone isn't rude. And you do have freedom of association. But here's the thing: when a bunch of people all exercise that right, against someone else, then it can become discrimination. And I don't think there's a whole lot of court cases where "freedom of association" has been successfully argued as a reason to discriminate. (At least not lately.)

[Joe G.]

Yes, I do think singling out and excluding someone entirely on the basis of a characteristic they cannot control and should not affect the situation is incredibly rude. I've had it happen to me many times, and it sucks. You probably have as well.

If it was about race, we'd call it racism. So why isn't it sexism when its about sex?

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms....Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

Can you quote a scientific study in support of this "theory," which shows such glaring differences that it's worthwhile for everyone to actively work to create/maintain a situation where it's difficult or practically impossible for people of a certain gender to get careers in certain fields or are you just trying to rationalize your own biases?

The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want.

A majority of women identify as feminists.

[Liam Fay]

My theory, is that the two sexes have different preferences, ingrained in us biologically and enforced through societal norms. A portion of the population feels that this "status quo" is wrong. To them, unless a field is split 50/50 it is unfair. Here is where the hypocrisy comes in. The majority of the people with this point of view are women arguing that men-heavy fields are the most unfair. The truth is, the reality that most feminists want isn't the reality that most women, on the whole, actually want. When every option is available to women (UC's have a sex split of 50-50), they tend to not choose engineering. Biological differences explain why women enjoy becoming psychologists, and why men enjoy becoming engineers.

There is a difference between wanting a 50/50 split and not wanting a 92/8 split.

Second of all, if women truly aren't that interested in STEM, then why are events like IndyRAGE and Girls' Generation (1540's off-season of a similar vein) so popular? Do you think it's their mentors forcing all of these girls to go? Or is it because they are genuinely interested and have a passion for STEM?

[EricH]

I highly doubt the group of men chose to not invite her because of some "subconscious sexist discrimination bias". If they had wanted her around, they would have invited her. If they didn't ask, they don't want to hang out! It's that simple. Are you sure that that's what you mean to say?

You just implied, very directly, that they DID NOT want her around. Patterns of that nature are what HR departments dread, as they mean discrimination training, possibly harassment training, and/or investigations.

Why? Do I need to say it again? Discrimination based on a long list of characteristics (of which gender is one, in just about every list I've seen) is not legal. So if a bunch of men are deliberately excluding a woman, then that can fit the legal definition of discrimination. And if you're a company, the LAST thing you want is somebody bringing that kind of lawsuit, because it doesn't matter if you win or lose, you've got at least one black eye.


Now, if you want to explain everything by biology, you want to explain why I, a male, am arguing on the women's side? (Trust me, you don't want to go that route. You aren't me, so you don't know what I'm thinking or why I'm doing this.)

[SoftwareBug2.0]

STOP RIGHT THERE.

You just implied, very directly, that they DID NOT want her around. Patterns of that nature are what HR departments dread, as they mean discrimination training, possibly harassment training, and/or investigations.

Why? Do I need to say it again? Discrimination based on a long list of characteristics (of which gender is one, in just about every list I've seen) is not legal. So if a bunch of men are deliberately excluding a woman, then that can fit the legal definition of discrimination. And if you're a company, the LAST thing you want is somebody bringing that kind of lawsuit, because it doesn't matter if you win or lose, you've got at least one black eye.


Now, if you want to explain everything by biology, you want to explain why I, a male, am arguing on the women's side? (Trust me, you don't want to go that route. You aren't me, so you don't know what I'm thinking or why I'm doing this.)

Wow, this thing is off the rails. Lots of people off the deep end from both sides. Everybody take a calm breath and repeat after me:

-Talent can be found where you least expect it. Try to give people a fair shake.

-People can be rude or mean for a myriad of reasons. A person being a part of a protected group is not the only one.

[Drake Vargas]

*Citation Needed* On about half of that... but skipping over that for a second.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/gray-matter-and-sexes-a-gray-area-scientifically.html

http://www.simplypsychology.org/gender-biology.html

http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/gender-early-socialization/introduction/does-biology-play-role-gender-development-and-behaviour

That's a decent summary of my points. I'm not going to do the research for you. Males and Females have well documented neurological differences. There is a reason there are 4x more autistic men than women and there is a reason why the grand majority of chess masters are male. Our brains are not constructed in identical fashion. You can't deny that and you can't deny the hundreds of studies showing obvious differences in a variety of competence tasks between the sexes.

If I were to take what you wrote as truth, I would still argue that being aggressive is not the determining factor in success in engineering or a corporate environment. I would argue that passion for your work is important, as well as competence.

In science, we don't only need competition, we need passion and empathy. I have read, and I have seen, that many women (not all) in engineering tend to connect better with projects that have a societal good associated with it. This could be a project that helps the environment, provides water to 3rd world countries, or saves us from a hurtling asteroid. If there is a project she is passionate about, and she is a competent engineer, than the lack of a primal male aggression is probably not going to hold her back. Increasingly, today's problems are so complex, that it is becoming difficult to do anything of any magnitude without a team as well. Many "traditional female characteristics" also can bring a lot to balance and increase a team's performance.

You are employing a strawman argument. I never said that women in engineering roles was bad; in fact I agree that diversity of engineers leads to new outlooks and solutions. I am just trying to explain the reasoning for the trends that women tend to not go into STEM fields. As far as science not being competitive, this is false. Innovation is the process driven by wanting to make some solution better than ones peers. Further science happens in a capitalist economy and thus there is a competition to get results that trickles down from company level contract bidding wars to the scientists themselves doing the science. To say that science isn't driven by competition is naive. Empathy and morality are important to development too but without competition there is a good chance different countries could be speaking very different languages today.


Also, while you have a relative anonymity with a new user name and little details to personally identify yourself, I would encourage you for your own career protection to know that posting on the internet about how women are biologically incapable of succeeding in a competitive workplace could have consequences in the future, perhaps in a time when you have changed your opinion but the internet is forever. You could very well be working for a female supervisor in the future who may not be amused that her employee feels she is incapable of during her job due to her chromosomes.


I've decided to keep my primary account focused solely on the mechanical side of engineering. I created this account to direct the ad hominem attacks I would surely receive away from my team and it's members. My views do not represent those of my team.

Additionally, I don't want people who can't be bothered to read correctly making assumptions about my personal beliefs. Not once in this thread have I said women are incapable of succeeding in engineering fields. I said that on the whole, men and women are predisposed to different things. I don't believe biology ultimately controls every factor of a persons life, but I do believe it heavily influences it.

[Drake Vargas]

There is a difference between wanting a 50/50 split and not wanting a 92/8 split.

Second of all, if women truly aren't that interested in STEM, then why are events like IndyRAGE and Girls' Generation (1540's off-season of a similar vein) so popular? Do you think it's their mentors forcing all of these girls to go? Or is it because they are genuinely interested and have a passion for STEM?

Yet another strawman argument in this thread. I never said all women, I said there is a general trend. But way to go ahead and miss the point completely and then advance the notion that two events is a statistically significant point.

[Drake Vargas]

Alright lads, I'm abandoning ship. This thread started with a legitimate concern and has devolved into a mess of accusations, assumptions, and a massive bandwagon.

Not everything is immediately about sex or race.

If you wish to talk about anything, PM me. I'm always up for a civil discussion.

Have a nice evening everybody.

[Joe G.]

People can be rude or mean for a myriad of reasons. A person being a part of a protected group is not the only one.

I acknowledge this. And that would be fine if that's all that it was about. But the scenario was posted in the context of an example of gender bias by a person who knows more about its details than any of us, and the person who first took issue with the scenario then made it very explicitly about gender, by expressing doubt at the idea that Smiti would find enjoyment in spending time with them, and stating that things work much better when boys and girls play separately. Even if the people in the original story weren't discriminating on the basis of gender, it was certainly interpreted as such by readers on both sides here.

I apologize if any of my posts were jumping to conclusions.

[Ed Law]

Fair enough. It is a lot easier for me to use my primary account as my views are probably more in line with many in this forum. Again, wasn't trying to disrespect you, just honestly don't know if you are 15 or 50, and if you were a student wanted to pass along a caution. You are absolutely entitled to an opinion and to speak the opinion, and I won't disagree with an anon account when you recognize your opinion might rub some the wrong way.
Yes he is entitled to his opinion. We formed our opinions based on our upbringing and life experiences. But I do not agree he is entitled to use an anonymous account to hide and express an opinion. If he feels so strongly that he is right about his opinion, he should say it in public. He should teach the students on his team and convince them of his opinion. He should tell the girls on his team and their parents where girls belong in his opinion. in short, be a MAN!

[Steven Smith]

Yes he is entitled to his opinion. We formed our opinions based on our upbringing and life experiences. But I do not agree he is entitled to use an anonymous account to hide and express an opinion. If he feels so strongly that he is right about his opinion, he should say it in public. He should teach the students on his team and convince them of his opinion. He should tell the girls on his team and their parents where girls belong in his opinion. in short, be a MAN!

I probably could have worded a number of things better after my first couple posts, which were from the heart, versus later posts where frankly I was just arguing on the internet with someone I disagreed with. Someone noted it in a PM, and I agree, and I went ahead and removed a few posts where I was more focused on dissecting someone else's opinion than sharing my own and contributing positively to a discussion.

To your point though Ed, it did read as I was endorsing the use of anon accounts to speak opinions that are unpopular. My intent was more of "I understand" and "please everyone be mindful of what you post, especially if it is (or could be construed as) sexist/racist/homophobic/etc... that might bite you in the future". I can understand some of the uses of anon accounts, but this would not be one of them, and I wouldn't want to come across as endorsing them.

[ASD20]

Yes he is entitled to his opinion. We formed our opinions based on our upbringing and life experiences. But I do not agree he is entitled to use an anonymous account to hide and express an opinion. If he feels so strongly that he is right about his opinion, he should say it in public. He should teach the students on his team and convince them of his opinion. He should tell the girls on his team and their parents where girls belong in his opinion. in short, be a MAN!

I've noticed that the 2 most inflammatory posters on this thread are both accounts created in the past 2 days that have only commented on this thread and have very little personal information in their profile. One has admitted it is a second account, and I am fairly certain the other one is a second account as well. And now a quote from the Chief Delphi rules:

Creating multiple accounts for a single person is not allowed.

It is not a matter of opinion. These posters are not allowed to use anonymous second accounts.

[John Weissman]

I am sorry that some teams only ( from the thread of the conversation) seem to use males more than females. I cannot speak for any other teams, only my own, but as I say to anyone on my team 1640, I don't care what bathroom you use, The team cares about effort and ability. We as a team have decided not to go to all girls competition because that is not representative of our team. Admitting that some members of the team, both male and female, took the side of going, the team decision was we are a team, and individuals, but we go as a team, not as separate sexes.

This is my take on this subject.

[Siri]

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".Of course there are efforts tat support men, male issues, and male membership in underrepresented fields (total or male minorities). They may not have visibility to you [this is a general "you"], or you may wish more existed or that they were more active. If so, I'm sure they'd welcome any help. It's the membership that determines how controversial, active, and effective any organization is. But these groups certainly can and very much do exist whether or not they're regularly mentioned on a robotics forum. As a quick first Google, there's American Assembly of Men in Nursing (http://aamn.org/aamn), American Men's Studies Association (http://mensstudies.org/), Young Men's Initiative (http://www1.nyc.gov/site/ymi/about/about.page), 100 Black Men of America (http://www.100blackmen.org/home.aspx), the Men Teach nonprofit (http://www.menteach.org/), and the Mankind Project (http://mankindproject.org/), before I satisfied myself about the depth. There are also a massive number of male fraternal, social, and religious (not to mention sporting) organizations that support male career and life goals, as well as organizations that focus on male-dominant issues, such as Just Detention International (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Detention_International). If there's one you'd like to see and don't, go for it. Every organization ever made was made by a person who felt that.


As for whether people complain that men dominate many grueling jobs on the list, I need to control my temper. Do women push for male-dominate jobs that aren't very socially valued? Not so much, but that's a recursive definition and also applies to low-paid women's jobs, most notably tipped food service (72% (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/26/new-white-house-report-impact-raising-minimum-wage-women-and-importance-)). But don't conflate low social value and grueling. Have women fought for access to other grueling male-dominated jobs? Of course. Countless women have being fighting for literally generations to be able serve and potentially die for their country in many military and law enforcement jobs, and for the recognition of women who already did before they were technically allowed. I hope you are not in this position, but I know I could wake up tomorrow to find out that any number of women in uniform I care about are dead for their country on the other side of the world, doing jobs they or their foremothers had to fight just to access, in an organization where they are still far more likely to be discriminated against, harassed, and assaulted. Regardless of what you think of women in combat, to say there's no push to grueling jobs is blatantly ignoring a very, very long and hard history of women pushing just to be able to compete against the same standards of the profession as men.

Phew. And separately, yes, of course there is a National Association for Women in Construction (http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp), several for women in mining, Women in Petroleum (http://www.spwp.org/), Women in Manufacturing (http://www.womeninmanufacturing.org/home), Automotive jobs (http://www.womeninautomotive.com/), and on and on. (Like the male counterparts, these tend to focus on or at least publish more high versus low social value jobs in their industry, but the support network is there.)

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Let's be reasonable now. Posting controversial opinions and/or opinions grotesquely opposite of CD popular opinion will get you neg repped into oblivion. Heck, I've been neg repped for "Harsh tone". Some BS that is.

Point is, the guy probably wants to voice his true opinion without sacrificing his account's reputation. Yes, they're just dots. But all the cool kids have them.


My point is: if we're REALLY that concerned with women in engineering, we need to stop the equality fanfare and focus our attention on changing parenting techniques of "Legos and K'nex for boys and barbie/baby dolls for girls". Little kids are VERY persuadable, and if you want to instill a passion in both boys and girls EQUALLY, you need to introduce engineering to both similarly. Right now, boys are generally exposed to engineering WAY before girls are, and therefore are more likely to want to do it.

There's a reason kids do what they do; it's because their parents are setting them up to do it.

[Hitchhiker 42]

Can we not have the anon account debate in this thread about all-girls events?

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Can we not have the anon account debate in this thread about all-girls events?

Wasn't this thread started BY an anon account?

[Hitchhiker 42]

Wasn't this thread started BY an anon account?

No, it was split off from another thread

[The Swaggy P]

Wasn't this thread started BY an anon account?

This is not an "anon" account. This is the one and only account I've ever used on CD.

I don't post my personal information, purely because I prefer privacy when using the internet.

[EricH]

I've been thinking for most of the day on how to phrase this. I think I might have it. By the way, this does not apply only to the gender discussion--there are other discussions it can apply to as well.


Men and women are not equal, and will not necessarily like the same things. And, that applies to individuals with the same gender as well. So, each person should be free to find out what they like to do. Everybody with me on that? Reasonable enough?


What happens when one gender strongly dominates one area? Well... The other gender can be intimidated into not even trying. I think that's kind of established. And when they do enter that field--and this is not limited to engineering--they can be the proverbial nail that sticks out (result: it gets hammered down). I've seen a couple of news articles recently on how women are working on just getting interest in traditionally male-dominated fields, or how women in those fields are, how shall I say this, subjected to non-workable working conditions. By the way, I realize that I'm totally ignoring social conditioning. That's also part of it, too.

Now, part of my take is that in order to know it's not for you, you need to try it--whatever it happens to be. If you're too afraid/pressured/etc. to try, then you're probably not going to try--so you're not going to know one way or the other. It takes a great deal of courage to go through that pressure.

My take on it is, if you can pass the test, great, come on in. And by "test", I mean that you meet the requirements to do whatever career field you're entering. (All I'll say is that if I'm in a house on fire and can't get myself out, whoever comes in there better be able to pull me out!)


The question is, for someone who is not interested in trying due to societal pressures or similar reasons, how do you get them to try?

And what the answer to that, according to the event organizers for these events (and, also, according to the '07 (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/28120) and '08 (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/31037) versions of team 842), happens to be to remove the pressures temporarily. LET them try, encourage them to try--and once they figure out that, yes, in fact, they CAN do this, and do well at it, then they will tend to be more assertive at doing it the rest of the time. And the general idea is that if you get one group of a larger group "in the door", more will follow, with a better support structure, until the support structure is no longer needed because it is the entire building that that door is in.

Whether that is the correct answer for all cases, I don't know. On the other hand, it does seem to be a popular answer for the general problem of "Group X is underrepresented in Y", along with "make a support group".

[John Weissman]

Siri
Hi, thanks for your response and I always respect your opinion.

[JohnTu]

In the medical profession, tremendous progress has been made since 1950s to increase female medical students from 5.5% to 47%.
https://sites.google.com/site/hammerheads226/files/MedSchoolGender.jpg.
The original article is here (https://www.amnhealthcare.com/uploadedFiles/MainSite/Content/Staffing_Recruitment/Staffcare-WP-Women%20in%20Med.pdf).

In engineering, we still have a long way to go.

Team 226 Hammerheads is very appreciative that our near by FRC teams 2834, 469, 33 and 68 have been hosting their annual Bloomfield Girls Robotics Competition in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As we participated in the competition these past two years, we have seen a 50% increase of our female students from 32 to 48 (We have about 75 male students). Of our 20 leadership positions, 10 are held by girls including the Engineering VP.

I believe these girls-only competition events definitely have helped to interest more girls to join a robotics team and hopefully a career in STEM!

- John

[smitikshah]

While browsing the internet I found this: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/promoting-gender-equality-through-emoji.html

This made me really happy.

This is just one example of "unintentional bias", and a great proposed solution to it!

While I doubt anybody would go "we shouldn't make female emojis representing a construction worker or detective", the end result did end up playing a bit on traditional gender roles. If some of these suggestions are used, we can all take a great step forward towards promoting females in STEM that might not have otherwise joined thinking it's not their place.

[Mike Schreiber]

I won't comment on all the debate that's happening with regard to bias etc. Just wanted to make a point I hadn't seen yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this mean Cheesy Poofs cannot come to IndyRAGE? They're from an all boys high school.

[frcguy]

I won't comment on all the debate that's happening with regard to bias etc. Just wanted to make a point I hadn't seen yet.



Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this mean Cheesy Poofs cannot come to IndyRAGE? They're from an all boys high school.

That would seem to be the case, along with any other teams from male-only high schools.

[Siri]

*slow clap* (Bolding is mine.)

Spout all theory y'all want, but we're engineers, and we know that theory doesn't hold up in the real world and we must deal with it. The best way is to practice. The worst thing to do to a budding engineer is to give them a false sense of what reality is. I have never coddled, and will never coddle my students- whether it's about discrimination, workload, etc.

(This is about the direction I feel FIRST is going in in general. I feel there's too much hype and superficiality and quite frankly, disconnect from industry in general...)

Someone mentioned that so many females leave STEM fields after joining. Even if bucking up female involvement is a goal, is false advertising somehow NOT hampering retention?

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.This sounds very...weird to me. As a woman and former girl, I can assure you that we do not attend all-girls events in any field and think, "oh wow, the whole field must be guy-free like this!" Trust me, no girl old enough for FRC is ignorant about gender situation in society or slow enough to miss it. You cannot fool me with an off-season. Having an single-gender event, regardless of topic, is the substantive equivalent of hanging up a flashing neon sign that says "we have difficult a gender equality problem in this area, and it won't be easy for you. But we're really trying!" Regardless of whether you think this is trying correctly, there is no universe in which an all-girls event or a thousand of them is false advertising. We understand the way the world works; we've lived here for years regardless of where we go on some weekends.


You are free not to coddle your students, just as others are free to coddle them. Personally I call it incubating, which is also what we do with startup businesses. The goal is not to deceive anyone; it's to build up strengths. It's the same reason you scrimmage with your own sports team in addition to playing others. No, you can't simulate everything you face in a real game (in this case handling professional coed interactions), but you have to work on the fundamentals too. This may seem silly when it comes to coed professionalism, and maybe it is for some people. Maybe your students and potential students are all as naturally talented in this as they are in varsity basketball.

But I am not one of those people. My female students (and some of my male students), by and large, were not those people at the onset. You quoted a fellow mentor of mine from a rather successful MAR team that has a bit of a reputation for good coed work. What Gary says about how we encourage integration is absolutely true, and we're pretty good at it. I should know; I got it as a student! But it's not nearly the whole story of what we provide. In fact as a female former student and mentor, I can assure you that much of the strength of our female recruitment and retention is informal friendships and mentorships within the gender. Our integration work is absolutely critical for making successful teammates and future professionals, but it doesn't cut it alone in terms of retention or recruitment.

My own interactions with male students and mentors would have driven off me the team as a rookie in 2006, had it not been for the other girls and young woman to support me. As a student and later mentor, I have relived that situation over and over and over again. In fact virtually all of the best female students we've ever had came to me at some point(s) (usually as rookies when they were least integrated and most likely to leave) to express discomfit, difficulty interacting, or to quote, "I give up, the guys just won't listen to me." And by that they meant both male students and mentors. Fortunately, I, with my previous years of awesome 1640 'how to work work with guys' experience, would walk over each time and build bridges. But you have to recruit and retain long enough to teach students those skills. You have to practice in the safe zone. If I hadn't built that understanding with the girls--that sort of incubation, coddling, girlfriendship, special treatment, whatever you want to call it--many of them wouldn't've felt comfortable coming to me or even known not to just accept it. I know, because I vividly remember not feeling comfortable and not understanding what I was experiencing--and having an older girl/woman there to help.

1640 does all this without attending all-girls events. Lots of teams do so, and lots of others attend. Our system works for the girls on the team, at least without a comparison. And that's okay. But I have known girls I've tried to recruit or girls that've left quickly because even that first hurdle into the proverbial 'incubator' is too distressing. And sometimes you're inside, but things get to be too much and you want to give up. (This can also involve extra gendered pressures above the standard datum.) If an all-girl event lowers that hurdle or lessens that burden for someone, somewhere, well then I hope they're very a lucky future engineer.

You (general "you") can say this shouldn't be necessary, and I agree. (I fault societal pressures, not the individual girls receiving them.) But even if it shouldn't be needed, what do we say to the girls that would benefit from this event? 'Sorry kid, you should've been stronger?' 'Come back if you don't want to be coddled?' 'No, I'm not going to incubate you enough.' Some people need more help than others. I got what I needed, and instead of walking away ten years ago, and I now have an honors BSME and have coached Einstein twice. You can never know who you're not helping.

For the record, if someone cares to articulate an analogous case of why an all-boys event would be of similar benefit, I say go for it. I'll ref. As I've mentioned previously, this case does indeed exist in some other fields, including nursing.

[Tom Ore]

I was a judge at an FLL event a couple of years ago and I asked a team how they were organized. One young man answered that the boys designed the robot and the girls designed the t-shirts. I was so surprised by the answer that I had no follow up question.

[Koko Ed]

That would seem to be the case, along with any other teams from male-only high schools.

FRC 3173 is an all male school but has had female team members including a young woman who was their human player in 2013. Teams kind of get around who can be on the team at times.

[Jon Stratis]

While browsing the internet I found this: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/promoting-gender-equality-through-emoji.html

This made me really happy.

This is just one example of "unintentional bias", and a great proposed solution to it!

While I doubt anybody would go "we shouldn't make female emojis representing a construction worker or detective", the end result did end up playing a bit on traditional gender roles. If some of these suggestions are used, we can all take a great step forward towards promoting females in STEM that might not have otherwise joined thinking it's not their place.

Are those emoji's really male/female, or just long loose hair/short or pulled back hair? What specifically is it about showing a cartoon face with a hat/helmet on and very little hair showing on the sides that makes it a "male" representation? Why, in the new emoji's, are the "male" representations wearing green while the "female" ones are wearing purple?

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against expanding the standard emoji set, but it's important when we look at stuff like this to recognize that, even in efforts to promote gender equality we can still unintentionally put forward gender stereotypes. When we embark on these efforts ourselves, it's important to ask these types of questions.

[FrankJ]

... For the record, if someone cares to articulate an analogous case of why an all-boys event would be of similar benefit, I say go for it. I'll ref. As I've mentioned previously, this case does indeed exist in some other fields, including nursing.

This idea has come up a couple of times in this thread. It is not a realistic option for a robotics event. For a likely CD response, see this thread (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=137657&highlight=timmins+library) This was about a one day library reading event in a small town in northern Ontario.

Please don't read my opinion this subject into this post. I just believe in truth in advertising. :]

[Ryan Dognaux]

There's nothing wrong at all with this event. There is still a huge social stigma in this country when it comes to involving women in STEM related activities. Many of you, especially mentors, need only to look around your office and see mostly men working there. Actively targeting women to give them an additional opportunity to be inspired to pursue a STEM career is a fantastic idea.

Boys already have plenty of opportunities for inspiration the other 364 days of the year and there are other off-season competitions in Indiana that they can attend.

Giving girls one day to have an event to call their own is something we should be applauding, not trying to tear down. Well done 234!

[jajabinx124]

Many of you, especially mentors, need only to look around your office and see mostly men working there.

Students should especially realize this as well. When I got a sneak admitted students preview of University of Wisconsin- Madison's engineering program this spring along with around a thousand other students, I literally looked around this big auditorium and barely saw females in the college of engineering. It's a major problem still.

Thankfully we have teams like 234, 2177 in MN, etc. and organizations like the Women in Science and Engineering groups in colleges working hard to improve this ongoing social stigma in this country about the lack of Women in STEM. It is still a problem today and events like Indy-Rage will hopefully inspire more Females to go into STEM. Bravo to all the teams and organizations working on making a difference.

[Whatever]

Six pages and no one has pointed out that salt mining in Russia is done more in the mid-Russia area near the Ural mountains.

My mom took my daughter on a tour of a salt mine in Hutchinson Kansas a few years ago. They both recommend the tour and it looks like they have upgraded the experience over the past few years.

[FrankJ]

Six pages and no one has pointed out that salt mining in Russia is done more in the mid-Russia area near the Ural mountains.

My mom took my daughter on a tour of a salt mine in Hutchinson Kansas a few years ago. They both recommend the tour and it looks like they have upgraded the experience over the past few years.

But what is the gender ratio of the Ural salt mines compared to the Kansas salt mines. If you are going to squirrel, you should at least use some relevant data. :]

[Whatever]

Well, Russia has significantly more women than men in general (86.8 men to 100 women) and a higher percentage of Russian women work than American women. So I am guessing the Russian ratio is better than the 98.2% men in "other mining occupations" that Karthik posted but I couldn't find hard numbers. Sorry.


I really do recommend the salt mine tour in Hutchinson Kansas though.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Well, Russia has significantly more women than men in general (86.8 men to 100 women) and a higher percentage of Russian women work than American women. So I am guessing the Russian ratio is better than the 98.2% men in "other mining occupations" that Karthik posted but I couldn't find hard numbers. Sorry.


I really do recommend the salt mine tour in Hutchinson Kansas though.

Im fairly certain KK's numbers are just for the US.

From the FiveThirtyEight github repo for that data...

All data is from American Community Survey 2010-2012 Public Use Microdata Series. Download data here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/pums_data/ Documentation here: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/data_documentation/pums_documentation/

https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/college-majors

[Nathan Streeter]

I approve of 234 having a female-focused event to try to ensure that girls and women are getting fair chances to step into various roles... I hope all teams are putting talent first though for role selection during most of the season... and ensuring EVERYONE has an opportunity to gain the skills for the roles they want.

Girls/women should be encouraged to pursue whatever field they want... just as boys/men should be encouraged. Since FIRST deals with STEM most, we should be encouraging girls/women and boys/men. Being cognizant of the fact that STEM fields are largely male-dominated, this may at times involve particularly encouraging girls/women... under the assumption that they're more likely to be discouraged by the male-dominated atmosphere. Really though, I think the bigger battle is probably in getting more female FRC students... by the time kids are in high school, they often already have a positive or negative impression of robotics, science, and math. This is where the academic system, toys targeted for boys vs girls, parenting, and younger programs like FLL really come in.

That said, I would like to make another point... There's nothing inherently wrong with having more of a particular gender in a profession. Every profession should be made welcoming to both genders (and all races and all socioeconomic backgrounds), but just getting to a 50/50 ratio in the nifty infographic that Karthik shared won't make society any better inherently. Making every profession more welcoming will make society a better place though... and hopefully as a result we'll have happier and more capable people in every profession and a lot of those ratios will be a little less split. If they're not less split though, I won't lose any sleep.

What I do have a problem with - and what does concern me - is when people are subconsciously OR intentionally selected based on their race/gender/religion/socioeconomic background. Maybe this is a girl or a boy being passed over by a sexist employer (instead hiring a less-qualified applicant of a different gender) or maybe it's an admissions counselor trying to meet a quota/ratio and so selecting someone of a particular gender or background. College admissions and the job market are not the times to be trying to push demographics one way or the other... I want the best doctors, engineers, business leaders, scientists, teachers, politicians, etc. If we want to push demographics in one direction or another, organizations should be working to motivate and equip people of all types prior to those critical junctures (as FIRST does, and tries to continue doing better).

[Katie_UPS]

What I do have a problem with - and what does concern me - is when people are subconsciously OR intentionally selected based on their race/gender/religion/socioeconomic background. Maybe this is a girl or a boy being passed over by a sexist employer (instead hiring a less-qualified applicant of a different gender) or maybe it's an admissions counselor trying to meet a quota/ratio and so selecting someone of a particular gender or background. College admissions and the job market are not the times to be trying to push demographics one way or the other... I want the best doctors, engineers, business leaders, scientists, teachers, politicians, etc. If we want to push demographics in one direction or another, organizations should be working to motivate and equip people of all types prior to those critical junctures (as FIRST does, and tries to continue doing better).

The problem with the "I want the best person for the job argument" is explained by Steven Smith:


Regarding Reverse Discrimination
...
I get why that feels so wrong, and I can appreciate the feeling of “reverse discrimination”. If you are up for a job, and are 5% more qualified on paper than another applicant, and hypothetically that applicant gets an edge “to meet a quota”... for the individuals in question it doesn’t matter… it just feels wrong. However, what if that 5% the slightly more qualified applicant had was because more opportunities afforded them, or they didn’t have to work through college and could study more because their parents could afford to pay for it, or any other number of reasons that have less to do with how “good” that individual is, and more to do with their parents and their society. Maybe their parents had two kids, and as the boy, they got all the attention, worked in their father’s shop, and was trained from a young age that “engineering was right for them”, while the girl got Barbie dolls and didn’t realize until later in life that she too really liked engineering and was perfectly capable of doing it as well, but had to play catch-up. Maybe the person that is 5% less qualified on paper has had to work harder to get there, and would make a better employee. Or maybe it’s all backwards and the (hypothetically white male) applicant was the poor one that worked their butt off, and the minority applicant actually had well off parents and got all the benefits plus an extra boost. All that said, it is a fact that these subtle (or less subtle) negative biases exist, and the purpose of affirmative action really just to match them with a positive bias.


(by the way, the whole post that I pulled from is really good and is worth a re-read especially for anyone who doesn't understand why affirmative action is a thing)

[Jon Stratis]

Girls/women should be encouraged to pursue whatever field they want... just as boys/men should be encouraged. Since FIRST deals with STEM most, we should be encouraging girls/women and boys/men. Being cognizant of the fact that STEM fields are largely male-dominated, this may at times involve particularly encouraging girls/women... under the assumption that they're more likely to be discouraged by the male-dominated atmosphere. Really though, I think the bigger battle is probably in getting more female FRC students... by the time kids are in high school, they often already have a positive or negative impression of robotics, science, and math. This is where the academic system, toys targeted for boys vs girls, parenting, and younger programs like FLL really come in.

While I agree a large part of the battle is getting more female FRC students (specifically, more of them involved with build, as they seem to dominate some of the other areas of many, if not most, teams), and getting to them young is definitely helpful, it's way too easy to say "well, it's something FLL will solve for us". Teams can and should do a better job at recruiting females. I've seen 50-person teams, coming from 2000-student schools have no females in the pits at competition across multiple years. My team comes from a 300-student all-girls school, and we manage to get 20-30 students every year. If we can get 10% of the girls in our school involved, why can't mix-gendered teams?

My personal hypothesis is centered around the way teams recruit. Show a robot! Robotics is fun! Look at a video of a competition! All ways to help drum up interest... but ways that can easily be intimidating. Like it or not, growing up as a male is much different than growing up as a female. I witnessed it growing up - I played with Lego's, built model planes, helped my dad and grandfather build stuff, and did countless related stuff with Boy Scouts. My sister, on the other hand, had her easy bake oven, dolls and such. She never built anything. Many (most?) girls today get treated the same way, forced into those stereotypical gender activities. Sure, in the long run programs like FLL will help as they grow. But right now today, we should recognize one thing: robotics can be intimidating. Someone may have an interest, but look at it and say "I don't know how to do that", or "man, I wish I had gotten involved in FLL years ago so I could do that". We need to emphasize with our recruitment training. Emphasize that everyone who starts is a beginner that doesn't know anything, and the whole point of the team is to train you in the tools, give you the knowledge, and help you figure it out. Do whatever you can to lower that barrier to entry (especially since it's almost entirely a perceived barrier and not an actual one) and then to encourage people to keep on with it once they get in the door.

[Nathan Streeter]

The problem with the "I want the best person for the job argument" is explained by Steven Smith:

(by the way, the whole post that I pulled from is really good and is worth a re-read especially for anyone who doesn't understand why affirmative action is a thing)

Thank you for linking Steven's post... I hadn't read it all, and I definitely think there's a lot of good stuff there. That said, it doesn't convince me of the benefit of affirmative action... largely because of this aspect that Steven mentions:

Maybe the person that is 5% less qualified on paper has had to work harder to get there, and would make a better employee. Or maybe it’s all backwards and the (hypothetically white male) applicant was the poor one that worked their butt off, and the minority applicant actually had well off parents and got all the benefits plus an extra boost. All that said, it is a fact that these subtle (or less subtle) negative biases exist, and the purpose of affirmative action really just to match them with a positive bias.

Is the goal of affirmative action to reward people who have had to overcome more adversity due to negative stereotypes or is the goal of affirmative action to balance demographics?

I think there is value in "affirmative action" for the former, but not for the latter. Really though, I don't see how it can realistically be done for the former... it seems like to start you'd need to create some "Adversity Index" to determine who has had to overcome the most adversity (which would probably vary by region and profession)... and even then you'd still be generalizing. I believe that determining the degree that someone has overcome prejudice by their resume or college application is not possible without a variety of stereotyping and would prefer to 1) seek to prepare people of every single background for your profession and 2) hire the most capable individuals that result.

No one seems to be criticizing the underrepresentation of men in K and Pre-K Education, Dance, Hairdressing and Cosmetology, and Library work (among others). Should these areas use Affirmative Action campaigns? Why or why not?

While I agree a large part of the battle is getting more female FRC students (specifically, more of them involved with build, as they seem to dominate some of the other areas of many, if not most, teams), and getting to them young is definitely helpful, it's way too easy to say "well, it's something FLL will solve for us". Teams can and should do a better job at recruiting females....

I don't mean to imply that FLL solves this for FRC...

Quite frankly, for a long time our team was just bad at all recruiting. Word of mouth was about it. When we had a strong representation of females, we tended to get more females... when we had a lower representation of females, we got an even higher proportion of males. We've been trying to get better at recruiting in general, and recruiting females in particular, but it's very much a work in progress for our team.

[PayneTrain]

47 people have posted in this thread.
4 of those people publicly identify themselves as not being males.

Edit, 48/4.

[Pauline Tasci]

47 people have posted in this thread.
4 of those people publicly identify themselves as not being males.

preach.

A lot of the people commenting on this act like they know what women feel like in STEM.
You will NEVER understand what a woman has to go through to be respected in this community until you are in their shoes.
There is a reason why so little women comment on technical threads. We constantly need to prove ourselves, and our male counterparts do not.

So this is a call to women reading this thread, speak up, share your voice. Share your opinions, don't let others share it for you.

[Brian Maher]

47 people have posted in this thread.
4 of those people publicly identify themselves as not being males.

In a similar vein, I think it may be beneficial to hear from a student or alumna who has competed at such an event.

[wesbass23]

I'd also like to point out how difficult it is to be a woman in STEM when STEM jobs and FRC have this strong male culture behind them. I am constantly told I shouldn't be doing this, that I'm in a man's field, and that I chose the wrong path.

If you are willing to share, can you tell us how these situations happened?
I am appalled that someone would be rude enough to say that to you, or even still thinks that way.

[smitikshah]

No one seems to be criticizing the underrepresentation of men in K and Pre-K Education, Dance, Hairdressing and Cosmetology, and Library work (among others). Should these areas use Affirmative Action campaigns? Why or why not?


...

"Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality"."

"If you find that there is a problem with promoting Males in a certain field that you would like to see more males in, or if you think Males should also be pushed in FRC - then take your own initiatives to do so!"

"So get upset about this! Do something about it! People are missing out on the opportunity to gain fulfilling employment right now, time is of the essence! Start a program to encourage male Kindergarten teachers, and eradicate the perception that men working with young children are automatically sexual predators! Create initiatives to remove sexist barriers to entry and cultural normalization of dirty, hands on work as "a man's job." But that sounds like work, and it's easier to complain about people actually taking these initiatives in other fields. It'd take real passion and concern for these issues, rather than only caring about them for the purposes of an internet argument in favor of the status quo..."

"Choosing to focus a discussion on a subset of a problem does not mean we immediately accept every other problem as "solved". You give the example of kindergarden teachers, I'll add to the example nurses. Nursing is a huge need and a growing field, one that historically men have not been involved in as heavily. I have friends that went into nursing, and there is a degree of "lulz, a male nurse" that is no more acceptable. If a woman wants to be a cement worker, or another physically grueling job, she should be able to. Similarly, there are a lot of other "grueling jobs" on the female side of it, though some perhaps more mentally/emotionally grueling."

"Of course there are efforts tat support men, male issues, and male membership in underrepresented fields (total or male minorities). They may not have visibility to you [this is a general "you"], or you may wish more existed or that they were more active. If so, I'm sure they'd welcome any help. It's the membership that determines how controversial, active, and effective any organization is. But these groups certainly can and very much do exist whether or not they're regularly mentioned on a robotics forum. As a quick first Google, there's American Assembly of Men in Nursing, American Men's Studies Association, Young Men's Initiative, 100 Black Men of America, the Men Teach nonprofit, and the Mankind Project, before I satisfied myself about the depth. There are also a massive number of male fraternal, social, and religious (not to mention sporting) organizations that support male career and life goals, as well as organizations that focus on male-dominant issues, such as Just Detention International. If there's one you'd like to see and don't, go for it. Every organization ever made was made by a person who felt that."

[teku14]

While this debate is going on, I couldn't help but remember an interesting study that I had found a few weeks ago.

Here is the link:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/

I felt that it was relevant to the debate at hand and urge everyone to consider the results that were found.

TLDR for those who didn't read, the real problem seems to be that women are more likely to give up at a given field after an attrition event, than men.

[ASD20]

No one seems to be criticizing the underrepresentation of men in K and Pre-K Education, Dance, Hairdressing and Cosmetology, and Library work (among others). Should these areas use Affirmative Action campaigns? Why or why not?


Not saying that that isn't a problem or that STEM diversity is not a problem, but the larger overarching problem is the gender pay gap. The reason people are pushing for more women (and more of everyone) in engineering is that engineering is one of the highest paid professions (Most of the other highest paid professions are also dominated by men). If salaries were swapped, then there probably would be a large push for men in hairdressing.

[smurfgirl]

If you are willing to share, can you tell us how these situations happened?
I am appalled that someone would be rude enough to say that to you, or even still thinks that way.

Some people do still think this way. Overtly discriminatory comments are less common, but subtle discrimination is pretty frequent. Sometimes people aren't even aware that they have unconscious biases that play out as subtle discrimination.

I'm an MIT alum and I serve as an MIT Educational Counselor (I am an alumni volunteer who recruits for/promotes MIT, shares information/answers questions, and does interviews for prospective students). I can't tell you how many times I hear from students and parents that I am "lucky to be a girl because it must have been sooo easy for me to get in".

In my career and outside of work, and even in FIRST, people constantly express their surprise that I am a "real engineer" and that I'm "actually smart". I've gotten questions like "but you're a girl, you can't actually like this stuff?" multiple times. I've been repeatedly asked to do things like take notes, schedule meetings, and order food because "women are better at that kind of stuff". I've been excluded from meetings and important technical decisions where I am a stakeholder and have relevant expertise.

Most people I have worked with in school, at work, and in volunteer roles have been great. But discrimination and unconscious bias against women in the STEM fields is absolutely real.

[smitikshah]

While this debate is going on, I couldn't help but remember an interesting study that I had found a few weeks ago.

Here is the link:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/

I felt that it was relevant to the debate at hand and urge everyone to consider the results that were found.

TLDR for those who didn't read, the real problem seems to be that women are more likely to give up at a given field after an attrition event, than men.

Thanks for sharing!

That is a very interesting study.

I did some super quick research to find more details about women retention rates in STEM overall and found this review (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1094603.pdf).

For those that won't read it I'll highlight some points here:
The attrition of women in STEM has been extensively investigated and some major findings are:
1.) Qualitative studies indicate their decision to persist in STEM is influenced by the perception of self-efficacy
2.) Others factors affecting persistence are positive relationships with advisors, mentors, and interest in
STEM classes
3.) Women may need assistance to function in mixed-gender teams, especially when dominated men
4.)Women exhibit lower self-confidence than males even when academic preparation and performance are
equal or superior
5.) Professional role confidence is a critical factor in the persistence of women in STEM

"Self-confidence appears to be a key variable, with diverging self-confidence scores between those who persist and switchers. This disparity was not correlated with actual performance, as measured by GPA. Other barriers were: feelings of isolation, discouragement based upon grades, poor teaching, and unapproachable faculty."

"In examining gender-based difference several indicators point to a decline in the self confidence of women as they progress through STEM courses. Women tend to rate themselves as less capable problem solvers with fewer of them planning to continue to graduate school. While women seem to internalize failure and credit others with their success, males (particularly Caucasian) tend to do the opposite. "

The article goes on and on but basically keeps restating the fact of "women tend to value themselves less even though objectively they are of the same, if not then greater, caliber than their male counterparts."

The way to fix this, and encourage females to build their self confidence in certain fields of STEM that they might not be a 100% confident in. Because females feel bad about themselves after a small little failure in something they may not have been too confident to begin with.

Events like these that promote females to learn and fail/succeed in a comfortable environment where a lot of others are in the same boat help females realize that it's okay to fail, and they shouldn't take it to heart. It helps build a female's self worth.

Getting to be on drive team as coach this year (I do believe I genuinely earned the position), helped me learn to value myself and be more confident in my abilities. I can imagine that if for one day females got to be on a drive team and be more involved in the technical aspects of the program, it could boost their confidence and help retention rates later on. This event could help the next female who might develop a world changing program or invention build up the persistence they will need later on in life to keep doing what they are doing.

[Sperkowsky]

Thanks for sharing!

That is a very interesting study.

I did some super quick research to find more details about women retention rates in STEM overall and found this review (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1094603.pdf).
Getting to be on drive team as coach this year (I do believe I genuinely earned the position), helped me learn to value myself and be more confident in my abilities. I can imagine that if for one day females got to be on a drive team and be more involved in the technical aspects of the program, it could boost their confidence and help retention rates later on. This event could help the next female who might develop a world changing program or invention build up the persistence they will need later on in life to keep doing what they are doing.
To start you did earn it as the person who put you in that position I can assure you of that. You didn't earn that from the most hours or most knowledge you earned if because of competence.
But here's my question and this is for everyone would being on drive team feel the same if the only reason you were there was because no boys were allowed there?

[smitikshah]

[W]ould being on drive team feel the same if the only reason you were there was because no boys were allowed there?

I'm sure a couple other people are wondering this as well, so this is an open message to all, and not just Sam

I don't care who was there as long as I got the experience I was able to communicate with other teams and strategize, as well as absorb a variety of technical knowledge from being in that atmosphere. I also learned leadership in a scenario. All these aspect would remain the same regardless of who else was around me.

The above is applicable to me, and I can only speak for myself. This is because I have learned how to cope and various techniques when I feel dominated in a male-based setting.

What would be different is level of comfort. I don't care if this is the right thing to say, but I feel more comfortable around those of the same gender as me. This fosters an environment for those who might not be comfortable in the traditional setting to build their skills in a comfortable way before thrown into the real world.

This skill building in this environment helps other females grow and could potentially increase female in STEM retention rates.

So, it's not about being able to get that "coveted" position by kicking out all males. The feeling of drive team was simply one that allowed me to build my skills, and if more females can build that skill in a non-traditional setting, I am all for it.

[Ed Law]

In a similar vein, I think it may be beneficial to hear from a student or alumna who has competed at such an event.
That is a good idea. I am aware of 5 such events.
girlPOWER by FRC team 433 in PA
Girls Generation by FRC team 1540 in OR
Girls Generation by FRC team 2046 in WA
Bloomfield Girls Robotics Competition by FRC team 2834,33,469,68 in MI
IndyRAGE(Robotics All Girls Event) by FRC team 234 in IN

I think it is a good idea to hear from the teams and the girls who attended these events. What did you like or not like about it? Did you get to try something (drive team, pit crew etc) that you didn't get a chance to during the regular season? What was your experience? Should these events continue?

[Drake Vargas]

Not saying that that isn't a problem or that STEM diversity is not a problem, but the larger overarching problem is the gender pay gap. The reason people are pushing for more women (and more of everyone) in engineering is that engineering is one of the highest paid professions (Most of the other highest paid professions are also dominated by men). If salaries were swapped, then there probably would be a large push for men in hairdressing.

The gender pay gap is a statistical myth for the exact reason you mentioned. Women traditionally take on lower paying jobs (Psychology, pediatrician, art vs math, cardiac surgery, orthopedic surgery) as well as take more time off for child rearing.

Pay gap exists, but only when you total up all the money earned by women and all the money earned by men- which is a deceitful way of looking at it.

A man in field X and a woman in field X will make the same amount provided they work the same number of hours at the same level of rigor.

I do agree that the reason there is a bigger push for women in engineering is because it pays more, simple as that. Nobody wants to be a garbage collector, so nobody is going to push for a man or woman to become one. However, the women that do go to college and graduate tend to pick majors that lead into lower paying fields.

Whether this is a result of some sort of systemic sexism, that's up for you to decide.

[The Swaggy P]

Alright.
I'm going to stray from my original intention of simply pointing out the massive difference in lunch discussions at the IndyRAGE event, and move on to something I've noticed a lot in recent posts.

Most of the females talking about not getting into high-paying jobs because of male dominance, are mainly talking about jobs like Engineering, software design, business management, etc.

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

[PayneTrain]

Alright.
I'm going to stray from my original intention of simply pointing out the massive difference in lunch discussions at the IndyRAGE event, and move on to something I've noticed a lot in recent posts.

Most of the females talking about not getting into high-paying jobs because of male dominance, are mainly talking about jobs like Engineering, software design, business management, etc.

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

Go start a program that is designed to inspire people to become oil drillers, miners, sheetrock layers, etc., have a public internet forum organically spring up from the community it forms, and take that discussion there.

Or you can continue being a misogynistic troll here and people will continue to tell you to $@#$@#$@#$@# off, even though those efforts clearly are in vain.

Alternatively, delete your account.

[Cothron Theiss]

Alright.
I'm going to stray from my original intention of simply pointing out the massive difference in lunch discussions at the IndyRAGE event, and move on to something I've noticed a lot in recent posts.

Most of the females talking about not getting into high-paying jobs because of male dominance, are mainly talking about jobs like Engineering, software design, business management, etc.

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

No. The "aforementioned females" get to push for more female representation in any career field they're interested in because all individuals have a right to pursue a career they're passionate about and competent in.

Also, this whole thread began because of YOUR objection to a robotics event that featured women in STEM.
Changing your arguments after losing your first isn't clever or mature.

[Joe G.]

Alright.
I'm going to stray from my original intention of simply pointing out the massive difference in lunch discussions at the IndyRAGE event, and move on to something I've noticed a lot in recent posts.

Most of the females talking about not getting into high-paying jobs because of male dominance, are mainly talking about jobs like Engineering, software design, business management, etc.

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

You are literally on a discussion board about a program aimed to get people into engineering and sofware development fields, in a thread about an event specifically aimed to achieve this. Of course that's what everyone is going to be discussing.

Already talked about this.

So get upset about this! Do something about it! People are missing out on the opportunity to gain fulfilling employment right now, time is of the essence! Start a program to encourage male Kindergarten teachers, and eradicate the perception that men working with young children are automatically sexual predators! Create initiatives to remove sexist barriers to entry and cultural normalization of dirty, hands on work as "a man's job." But that sounds like work, and it's easier to complain about people actually taking these initiatives in other fields. It'd take real passion and concern for these issues, rather than only caring about them for the purposes of an internet argument in favor of the status quo...

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the same, much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. I mean, we're on a discussion board about a nationwide program to get more people inspired by this career -- I doubt you could find a similarly sized "For Inspiration and Recognition of Garbage Collectors," regardless of gender focus. But maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

Sidenote, but when did this trend of replacing the word "women" with "females" happen? It might be just me, but it sounds incredibly demeaning and almost dehumanizing, especially since it never goes the other way.

[Chief Hedgehog]

I understand the sentiments laid out by the OP. However, I do value the options of having events such as IndyRAGE to encourage females to take on roles that are not typically set aside for them.

FRC 4607 has a fairly large female segment (~40/60 this last season), and yet it is like pulling teeth to get some of the girls into the programming/fabrication side of things.

Part of this is our collective issues with societal/cultural differences or perceived 'gender appropriations'. Another aspect is the lack of female mentors in these areas. We (4607) do try to include/encourage females into these areas - but even then they are subjugated (unwittingly) to meaningful tasks that demean these girls; i.e "take notes on this because you have better hand-writing". This drives me nuts.

My concern this coming season is to get more females to transition from our Marketing/Business squads to the fabrication/design squads. In fact, one of our best fabricators this last season was a female. And she commanded respect from the males in the lab - because she was one of the best fabricators we have ever had.

But I will state this - even as good as she was, she took a lot of crap. Not from the fabrication squad (don't get me wrong, she took some ribbing from the guys, but it was in a situation where she was able to give it back - and she had fun with it), but from the other females on the team. In fact, it got to a point that she wanted to quit because of her excelling amongst the boys. Again, not from the boys, but from the other females. After a very long talk, she decided to continue with the team. How can we prevent this type of female vs female bullying?

Well, this is why we need these types of events - so that females can showcase their worth amongst their female peers. And so that other females can see that success in these fields are not only possible, but so that they can gain confidence. And that girls such as the aforementioned can gain POSITIVE notoriety amongst her peers.

Just my 2 cents.

[smitikshah]

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

I shouldn't have to push for anything. You have no right to tell me what I should or shouldn't be passionate about. Responses on here want to push for females in STEM because you are on a forum about robotics engineering.

At this point, I think you're just a troll, and not genuinely worried about this event or rights and equal opportunity in STEM.

[ASD20]

The gender pay gap is a statistical myth for the exact reason you mentioned. Women traditionally take on lower paying jobs (Psychology, pediatrician, art vs math, cardiac surgery, orthopedic surgery) as well as take more time off for child rearing.

Pay gap exists, but only when you total up all the money earned by women and all the money earned by men- which is a deceitful way of looking at it.

A man in field X and a woman in field X will make the same amount provided they work the same number of hours at the same level of rigor.

I do agree that the reason there is a bigger push for women in engineering is because it pays more, simple as that. Nobody wants to be a garbage collector, so nobody is going to push for a man or woman to become one. However, the women that do go to college and graduate tend to pick majors that lead into lower paying fields.

Whether this is a result of some sort of systemic sexism, that's up for you to decide.

First of all, there is a pay gap between men and women working the same jobs. I don't have time to look for a citation but I'm sure someone has one.

Second of all, what I find much more alarming than the handful of anonymous trolls, is the fact that somehow this guy has 4 rep bars!!! There are clearly some fairly high-rep CD accounts that support his garbage for him to have 4 rep bars after 8 posts, all of which are offensive comments on this thread.

[Chris is me]

The gender pay gap is a statistical myth for the exact reason you mentioned. Women traditionally take on lower paying jobs (Psychology, pediatrician, art vs math, cardiac surgery, orthopedic surgery) as well as take more time off for child rearing.

Pay gap exists, but only when you total up all the money earned by women and all the money earned by men- which is a deceitful way of looking at it.

A man in field X and a woman in field X will make the same amount provided they work the same number of hours at the same level of rigor.

I do agree that the reason there is a bigger push for women in engineering is because it pays more, simple as that. Nobody wants to be a garbage collector, so nobody is going to push for a man or woman to become one. However, the women that do go to college and graduate tend to pick majors that lead into lower paying fields.

Whether this is a result of some sort of systemic sexism, that's up for you to decide.

It took less than ten seconds of Google searching to find a US Department of Labor article (https://blog.dol.gov/2012/06/07/myth-busting-the-pay-gap/) debunking all of these claims, showing that the gender pay gap persists even when you control for time off due to pregnancy, presence of advanced degree, job title, etc.

The information is out there and is, quite frankly, very easy to find. If you don't want it to be true, that's another story. Discrimination isn't a myth.

[Drake Vargas]

him to have 4 rep bars after 8 posts, all of which are offensive comments on this thread.

Having an opinion that differs from the norm shouldn't be considered offensive. The overly PC culture present in FIRST and CD is ridiculous. God forbid anyone say something that might be interpreted as misogynistic. /s

[Shrub]

A question that might help some folks who aren't used to managing systemic inequality and their piece in dismantling it: does anyone have any resources (specific to marginalized people in STEM, maybe) that others can use to learn more without women/PoC having to prove their marginalization?

Here are a few I have found: link a (https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-stem), link b (http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopardy-report.pdf), link c (http://www.ladiesinfirst.com/blog/the-sad-tale-of-a-sexist-team), link d (http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/respectability-politics-black-women/)(this one is a little more jargony and isn't specific to STEM).

I am open to critiques on the choices of articles I am sharing as well as starting a collection of more resources to share with others. I am also open to PMs if anyone needs any help implementing change on their own team or needs support.

[smitikshah]

Having an opinion that differs from the norm shouldn't be considered offensive. The overly PC culture present in FIRST and CD is ridiculous. God forbid anyone say something that might be interpreted as misogynistic. /s

Yes, please let us forbid that. It might be hard for you to understand, but from an outsider looking in's perspective, if FIRST/CD condoned posts that could be interpreted as misogynistic we would turn off so many prospective FIRSTers. Not to mention in a professional setting it can be called sexual harassment and/or discrimination and can cause some serious issues.

These certain posts are catalyzing the demise of the already dwindling hope I had left in the thread.

Going back to the post about the pay gap -
As others have cited there are a variety of sourcing offering information that it exists. I have done a lot of research on my own time about it and contacted several different agencies working on improving it. The number one cause I was able to conclude was that women under negotiating their salaries. Women tend to value themselves less and hence negotiate less as opposed to males who tend to overvalue themselves and negotiate for more.

This comes down again to confidence, and multiple arguments on this thread work in favor of the argument women aren't as confident in their abilities even if they are objectively on or above par.

That's why events like these help build females confidence and get them psychologically ready to deal with things like negotiating pay based on your confidence or retention in STEM after a small failure.

[Joe G.]

Having an opinion that differs from the norm shouldn't be considered offensive. The overly PC culture present in FIRST and CD is ridiculous. God forbid anyone say something that might be interpreted as misogynistic. /s

There's a big difference between "I think eliminating bag day would irreparably damage the FRC experience for a majority of teams" and "Because of your gender, you are likely to be less capable at math and science." One is an unpopular but valid opinion that spars debate, the other is an offensive declaration that directly insults and discourages a large group of the very people we're supposed to be inspiring and building confidence in with this program and on this board.

Please don't make this a bag day thread now. Though that might be an improvement. :)

[efoote868]

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

My take on the diversity gap / gender gap was probably similar to yours when I was in high school, because it was based on the idea of a zero sum game. If a society is going to promote something, it must be ignoring something else, right?

The more experience I gain in the real world only shows me this couldn't be further from the truth. The number of opportunities available is not a fixed number, like it might be for an admissions office at a university. Growing a percentage of a population in engineering doesn't mean the rest of the engineering population needs to lose that percentage - the overall number can grow!

Applying it to this example, adding a girls-only event doesn't take away any other opportunity a boy might have.

Last point. In fields requiring a brain (creativity, critical thinking, etc.), diversity of thought is an admirable goal. If we can't approach a problem from every angle, we might not find the best solution. I don't have to think long to imagine life experiences that I have not and cannot experience simply because of my gender - and those are perspectives that I lack and cannot use in solving a problem. Imagine where the world could be and isn't because of the lack of diversity in engineering.

[Cothron Theiss]

Please don't make this a bag day thread now. Though that might be an improvement. :)

At first look this is a pretty terrible thread. But then again, if you just ignore the disrespectful/trolling posts that keep sparking the debate, you have a list of some really great responses as for why All-Girl Events are great. Might be nice if someone made a white paper of all of the positive responses from people in this thread.

[ASD20]

Having an opinion that differs from the norm shouldn't be considered offensive. The overly PC culture present in FIRST and CD is ridiculous. God forbid anyone say something that might be interpreted as misogynistic. /s

Here are some of your posts along with some of the quotes that preceded them in italics. I went through the trouble of bolding what some might interpret as offensive or misogynistic (and I was fairly conservative with it) and underlining things that are untrue along with some commentary in case you don't understand why. I tried my best to explain these problems, but if anyone else can explain it better, feel free to chime in.

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".

Taking a discussion about women and immediately trying to change the focus of the conversation to the men. This may be interpreted as you not caring about the issues women face and only caring about your own gender.


Originally Posted by smitikshah
For example. just today, all the "bros" (as they like to call themselves) made plans to go out for a lab team lunch, and I was the only one that wasn't invited.

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

I shouldn't have to explain how this is insulting.

Originally Posted by Joe G.
Just because it's legal to be a rude person, doesn't mean you should be a rude person.

Not wanting to hang out with a person isn't rude. Do you actually believe that? Other people should be able to tell me who I can and can't hang out with?


Any elementary schooler would be able to tell you that excluding someone is in fact, quite rude.


It's incredibly naive to think biological factors don't play a role in the distribution of careers. Biology is the single largest determinant in a persons character. Yes, there are societal pressures, but they are driven by our innate biological tendencies. We tend to enforce the norm as guided by our unique neurological makeup. Men are typically more aggressive than women, women are typically more empathetic than men. Meaning that on the whole, a lot of women aren't going to like working in a competitive environment whereas men will. And in science, you need competition.

Textbook definition of predjudice and sexism and just because you use the word typically, it doesn't change anything. It is the exact same as this famous quote:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

I might do a part 2 if I have time and it's necessary, but I've spent way too much time on this for now.

[Drake Vargas]

"Because of your gender, you are likely to be less capable at math and science."

Your words, not mine. You're making up your own narrative, I never said anything of the sort.

[Drake Vargas]

Taking a discussion about women and immediately trying to change the focus of the conversation to the men. This may be interpreted as you not caring about the issues women face and only caring about your own gender.

You're looking at it too broadly. That was a specific reply to Karthik's image. A very useful image with a lot of information, that was unfortunately being viewed in a very one-dimensional way. I pointed that out.

I shouldn't have to explain how this is insulting.

I don't find that insulting.

Any elementary schooler would be able to tell you that excluding someone is in fact, quite rude.

Any elementary schooler would be able to tell you people have freedom of choice in association.

Textbook definition of predjudice and sexism and just because you use the word typically, it doesn't change anything.

Prejudice definition: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.

Using biology as an explanation for gender differences isn't based on reason? Well I'll be.

[kristinweiss]

You will NEVER understand what a woman has to go through to be respected in this community until you are in their shoes.


I could not agree more with this! Girls in FRC tend to have to prove themselves repeatedly to gain any respect in the community, and many girls don't have the confidence to show time and time again that they are just as capable as their male counterparts. While I normally am not a fan of "girls only" events, I think that this is a great event to show girls who may be struggling on teams that they are completely capable of everything that their male counterparts are, and I hope that it gives the girls in attendance the confidence they need to keep pushing and stay involved in engineering.

[MechEng83]

what I find much more alarming than the handful of anonymous trolls, is the fact that somehow this guy has 4 rep bars!!! There are clearly some fairly high-rep CD accounts that support his garbage for him to have 4 rep bars after 8 posts, all of which are offensive comments on this thread.

"They're just dots"

[Chris is me]

Using biology as an explanation for gender differences isn't based on reason? Well I'll be.

Are you actually going to cite something that claims your stereotypical ideas of differences in the behavior of people of certain genders are actually rooted in biology? You're just spouting prejudiced ideas and saying "it's biology!", but haven't vetted any of your claims at all. If you're going to use the idea that your prejudices are rooted in scientifically verifiable truth, you'll have to at least cite some sources so that your claims can be critically analyzed.

I'm betting the best you'll be able to come up with are either speculative evo-psych papers, which are rarely if ever evidence based, or outdated studies. It's difficult if not impossible to control for cultural and societal influence when analyzing gendered behavior. I don't believe this will stop you though - you've decided your opinions are objective truth.

[ASD20]

I know I shouldn't post on CD while angry, but I'm going to do it anyway.

You're looking at it too broadly. That was a specific reply to Karthik's image. A very useful image with a lot of information, that was unfortunately being viewed in a very one-dimensional way. I pointed that out.

One of the classic techniques of the anti-feminist and women's rights groups is to always turn every conversation towards the men. Focusing on just the men in every conversation and ignoring the women is misogyny because you are saying that men and their issues are more important than women and their issues. An English teacher would be able to explain this much better than me.


I don't find that insulting.
You said there is nothing wrong with excluding your coworker, presumably on the basis of gender. How is that not insulting? However, that is not nearly as bad as you saying "Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them?." HOW DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND HOW SEXIST THAT IS? First of all, you don't know the OP or her coworkers, how do you know what any of their definitions of fun are? YOU DON'T!! You are assuming that she does not like the same things as them SOLELY ON THE BASIS OF HER GENDER. Furthermore, you are not making a general statement about men and women, you are saying it about a real person.

Any elementary schooler would be able to tell you people have freedom of choice in association.


Rude: offensively impolite or ill-mannered.
Legal: permitted by law.

HOW DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE TWO WORDS. Yes, you have the freedom of association to not hang out with someone, just like I have the freedom of speech to call it rude. No one is going to arrest those kids for excluding someone, but it doesn't mean they aren't horrible people for doing it.

Prejudice definition: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.

Okay give me your reason or actual experience, not just that men and women are biologically different, but that it is the largest influence on who they are as a person.

Using biology as an explanation for gender differences isn't based on reason? Well I'll be.
You are defining women by their sex and saying that they have limitations because of their gender. Research the women's suffrage movement, you will see a lot of the same arguments being used. Once again someone else can explain this much better than me, but it shouldn't be that hard for you to understand.

[asid61]

Are you actually going to cite something that claims your stereotypical ideas of differences in the behavior of people of certain genders are actually rooted in biology? You're just spouting prejudiced ideas and saying "it's biology!", but haven't vetted any of your claims at all. If you're going to use the idea that your prejudices are rooted in scientifically verifiable truth, you'll have to at least cite some sources so that your claims can be critically analyzed.

I'm betting the best you'll be able to come up with are either speculative evo-psych papers, which are rarely if ever evidence based, or outdated studies. It's difficult if not impossible to control for cultural and societal influence when analyzing gendered behavior. I don't believe this will stop you though - you've decided your opinions are objective truth.

Not going to get involved as much as possible, but here's the links he posted:
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1596940#post1596940
Rather sketchy links to support his opinion IMO (very little in there that's directly related to this topic), but you can't argue with a sexist anymore than you can argue with a racist.

[ASD20]

"They're just dots"

I know they are just dots, but behind those dots are respected CD members agreeing with him. It's not like one person gave him all that rep because his rep has fluctuated like crazy over the past few days which means a not insignificant group of people KEEP giving him rep.

[Siri]

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.First of all, welcome to ChiefDelphi. You'll notice as you look around that the overwhelming subject of career recruitment here is STEM fields. This is because we are a robotics forum, not because some of us are women. If you're interested in recruitment of women into other fields, I suggest you follow up with places like National Association for Women in Construction (http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp), several for women in mining, Women in Petroleum (http://www.spwp.org/), Women in Manufacturing (http://www.womeninmanufacturing.org/home), Automotive jobs (http://www.womeninautomotive.com/), as I mentioned in a previous post.

There is no grand monolith of "women" in society that limit the priorities of our gender. Rather, there are just millions of women that have individual priorities and passions. The same is true of all people, and I would not expect a male engineer on this forum to be pushing male students toward any career they are not personally interested in avocating. If you would like to work with that Women in Construction organization, please send me a donation letter next tax refund season.

That said, while I am on this forum as an engineer, you have lucked into locating a woman who is indeed passionate about some very difficult and dangerous manual labor jobs. In fact I was injured training for just such a job and am still striving to recover and rejoin. So with that, I invite you to read my previous monologue. While its existence is not critical here, I'm afraid you must have missed based on your claim that no women have discussed this issue.

As for whether people complain that men dominate many grueling jobs on the list, I need to control my temper. Do women push for male-dominanted jobs that aren't very socially valued? Not so much [see separate links to women's professional organizations in labor-heavy fields], but that's a recursive definition and also applies to low-paid women's jobs, most notably tipped food service (72% (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/26/new-white-house-report-impact-raising-minimum-wage-women-and-importance-)). But don't conflate low social value and grueling. Have women fought for access to other grueling male-dominated jobs? Of course. Countless women have being fighting for literally generations to be able serve and potentially die for their country in many military and law enforcement jobs, and for the recognition of women who already did before they were technically allowed. I hope you are not in this position, but I know I could wake up tomorrow to find out that any number of women in uniform I care about are dead for their country on the other side of the world, doing jobs they or their foremothers had to fight just to access, in an organization where they are still far more likely to be discriminated against, harassed, and assaulted. Regardless of what you think of women in combat, to say there's no push to grueling jobs is blatantly ignoring a very, very long and hard history of women pushing just to be able to compete against the same standards of the profession as men.

[Andrew Schreiber]

You're looking at it too broadly. That was a specific reply to Karthik's image. A very useful image with a lot of information, that was unfortunately being viewed in a very one-dimensional way. I pointed that out.


.

You're right, it was one dimensional. What additional data do you think would help make your point? I'll put my money where my mouth is and say that if you can provide me some information that would make your case (either an actual data set or simply the type of info you want) I'll go, hunt it down, and combine it with Karthik's image to see help you make your case in strokes that are less broad than "it's biology".

You tell me what more you want to see and I'll do my best to hunt it down, maybe we can have a discussion here . And maybe we can all learn something about the relative value of opinions and feelings in a discussion compared to that of data and evidence.

Addendum - Do not mistake this post for support of any ideas or positions.

[Tyler Olds]

I'm not going to read through all the comments on here but here's the process and feedback from my team's experience from last year:

One of my female students saw the post for Indy-Rage last year and after telling other girls on the team who became interested they practically begged me to go.

Girls who attended the event overwhelmingly had a blast being able to drive/operate/participate in a lead role and mentored first year female students attending to get them comfortable in the environment. The response from the seminars was "meh" but they said they absolutely want to go back next year.

This year we had our first female driver/operator in our teams history and had a very close bid for another female. Previous years our driver try-outs has never been close to a female student earning their spot. We also had a much higher percentage of our female students in lead roles including both of our student leads being female and a higher percentage of females in the pits. Is this 100% due to Indy-Rage? Of course not but I do believe that this sparked some motivation for my female students to take it upon themselves to step up and strive to assert themselves as equals in our program.

Make whatever opinions and observations you want from my post All that I care about is that my female students benefited from the experience and want to go back. Because of this I would like to thank Indy-Rage for providing this opportunity.

[Cothron Theiss]

Agree completely. There's a lot of good information and perspectives shared by people with more patience with people than myself, which has helped shift my own opinion a bit on female-only events from more of a "those are things that people will put on, and while some people will gain something from them and there's nothing wrong with them, I'm not sure they're the most productive approach" to an "okay, I understand why this is a potentially very good solution with clear benefits for certain people, and I'm more likely to actively advocate for this kind of thing now."


Absolutely. In fact, I may even suggest to my team that we field an all female drive team for the off-season we plan to attend. It will be difficult to find a female driver because of the exact problem that's addressed by these types of events. We had our secondary driver leave after the 2015 season for a variety of reasons, and while I am not pretending to know all of her reasons behind leaving, I know for a fact that the team environment was far less inviting for her than it was for her male counterparts. So in my opinion, this mess of a thread has had some positive effect and has led to *some* good discussion amidst the chaos.

[Pauline Tasci]

What's so interesting to me is that a community who are all about spreading STEM, a category which strives for innovation, is pushing out inclusion.
You cannot innovate without more people involved, especially people who have different things to offer.

I cannot believe that FRC students will find this thread, read it, and have to feel to way I feel reading this thread.

Disgusted.

I cannot put into words how hurt I am that so many of you are telling women how we feel about being a woman in STEM. Theres a difference between understanding a situation and being in a situation. Please learn the difference.

With that said, thank you to the men and women who are fighting for the women in stem in this thread.

Now lets continue the conversation respectfully. In my opinion, the best person should get the job (whether that be in work or a lead in an FRC team), the goal of getting more women into STEM isn't to give them those positions more easily, it's to get them to the same level as their male counterparts. I am one who does not agree with special treatment of female members and would rather teach them to strive for being the best, interested what other people think.

Please keep your replies respectful. :)

[Michael Corsetto]

I'm not going to read through all the comments on here but here's the process and feedback from my team's experience from last year:

One of my female students saw the post for Indy-Rage last year and after telling other girls on the team who became interested they practically begged me to go.

Girls who attended the event overwhelmingly had a blast being able to drive/operate/participate in a lead role and mentored first year female students attending to get them comfortable in the environment. The response from the seminars was "meh" but they said they absolutely want to go back next year.

This year we had our first female driver/operator in our teams history and had a very close bid for another female. Previous years our driver try-outs has never been close to a female student earning their spot. We also had a much higher percentage of our female students in lead roles including both of our student leads being female and a higher percentage of females in the pits. Is this 100% due to Indy-Rage? Of course not but I do believe that this sparked some motivation for my female students to take it upon themselves to step up and strive to assert themselves as equals in our program.

Make whatever opinions and observations you want from my post All that I care about is that my female students benefited from the experience and want to go back. Because of this I would like to thank Indy-Rage for providing this opportunity.

Tyler, this is really great feedback from someone who is looking to improve the experience of the students on their team.

One challenge of FRC is the limited number of slots for any given aspect of a typical FRC team, especially when it comes to drive team/pit team/scouts, etc. At a given competition, a typical FRC team will have between 6-8 students in the pit and drive teams combined. Given FRC teams can be much larger in size, many students simply do not get the chance to participate in some areas of the team during the regular season. This isn't a bad thing, just one challenge of FRC specifically.

This is why I really value off-season events like Indy-Rage. I place a high value on giving more students more chances to play with robots. This is also why I love events like Madtown Throwdown, where we can bring three robots to play with. We get to circulate more than three times as many students through a lot of these roles that they won't experience during the regular season.

More opportunities, if structured wisely, means more opportunities to inspire more students. I think the direction we are headed in FIRST and competitive robotics is a great one. Every year, the net gets bigger and we bring in more students from all backgrounds. From my perspective, casting a bigger net has and will continue to naturally close the gender gap, but I also think events like Indy-Rage play a much needed role in accelerating our growth as a community.

Thanks all,

-Mike

[Jon Stratis]

I am who does not agree with special treatment of female members and would rather teach them to strive for being the best, interested what other people think.

Please keep your replies respectful. :)

It's hard to draw a line on special treatment for female members when, from my experience, female members typically come to a team with less experience than their male counterparts due to general societal differences in how we raise each gender and what toys we buy for them. Those differences are changing, but it seems to be slow going.

So, to some degree you do have to treat people differently based on their experiences, when they first come to a team - you need to have increased training opportunities for those who need it, you need to promote an atmosphere of acceptance and learning that supports individual growth and achievement within the team regardless of what experiences someone shows up with. And, unfortunately, I think you'll see that separate largely across gender lines even when it's not promoted as such.

All of that brings up an interesting question... where is the line between treating genders differently, and the appearance of treating genders differently within a team, and how important is that distinction? Opening the question a little broader, how do we provide appropriate support for any subgroup (for example, hotel assignments for individuals who identify as other than their biological gender), without treating them differently (or giving the appearance of such)?

[The Swaggy P]

I would like to also point out here, specifically to the people who are flaming & bashing me, rather than trying to talk reasonably about my posts, that I, as a boy/man/male (whichever you prefer), have been discriminated against multiple times in High School.

When my club got an opportunity to host the concessions stand for a football game, I was treated by the women running this event as if I was nothing but a "dumb shop kid". Only the girls were allowed to handle money, or take orders. I was only allowed to pour cheese on tacos.

When my father applied for jobs as a grade school music teacher, when he was not chosen for two of the positions he applied for, he was told, and I'm not making this up, that they "Wanted a woman". When he went to a lawyer to ask about filing a discrimination lawsuit, the lawyer told him that there was no point in filing a lawsuit, because a white man had no chance of winning.

In my own Robotics club, the teacher recruited cheerleaders from our school to join, because it was apparent that our four-man team would never be chosen for Playoffs without girls. The girls could only come to about half of our robotics meetings, and couldn't make the first competition, because of a basketball game. For the second competition, our drive team was told they had to give up half of their scheduled matches to the girls, even though the girls were first-year members, and the current drive team was made up of 3-4 years.

I am not a troll, and I am not against women's events in FIRST. I was originally ONLY against the gender labeling of lectures at a lunchtime meeting. It seems that I cannot express this intention enough, as I still see users accusing me of trying to bring down these events.

I have received private hate messages, both directly & indirectly insulting me. I've been called names, I've received veiled threats. And after looking into my sudden reputation drop to 5 negative reputation bars, I found out that between 12:00 AM & 9:00 AM this morning, 400 negative reputation was added to my profile without any additional rep comments. For these reasons I choose to remain anonymous, since I don't want to be yet another victim of discriminatory violence in a country that supposedly allows freedom of speech.

I am only a high school student, and you have shown me the worst of what the future has to offer here. I will no longer be posting or responding to users in this thread, as I will clearly only receive hate in return.

[TINCAN foodgas]

Lady Cans FRC #2881 Austin Texas can't make it during the school year...too far to travel by car/bus and airlines don't have good connecting flights during the school year. We are a girl scout team and we'd love to be here, but we have to deal with unexcused absences from school. Every FIRST event that we attend during the school year comes with a consequence. Fortunately the girl's passion for building FIRST robots far exceeds the pain of making up school on Saturday and having to take all the final exams.

Maybe next year Lady Cans FRC 2881.

[Michael Corsetto]

I am not a troll, and I am not against women's events in FIRST. I was originally ONLY against the gender labeling of lectures at a lunchtime meeting. It seems that I cannot express this intention enough, as I still see users accusing me of trying to bring down these events.

I have received private hate messages, both directly & indirectly insulting me. I've been called names, I've received veiled threats. For these reasons I choose to remain anonymous, since I don't want to be yet another victim of discriminatory violence in a country that supposedly allows freedom of speech.

I am only a high school student, and you have shown me the worst of what the future has to offer here. I will no longer be posting or responding to users in this thread, as I will clearly only receive hate in return.

I'm sorry to hear that you've been turned off by the community.

While I do think your initial post was very poorly worded (if the intention was to promote civil discussion), I think this latest post clearly shows how you've developed in your posting during the course of this discussion.

An increasingly evident (to me) development in our internet culture is the polarization of discussion. It is OK to be in the minority, it is OK to be in the majority, and it is OK for both sides to disagree and throw facts/figures/opinions out to prove/disprove their respective points.

We cross lines in productive discussions when we insult, demean, and slander others. Anyone and everyone can be tempted to cross those lines. Personally, I have crossed those lines many times.

I hope we all take some time to consider the person sitting at the keyboard on the other side of the internet. And I hope we can especially consider the words we say in PM/Rep that the rest of the community wont see.

Thanks everyone,

-Mike

[hardcopi]

People have a bad habit of forgetting that sometimes it is kids that are posting questions or comments on here and tend to go "rabid". Private messages to a student insulting them, by either student or mentor should not happen.

He might have worded it poorly, but his point wasn't lost on a lot of people. Personally, I can see both sides of it. As a mentor I look at it and think "My girls don't need their own event, they'll make all the events theirs if they want." Our team had a leadership that was mostly female. Had nothing to do with anything other than they were the best we had. President, Vice President, Safety, Spirit, Finance, Marketing, Programming all female led on our team.

That said I also know not all teams, schools, organizations work that way and we need to try and remember, even if your team has good about it doesn't mean all teams are.

I do know that, if you had an all boys event last year we would have been hard pressed to put together a complete team. :)

[Drake Vargas]

I'm sorry to hear that you've been turned off by the community.

While I do think your initial post was very poorly worded (if the intention was to promote civil discussion), I think this latest post clearly shows how you've developed in your posting during the course of this discussion.

An increasingly evident (to me) development in our internet culture is the polarization of discussion. It is OK to be in the minority, it is OK to be in the majority, and it is OK for both sides to disagree and throw facts/figures/opinions out to prove/disprove their respective points.

We cross lines in productive discussions when we insult, demean, and slander others. Anyone and everyone can be tempted to cross those lines. Personally, I have crossed those lines many times.

I hope we all take some time to consider the person sitting at the keyboard on the other side of the internet. And I hope we can especially consider the words we say in PM/Rep that the rest of the community wont see.

Thanks everyone,

-Mike


Well said.

[IKE]

I would like to also point out here, specifically to the people who are flaming & bashing me, rather than trying to talk reasonably about my posts, that I, as a boy/man/male (whichever you prefer), have been discriminated against multiple times in High School.

...snip...

Discrimination is rough, and I am sorry that you have had to experience it. It sounds like your father got an even more impactful dose. It might be good to think how those experiences have shaped your viewpoint of discrimination. Have they made you more empathetic to others experiencing discrimination in other areas, or have they hardened you and in turn make you feel like others should "toughen up"? Experiences like you have had can really make a person go either direction. Not that either direction is necessarily wrong, but it is important to be mindful of how they will influence your personal perception and in turn expressed viewpoints.

I used to PM a lot of students on posts like your previous few posts to be very mindful of "tone" or "wording" when getting into controversial subjects. In most case I would have hoped it would be considered as coaching, but giving someone a warning that they are headed into trouble may sometimes be taken the wrong way. After reading through YPP documentation, I now usually refrain from PMs unless I know they are a mentor or the discussion is purely technical in nature.

I am saddened that you feel threatened. Reading through this post, I see several folks that I have a ton of respect for being pretty harsh in their return commentary. I suspect that if some of them re-read their wording, they may realize why you are feeling threatened.

Because of the aforementioned concern regarding PMs, I would like to give this advice more openly:
If/when taking a position that you feel will likely be met with controversy be very careful of your wording. A good rule of thumb is, if I need an anonymous or relatively anonymous account to make your message, think very hard about what you are hoping to foster. Example: If you have health concerns because someone's baby looks ill, you wouldn't approach them with: Hey that's an ugly baby, is something wrong with it, or does it just look that way.

With controversy, try to avoid humor which does not translate well in text based communication and can often be misconstrued. Humor often works well in a personal conversation, but it is troublesome in written communication that is not story telling. This is especially true of sarcasm.
"Tone" via email or message boards can be very difficult to read. Folks may read into things incorrectly (from your perspective) as they read your post with a different tone than you intended. I personally had an issue with this a few months back with a work related email where I was frustrated, and my frustration came across as insulting and condescending. That was not my intent, and because I was expressing frustration, I actually had management review the note before sending it (and they approved it), but it still resulted in someone being offended and me writing a written apology*.

I would suggest sticking to some technical discussions. It looks as though you have some good posts in those areas. Keep working on your writing style. Not that I don't think your viewpoints or opinions merit discussion, but I as you can see, controversial viewpoints can get you lit up pretty quickly.

*An important thing to understand is that a persons perception is their reality. You may not intend to offend, but if they are offended, they are offended. An apology can be very beneficial as a starting point to have further discussion.
I would also hope that folks that may have threatened you might do the same.

[JohnTu]

Check out this FIRST Strategic Pillards posted today:
http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/blog/where-is-first-going

Increase Diversity is one of the pillards which coincides with our topic of All-Girl events very well.

From the blog:
"We also know that the demographics of FIRST participants do not fully look like the communities we serve. With approximately 30 percent female participants in our Programs overall, we are underrepresented in young women, as well as people of color and kids from lower-income families. I am proud to say that FIRST demographics are quite a bit better than the tech workforce overall, but we still have a ways to go to mirror our communities.

Why is this important? If you believe, like I do, that FIRST programs are real game changers for kids, opening them to a world of opportunity and enabling them to become the critical innovators and problem solvers of tomorrow, then shouldn’t every kid have access to these Programs? ..."

- John

[s_forbes]

(...)

While I do think your initial post was very poorly worded (if the intention was to promote civil discussion), I think this latest post clearly shows how you've developed in your posting during the course of this discussion.

(...)


Reminder that this user did not start this thread. Moderators split off a post from a separate thread into a new one.

Mods, please don't do this without adding a disclaimer at the beginning of the thread. It's ridiculous.

[nerdrock101]

I would like to also point out here, specifically to the people who are flaming & bashing me, rather than trying to talk reasonably about my posts, that I, as a boy/man/male (whichever you prefer), have been discriminated against multiple times in High School.

snip snip snip

I am not a troll, and I am not against women's events in FIRST. I was originally ONLY against the gender labeling of lectures at a lunchtime meeting. It seems that I cannot express this intention enough, as I still see users accusing me of trying to bring down these events.


I'm sorry for the hate you received in this thread, but I can understand how users may have perceived your post as being directed more at women's events in general versus just the lunch lectures. I'm also sorry that you have faced discrimination, but I wish that it had given you a glimpse into what women face in other areas rather than hardened your heart to this subject.

However, I disagree with you about the lunch lectures because to create a welcome environment for everyone, focus needs to be put on how men act with women in their "zone". I have had a number of events in my life where I have been bullied, mocked, and sexually harassed in the engineering field and every event had one thing in common: men were the perpetrators. Some didn't have bad intentions, but just didn't know how to act with me around. After explaining to them why I was hurt by what they said or did, it was easy for them to pick up the subtle language changes and get along splendidly. The potential for this event and the lunch to teach those skills to students before they enter the workforce is invaluable.

Finally, if you really will no longer respond to this thread, PM me if you feel comfortable continuing to discuss this. I think there's a lot we all can learn from each other if we take a breath first.

[Jon Stratis]

I wanted to share another anecdote... This past year, my team hosted a luncheon at the Minneapolis regionals for girls and women on teams, volunteers, judges, and the local university SWE chapter. It was a wildly successful event, with a much larger turnout than we expected. We had gotten e-mails to all the team leads about it, informing them of the event and asking them/their team to RSVP with the number of women that would be attending. At the event, one of our mentors went around to talk with some of the teams that did not RSVP, and here are some of the responses she got from male team leaders:

"Well, I'm not a girl so I didn't reply" - a female team member was standing right next to him at the time.

"Man, that's a lot of estrogen in there!"

And to top it off, after the luncheon there were some leftover pizza/cookies that the team took down to our pit and tweeted out that they were available for anyone that wanted them. One guy came by and asked "How many ovens do you have back there?"

So, whether we want to admit it or not, FIRST is not always as open and welcoming to women as we would like. Comments and attitudes like this are one very good reason why women might hang back instead of taking charge.

[Pauline Tasci]

So, whether we want to admit it or not, FIRST is not always as open and welcoming to women as we would like. Comments and attitudes like this are one very good reason why women might hang back instead of taking charge.

Maybe treating us like we are special makes people devalue us even more, makes people believe we had a million opportunities in FIRST. Which we frankly do, as there are SO MANY programs targeted to get women into STEM.
When you treat someone as different people think of you differently. When you treat someone as superior for a different anatomy people stop looking at what you know and start looking at what gender you are.

This is one of the biggest issues with getting more women into STEM that people seem to miss a lot.
To truly have women be EQUAL to men in STEM fields in a percentage and in a respect sense, we need to teach them the same skills when they are younger. We need to show girls they can do anything.

[MechEng83]

*snip*
And to top it off, after the luncheon there were some leftover pizza/cookies that the team took down to our pit and tweeted out that they were available for anyone that wanted them. One guy came by and asked "How many ovens do you have back there?"


Your other examples I understand as supporting your argument, but I fail to see how this specific comment is relevant. I'm not going to deny the existence of gender bias, but sometimes I think people look for examples where there aren't any.

[Jill_ls101]

In an attempt to contribute something to this thread that is both productive and informative, I’d like to share my thoughts as a female in FRC. I’ve been involved in FIRST since the tail-end of the 2009 season as a student, and the last four years as a mentor in CAD and manufacturing.

I was fortunate that the team I was on in high school was very welcoming and was not overly biased, but that didn’t make it perfect. Many of the issues I felt I faced were subtle and now many years later, I believe were possibly unintentional by my teammates. At the time, I would not have labeled as any kind of sexism, but also felt as if there was a “boy’s club” mentality that I was not a part of.

This is why these panel discussions are so important. No one intended to cause me harm, but now that I’m older (and hopefully wiser), I realize that those kind of actions are the most harmful. When neither side knows what has transpired, neither side can open a dialogue to fix the issue.

I always felt that I had to speak with great conviction to be listened to on my team, especially in the beginning. Over time, I did gain more respect of my peers, but sticking it out in the beginning was difficult. Naturally, I am a very patient and stubborn person and that enabled me to see it through. I also found support in one of the college mentors of our team. He was the first person on the team I felt took me seriously, and I will always be grateful.

Now as a mentor myself, I often stop and wonder if I’m doing enough for my students. (I’m sure we all do). But in context of this discussion, I worry about the girls whose skin might not be as thick or don’t know why they perceive this odd “feeling” about being on the team, as I had. As was stated earlier in this thread:
<snip> ... the real problem seems to be that women are more likely to give up at a given field after an attrition event, than men.
As a mentor, I’ve seen many girls come onto our team, and I’ve seen many disappear. I always am asking myself am I doing enough? Sure I can get girls interested in the team, but getting them to stick it out is hard.

1646’s two student drivers this year were female and I was drive coach. Midway through the season I belatedly realized our team had created a drive team that was 75% female. Did this inspire any of the other girls on the team? Do they want to be drivers too? How can I inspire more students on the team (all students) to be this involved?

Events like the IndyRAGE are a crucial step in this process, but we can’t let it end there. Letting the girls know they can be heavily involved in a FRC team is only part of the process. Empowering them to continue to do so once they leave the event is something we need to focus on.

Parting thoughts: How can we give girls the resources to succeed on FRC teams and in STEM? What can we do to aid them when faced with actions and behaviors of others that are unintentional but harmful? How should we approach any individual who exhibits behaviors that are potentially harmful to others on the basis of gender?

What can we do to make events like IndyRAGE even better for everyone?

[Pauline Tasci]

Hi all,
I've gone back and forth whether to post again in this thread, but I've gotten a lot of requests from people in community asking me to post a speech I gave that I shared on my personal Facebook. This speech is about my personal views on the growth and acceptance of women in STEM.

I have removed my opening and closing remarks so that anyone reading this can just focus on the content.

I do not want to start more debate, but would rather have other individuals see my side of being an unrepresented person in STEM who is not respected the same as her male colleagues.

Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16kJZPGz9OUTHe2ZCOPPR3fxPA4-SgRauW0N9A24YYg4/edit?usp=sharing


Thanks.
Please keep respectful.

[anfrcguy]

Are you actually going to cite something that claims your stereotypical ideas of differences in the behavior of people of certain genders are actually rooted in biology? You're just spouting prejudiced ideas and saying "it's biology!", but haven't vetted any of your claims at all. If you're going to use the idea that your prejudices are rooted in scientifically verifiable truth, you'll have to at least cite some sources so that your claims can be critically analyzed.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence (and the references at the bottom). There is a fairly overwhelming scientific consensus that there are "differences in the capacity of males and females in performing certain tasks, such as rotation of object in space, often categorized as spatial ability," in which a male advantage exists (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223279457_Sex_differences_on_the_Progressive_Matri ces_are_influenced_by_sex_differences_on_spatial_a bility, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1130467?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents are just a couple examples). I doubt many would disagree that spatial ability plays an important role in building a robot.

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.

[ASD20]

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence (and the references at the bottom). There is a fairly overwhelming scientific consensus that there are "differences in the capacity of males and females in performing certain tasks, such as rotation of object in space, often categorized as spatial ability," in which a male advantage exists (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223279457_Sex_differences_on_the_Progressive_Matri ces_are_influenced_by_sex_differences_on_spatial_a bility, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1130467?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents are just a couple examples). I doubt many would disagree that spatial ability plays an important role in building a robot.

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.

Please, someone just close this thread.

[Zealii]

The more important thing to notice is that everyone is different in their own special way. Males and females both bring different skills to the table to help the team succeed. Even two people of the same gender have different strengths. For example, one male may be a fabulous machinist while another may be great at writing grants. It is the combination of all of these different people, male and female, who make a great team.

IMHO, the reason for All-girls events is that typically, females are better at certain roles on the team. These roles can sometimes mean that they don't get to participate on the drive team or pit crew at regular season competitions because they are busy contributing to the team by doing what they do best, whatever that may be. Also, it is always interesting to watch an all girls event because of these differences. Females do generally attack a problem a bit differently than males (not saying that either way is better) so some strategy is different.

I love to compete at all girls events because it gives me the chance to be on the drive team. During the season, my skills are better used talking to judges and leading the team as team president. That doesn't leave a lot of time for drive team. I really enjoyed IndyRAGE last year and I hope that I get to attend again this year.

[anfrcguy]

The more important thing to notice is that everyone is different in their own special way. Males and females both bring different skills to the table to help the team succeed. Even two people of the same gender have different strengths. For example, one male may be a fabulous machinist while another may be great at writing grants.

Well said -- I couldn't agree more with this.

I love to compete at all girls events because it gives me the chance to be on the drive team.

Aren't there boys -- maybe those whose strengths involve writing grants -- who would also love a chance to be on the drive team who never had the opportunity? I just think that a "try out new role" type of event would achieve the same goal, but be far less exclusive.

[smitikshah]

Please, someone just close this thread.

+1

Please can we just end this thread. I feel like we've squeezed all the productivity we possibly can out of it already.

[Chris is me]

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.

Yeah, you see, there's a world of difference between "there is literally no difference between people who, all other things equal, have different sexes" and the thing I actually said that you were responding to. But I mean, you've created a brand new Chief Delphi account to argue about gender, snipped a single line of a post made two weeks ago out of context, and then dropped a link to a Wikipedia article as some kind of justification for institutional sexism, so I don't really think productive dialogue is going to result from this conversation no matter how I respond to it.

[Jon Stratis]

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence (and the references at the bottom). There is a fairly overwhelming scientific consensus that there are "differences in the capacity of males and females in performing certain tasks, such as rotation of object in space, often categorized as spatial ability," in which a male advantage exists (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223279457_Sex_differences_on_the_Progressive_Matri ces_are_influenced_by_sex_differences_on_spatial_a bility, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1130467?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents are just a couple examples). I doubt many would disagree that spatial ability plays an important role in building a robot.

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.

I have to strongly question any study along those lines - With our current culture, it has to be practically impossible to control for upbringing differences between males and females. How can you test two people for spatial reasoning skills on equal footing, when one grew up building things with Legos and another grew up with dolls and toy ovens? We give our boys toys that encourage development of spatial reasoning skills, and girls toys that encourage domestic tasks (cooking, child rearing), it only makes sense that, later in life, those same children would exhibit different abilities. Equalize the training kids receive from toys at a young age, and you'd probably see some very different results by the time they got into high school.

[anfrcguy]

I have to strongly question any study along those lines - With our current culture, it has to be practically impossible to control for upbringing differences between males and females. How can you test two people for spatial reasoning skills on equal footing, when one grew up building things with Legos and another grew up with dolls and toy ovens? We give our boys toys that encourage development of spatial reasoning skills, and girls toys that encourage domestic tasks (cooking, child rearing), it only makes sense that, later in life, those same children would exhibit different abilities. Equalize the training kids receive from toys at a young age, and you'd probably see some very different results by the time they got into high school.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680714/ supports that "the sexual dimorphism in the structure of the parietal lobe is a neurobiological substrate for the sex difference in performance on the Mental Rotations Test." In other words, neurobiological differences in the brain are likely causing the performance discrepancies.

But I mean, you've created a brand new Chief Delphi account to argue about gender, snipped a single line of a post made two weeks ago out of context, and then dropped a link to a Wikipedia article as some kind of justification for institutional sexism

My point is that the disproportionate gender gap in itself isn't enough to show that institutional sexism exists. There are certainly cases of sexism in FRC, and the community should work together to address those cases and avoid future ones. I just don't think an all girls event, where the only male focused item on the agenda is a lecture on "Unintentional Bias" is going to help boys or girls.

[frcguy]

+1

Please can we just end this thread. I feel like we've squeezed all the productivity we possibly can out of it already.

+2

Also, if there was any question I am in no way related to this "anfrcguy" nor do I endorse or support what he is saying.

[Chris is me]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680714/ supports that "the sexual dimorphism in the structure of the parietal lobe is a neurobiological substrate for the sex difference in performance on the Mental Rotations Test." In other words, neurobiological differences in the brain are likely causing the performance discrepancies.

I think the implied conclusions you are drawing from this study are a bit broader than the actual result shows. The implicit assumption is that the differences in neurobiology are the result purely, or predominantly, of biological sex's effect on brain development. But we already know that brain development is heavily influenced by a wide variety of outside factors, and it is impossible to isolate differently sexed people from social and environmental factors influenced by others' perception of their genders.

An oversimplified example: Say a boy and a girl go to the same preschool, which assigns the boys blocks to play with and the girls doll houses. These kind of external factors impact which parts of the brains are exercised during play and thus what part would foster growth. We can't isolate the variables enough to say what portion of the development is caused by something inherent to the human's sex and what portion is caused by differing life experiences based on being treated as a member of that sex's associated gender.

Even so, this point is kind of tangential - you can't use generalized trends to justify treating specific people differently. There are many women with better spatial reasoning with many men, but if sexist attitudes in society work from the generalization that women are weaker in that area than men, those women may not even get the chance to try and exercise the skills they have due to this perception. Social factors are everywhere. Events like all-girls events just try to eliminate those social factors for one day and let young women try whatever they want to try on a robotics team. For one day.

[Katie_UPS]

Aren't there boys -- maybe those whose strengths involve writing grants -- who would also love a chance to be on the drive team who never had the opportunity? I just think that a "try out new role" type of event would achieve the same goal, but be far less exclusive.

Yeah, that is completely a possibility but not really part of the grand narrative that a girls event is addressing. I don't think I've ever seen anyone assume that the boy in the pit is only there to talk to judges because obviously they do chairman's, whereas I know it happens with girls. When you think about that, you might see how a girl is more likely to be pushed into the paper-writing role on her team and pushed out of the driver/robot repair crew. The idea behind a girl's event is to negate a lot of the societal pressure/influence that girls experienced throughout their life... the pressure that comes from not getting legos and lincoln logs as a kid but instead a play kitchen and princess dresses.

Are there boys who would benefit from a push to try new things too? Yes. I'm not saying that those situations don't exist. But boys -by and large- are not actively discouraged from STEM the way girls are, and girls events are about addressing big, system wide problems.

[bduddy]

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?

[Hitchhiker 42]

I wanted to add one last insight - maybe something that could help.

I myself am part of an all-boys team (we're from an all-boys school), and that forces our students to develop interests in all parts of the team. We have both a large build/programming department, as well as large, well-developed business/outreach departments. Though I have little experience with all-girls teams, I would assume the same would hold true. I think IndyRAGE is basically just a taste of what all-girls teams do all the time - have girls involved in all parts of the team. In this sense, I think it is a very positive experience to have, if only for 1 event, to empower girls to take charge in parts of the team where they are historically less involved (largely due to social pressures).

[MikLast]

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?

Im assuming you meant the OP (if not please forgive me)

I am not defending Swaggy P here. I don't even know him. He may not be intentionally hiding his identity. If you check his previous post, you would know he is/was from 4692. It matches with the city he said he is in. He said his rookie year was 2013 which was when that team started. He may have just graduated and may have removed his team number because he is no longer on that team. That is his choice. Also many people do not put their real name in their CD profile. It is allowed although I think everybody should put their real name but that was just me.



I would like to also point out here, specifically to the people who are flaming & bashing me, rather than trying to talk reasonably about my posts, that I, as a boy/man/male (whichever you prefer), have been discriminated against multiple times in High School.

When my club got an opportunity to host the concessions stand for a football game, I was treated by the women running this event as if I was nothing but a "dumb shop kid". Only the girls were allowed to handle money, or take orders. I was only allowed to pour cheese on tacos.

When my father applied for jobs as a grade school music teacher, when he was not chosen for two of the positions he applied for, he was told, and I'm not making this up, that they "Wanted a woman". When he went to a lawyer to ask about filing a discrimination lawsuit, the lawyer told him that there was no point in filing a lawsuit, because a white man had no chance of winning.

In my own Robotics club, the teacher recruited cheerleaders from our school to join, because it was apparent that our four-man team would never be chosen for Playoffs without girls. The girls could only come to about half of our robotics meetings, and couldn't make the first competition, because of a basketball game. For the second competition, our drive team was told they had to give up half of their scheduled matches to the girls, even though the girls were first-year members, and the current drive team was made up of 3-4 years.

I am not a troll, and I am not against women's events in FIRST. I was originally ONLY against the gender labeling of lectures at a lunchtime meeting. It seems that I cannot express this intention enough, as I still see users accusing me of trying to bring down these events.

I have received private hate messages, both directly & indirectly insulting me. I've been called names, I've received veiled threats. And after looking into my sudden reputation drop to 5 negative reputation bars, I found out that between 12:00 AM & 9:00 AM this morning, 400 negative reputation was added to my profile without any additional rep comments. For these reasons I choose to remain anonymous, since I don't want to be yet another victim of discriminatory violence in a country that supposedly allows freedom of speech.

I am only a high school student, and you have shown me the worst of what the future has to offer here. I will no longer be posting or responding to users in this thread, as I will clearly only receive hate in return.


Reading the thread helps you answer questions you may have.

[MariOlsen]

While I've been reading this thread since it started, I've been avoiding posting for a while because I don't want to simply rehash the same old arguments. Plus I've been busy (perhaps ironically) teaching at the Women's Technology Program, a summer camp introducing rising high school senior women to EECS and having lots of conversations with my colleagues on this subject. But I've been talking with a friend who reminded me that there seems to be a trend that females are more likely to allow themselves to be marginalized in conversations, are more likely to use qualifying language to express uncertainty, and are more likely to keep quiet/doubt that they can contribute to the conversation, so I'm attempting to refute that :) I found Pauline's post extremely insightful, and I want to expand on it.


I do not want to start more debate, but would rather have other individuals see my side of being an unrepresented person in STEM who is not respected the same as her male colleagues.

Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16kJZPGz9OUTHe2ZCOPPR3fxPA4-SgRauW0N9A24YYg4/edit?usp=sharing

This is beautifully put, even though I've had it incredible easy. My parents gave me Tinker Toys and my favorite toy as a kid was a wooden tool set. I've been extremely lucky to have been supported my whole life in my dream to pursue engineering, but even so I have faced harassment and people's assumptions that the "cute little girl" must not really know what she's doing with the complicated tool. I've had some truly spectacular men help me along the way -- and I think that's the main crux of my complaint, that practically all of my technical/engineering mentors so far have been male (before this summer it would have been "all"). None of them have ever condescended me or tried to turn me away from engineering; in fact, I've received nothing but "good for you!"s and praise, which I'll always be grateful for.

But there's a frightening lack of representation of women in the most technical pursuits, and I think it's difficult to realize just how bad it is until you walk into a room and realize how alone you are. I was often the only girl at builds. I sat in on a Turing Computer Science Honors class at UT Austin: my presence brought the number of women in that room up to 20% (from 7/39 to 8/40). HackMIT runs a puzzle of programming challenges with automatic admission to the hackathon as the prize: out of the first 250 to attempt the puzzle, only 8% were female. I have no doubt that the number of women pursuing computer science outside of Turing is more balanced, as is the actual number of women attending HackMIT, but it's almost uniformly men who have more exposure to CS from a younger age, allowing them to dominate the higher levels of the field, at least at first, which only gives them more and more legs up: they get to take the honors classes, participate in hackathons, practice their skills, have access to fantastic resources... Most of the male programmers I know have been programming since they could type. Most of the female programmers I know learned their first year of college (or later).

A pair of MIT 2016s published a fantastic Report on the Status of Undergraduate Women at MIT http://news.mit.edu/2016/report-on-status-of-undergraduate-women-at-mit-0225 which essentially says that women come in with less experience and confidence in their abilities, but by the end of their time at MIT women had caught up or surpassed men in several metrics of success. FRC teams have the same ability to level the playing field, as long as we're careful not to accidentally steer girls away from technical parts (although it's also critical that no one be forced into something they don't enjoy). Just because she's happy doing marketing/outreach doesn't mean she wouldn't also be happy CADing or soldering if you give her a proper chance.

When I was in high school, I did some of mechanical/electrical stuff, and started out doing drive team, but I did a ton of outreach and paperwork because no one else wanted to do it. And as a result, by the end of the season I had been pushed off drive team. Which was fine because the guys really wanted to do it, and it made them happy, and they probably did a better job than I could have, and anyway outreach stuff is fun and important. For similar reasons, I never learned how to solder in high school: by the time it came up we were in the middle of build, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it made them happier to solder than it would have made me, and anyway, what if I messed up? My friends and I have speculated about girls being conditioned to be polite and considerate and please others and so on, but it's not speculation that these definitely aren't isolated incidents, despite the best efforts of my mentors.

And like most of the women in STEM I know, I find myself moving more and more towards more managerial/logistic extracurriculars, which I almost feel guilty about, as if I'm letting down future generations of women, but it's what I truly enjoy more. But I think that's because I know I'm good at it, because it was easy to get involved in those sorts of activities, whereas the activation energy required to start technical projects was much higher. I wonder if my choices would have been different if the shop where the technical teams work wasn't a pretty long walk in the dark from my dorm. I welcome anything that attempts to negate the many factors nudging girls away from technical fields.

[Ed Law]

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?
I am assuming you are referring to anfrcguy who created an account today and only posted on this thread.
If the moderators are not going to enforce the rules of anonymous (second) accounts, I am going to ask the community to stop engaging in discussions with trolls. Let them say whatever they want. If nobody responds to them, they will go away. I even put some of them on ignore list so I don't have to see their posts.

[EricH]

If the moderators are not going to enforce the rules of anonymous accounts, I am going to ask the community to stop engaging in discussions with trolls. Let them say whatever they want. If nobody responds to them, they will go away. I even put some of them on ignore list so I don't have to see their posts.
Ed, just so you're aware, anonymous accounts are not prohibited by CD rules. Duplicate accounts are*. There is a difference. Just to give one example of why anonymous accounts aren't prohibited: are you sure that I'm actually who I say I am? After all, I'm just another random person on the internet. (:p Just so we're clear, none of the information on my profile is fake.)


*As a general rule--there are several known duplicate and/or group accounts, which I assume have permission from the webmaster to exist.

[Pauline Tasci]

Ed, just so you're aware, anonymous accounts are not prohibited by CD rules. Duplicate accounts are*. There is a difference. Just to give one example of why anonymous accounts aren't prohibited: are you sure that I'm actually who I say I am? After all, I'm just another random person on the internet. (:p Just so we're clear, none of the information on my profile is fake.)


*As a general rule--there are several known duplicate and/or group accounts, which I assume have permission from the webmaster to exist.

But bullying is prohibited on CD. And this account is bullying a lot of people on this thread about our views.

[ASD20]

Ed, just so you're aware, anonymous accounts are not prohibited by CD rules. Duplicate accounts are*. There is a difference. Just to give one example of why anonymous accounts aren't prohibited: are you sure that I'm actually who I say I am? After all, I'm just another random person on the internet. (:p Just so we're clear, none of the information on my profile is fake.)


*As a general rule--there are several known duplicate and/or group accounts, which I assume have permission from the webmaster to exist.

Even if they don't outright admit it, I would be shocked if ANY of those troll accounts aren't second accounts.

[frcguy]

Even if they don't outright admit it, I would be shocked if ANY of those troll accounts aren't second accounts.

+1. I highly doubt students that haven't used CD or even random people on the Internet decide to troll a relatively obscure high school robotics forum at random.

And I just want to reiterate one more time that I am NOT associated with this "anfrcguy", and I personally believe his posts are complete nonsense and are just looking for a reaction and I completely disagree with everything he has written.

[EricH]

+1. I highly doubt students that haven't used CD or even random people on the Internet decide to troll a relatively obscure high school robotics forum at random.


It's been a decade since someone last tried that, I think, but it has happened.

Back story is that back around '06, some folks from another forum decided to spam/troll CD. (CD users do use other forums as well; I think that's where said trolls heard about CD.) Long story short, they were spotted pretty quickly, posts deleted, called out by users who spotted them from the other forum(s) to go back to said forums, and accounts banned by mods. Took about a day (I wasn't online at the time, so I only saw the aftermath).



I see four separate offenses. I only addressed ONE. Anonymity is not against CD rules; however, anonymous users should at least do everybody the favor of complying with the CD rules. The other three are duplicate accounts (against CD rules), bullying (against CD rules), and being a troll (it depends--it is possible to be a troll without breaking any rules, believe it or not).

[smitikshah]

I can't wait for this thread to go away. People now (aside from Pauline's speech and ensuing debate about anons), are mainly looking for a response. Most everything these anons/second accounts whatever you will are bringing up points already previously mentioned in the thread.

If you genuinely think you can add something to this discussion please read the past 11 pages and see if it was mentioned - it likely has been already. It saves people from starting a new CD debate.

[s_forbes]

I am assuming you are referring to anfrcguy who created an account today and only posted on this thread.

(...)

If I was someone who lurked on this message board and only decided to create an account when I saw a topic that I had a heavy opinion on, being immediately labeled as a troll would surely turn me away from the community. Maybe I hang around different parts of the internet than the rest of you, but that user doesn't seem like a troll to me.

But bullying is prohibited on CD. And this account is bullying a lot of people on this thread about our views.

On the subject of bullying, please keep in mind the reaction to the user who's post was used to start this thread:


(...)

I have received private hate messages, both directly & indirectly insulting me. I've been called names, I've received veiled threats. And after looking into my sudden reputation drop to 5 negative reputation bars, I found out that between 12:00 AM & 9:00 AM this morning, 400 negative reputation was added to my profile without any additional rep comments. For these reasons I choose to remain anonymous, since I don't want to be yet another victim of discriminatory violence in a country that supposedly allows freedom of speech.

I am only a high school student, and you have shown me the worst of what the future has to offer here. I will no longer be posting or responding to users in this thread, as I will clearly only receive hate in return.


It's probably a waste of words, but I encourage y'all to try and view things from other peoples perspectives before you post. Being inflammatory and insisting your view is the only correct one just makes this forum look silly. This is the kind of atmosphere that completely turned me off of posting here when I was in high school.

[Sperkowsky]

Why do people keep saying that these anon accounts are trolling? All I see is people with different views then yourself. I am not saying I agree with either side. But by calling someone disagreeing with a troll you are invalidating your argument. There are 2 sides to every debate. In order to get anywhere both sides have to mutually respect each other.

[jajabinx124]

It's probably a waste of words, but I encourage y'all to try and view things from other peoples perspectives before you post. Being inflammatory and insisting your view is the only correct one just makes this forum look silly. This is the kind of atmosphere that completely turned me off of posting here when I was in high school.

Why do people keep saying that these anon accounts are trolling? All I see is people with different views then yourself. I am not saying I agree with either side. But by calling someone disagreeing with a troll you are invalidating your argument. There are 2 sides to every debate. In order to get anywhere both sides have to mutually respect each other.

I agree with these posts. I'm not taking a side either, but I agree that being inflammatory and insisting one view is the correct one makes this thread and parts of CD look silly as heck. The only way we are going to progress on issues such as this, and other societal issues, is being open of others perspectives and respectfully disagreeing with what was mentioned. I understand the inflammatory responses because it's obvious many people have direct personal feelings attached to this issue and that causes the disagreeing to come out with an ego which I understand, but it's an issue because this thread largely fell apart because of that. The only way we are going to make a change is by opening up people to speak their opinions and have a mutual debate. This thread discourages many members from participating/expressing their views on crucial societal issues. And honestly if they don't voice that then the issues get prolonged further.

[Gregor]

Why do people keep saying that these anon accounts are trolling? All I see is people with different views then yourself. I am not saying I agree with either side. But by calling someone disagreeing with a troll you are invalidating your argument. There are 2 sides to every debate. In order to get anywhere both sides have to mutually respect each other.

Because people who use anonymous accounts typically have unpopular opinions and others are weary of calling them what they really are (asses), so they use the word troll to make it okay.

[Sperkowsky]

Because people who use anonymous accounts typically have unpopular opinions and others are weary of calling them what they really are (asses), so they use the word troll to make it okay.

So because they have an unpopular opinion they are automatically asses?

The reason they need to make anonymous accounts is because people are so toxic towards the unpopular opinion. If we all atleast mutually respected each other these anonymous accounts would more or less disappear.

[hardcopi]

But bullying is prohibited on CD. And this account is bullying a lot of people on this thread about our views.

Bullying is only prohibited in name only. The original poster, who is a student btw and not a mentor was bullied mercilessly for having a different opinion and actually stating it. Sure the bullying was through downgrade of reputation (-400... seriously) and through rude and bullying private messages, but the student was still bullied.

The interesting thing is that I know I will get negative reputation for this. To say bullying is prohibited is to ignore the fact that it is built into the rep system. Heck it is almost encouraged.

As mentors, would any of you have treated this kid the same way in person if he had voiced a difference of opinion?

And we wonder why people create anonymous accounts.

Rich.

[Aidan Cox]

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BOTY1NTUxOTY4MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNzc3NzU2._V1_S X640_SY720_.jpg

Anon Number 2- If you could choose any thread on Chief Delphi to abrasively troll, which one would it be?

[smitikshah]

I've been trying really hard to let this thread die down bit couldn't resist from adding this

One anon account used their power and pmed me how my story was a lie and discredot what I said, saying it was false. They also said parts of my post were looking for attention. Thankfully I couldn't care less about anons opinion and handled the ssituation. But what if I couldn't? What if it really hurt?

The person was able to use an anon account to attack me about my views on the subject. This is not just simply an "unpopular opinion".

Wow we went from debating girls events, to biological differences, to debating the validity of burner accounts. What in the world?

off season cd, you forever amaze me

[Chris is me]

Bullying is only prohibited in name only. The original poster, who is a student btw and not a mentor was bullied mercilessly for having a different opinion and actually stating it. Sure the bullying was through downgrade of reputation (-400... seriously) and through rude and bullying private messages, but the student was still bullied.


I'm not sure I disagree with this post, but could you link to the specific examples you consider bullying? Obviously, there is a line between passionately disagreeing with someone and "bullying" them, and it would be educational for everybody to discuss where that line is.

One thing I'm sure I disagree with is the idea that giving negative reputation is bullying. If negative reputation is considered "bullying", then I'm sure lots of people on both sides of this debate have been "bullied", perhaps by each other. Negative reputation is given by different people for different reasons, but at least for me, it requires more from me than to disagree with the post in question - the post has to be rude, condescending, toxic toward other parties in the debate, smug, arrogant, etc. to elicit a red dot. I'm sure other people have more hair triggers than I do.

They also said parts of my post were looking for attention.

I have never, ever understood this criticism from anyone. Literally all communication by all humans is desiring the attention of the reader. That is why words are said, to get the attention of another person to communicate an idea to them. Additionally, attention is not a finite resource and is a legitimate human need. What exactly is someone's point when they say a statement is "looking for attention"?

[anfrcguy]

I think the implied conclusions you are drawing from this study are a bit broader than the actual result shows. The implicit assumption is that the differences in neurobiology are the result purely, or predominantly, of biological sex's effect on brain development. But we already know that brain development is heavily influenced by a wide variety of outside factors, and it is impossible to isolate differently sexed people from social and environmental factors influenced by others' perception of their genders.


Good point. It's fair to say that further research is needed in order to conclude that this spatial ability disparity is nature and not nurture.

There are other performance differences between sexes that I feel would be more difficult to attribute solely to nurture. It's pretty known that the variance of male IQ is greater than the variance of female IQ. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.569.52&rep=rep1&type=pdf found that amongst the top 2% of IQ scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. Given that FRC is such an intellectual challenge, it wouldn't surprise me if the majority of students who choose to participate are pretty high on the IQ spectrum, which could perhaps explain why there are more male students than female students in the program.

Even so, this point is kind of tangential - you can't use generalized trends to justify treating specific people differently

Exactly. I've thought about this more, and now the all-girl event in itself doesn't really bother me (although I disagree with the implications that all males need to be educated on unintentional bias). I just feel that sometimes males are actually at a steep disadvantage due to this "movement" to do whatever we can to get more females involved. There are less scholarships for males, and additionally, I've actually witnessed discrimination against males for Dean's list. Also, at one point when I was on a small team that happened to be all-male, judges had consistently asked "what have you done to try to recruit women," and even "why don't you have any women on your team?" Our team had limited member spots, so in recruiting members, our priority was to find people who would be capable (or willing to spend time learning), dedicated, and have plenty of time. After repeatedly receiving such comments, we talked about going out of our way to find females (who weren't interested in the first place) over more otherwise-deserving males (who were asking to be on the team) to avoid subjecting ourselves to such criticism in the future.

I guess my point is that we should just treat everyone equally, and that going out of our way to try to compensate is neither fair nor productive. If there is in fact an unequal nurturing epidemic (and at least some of the gender gap in FRC could be attributed to environmental factors), perhaps it would be best to address this at a younger age. I don't think treating women specially is good for anyone.

[Lil' Lavery]

Reading through this thread, it struck me how much of the discussion regarding female-centric events was taking place between males. Wil Payne made the same observation a few pages ago.

47 people have posted in this thread.
4 of those people publicly identify themselves as not being males.

Edit, 48/4.


Figured I'd give an update on where this lies now, based on my quick and imprecise tabulation.


56 (78.8%) of the individual posters in this thread have expressed themselves as males
140 (76.9%) of the posts in this thread were posted by male users

[ASD20]

If I was someone who lurked on this message board and only decided to create an account when I saw a topic that I had a heavy opinion on, being immediately labeled as a troll would surely turn me away from the community. Maybe I hang around different parts of the internet than the rest of you, but that user doesn't seem like a troll to me.


To quote the description of CD found by googling 'Chief Delphi', "This is a discussion forum used to discuss the FIRST Robotics Competition." If after weeks or months of lurking on Chief Delphi, the first thing you feel compelled to post on this ROBOTICS forum is some highly questionable research about the biological differences between genders, maybe you should find a different forum. The internet is a large place. I am sure there are dozens of forums that you may find more interesting.

[anfrcguy]

To quote the description of CD found by googling 'Chief Delphi', "This is a discussion forum used to discuss the FIRST Robotics Competition." If after weeks or months of lurking on Chief Delphi, the first thing you feel compelled to post on this ROBOTICS forum is some highly questionable research about the biological differences between genders, maybe you should find a different forum. The internet is a large place. I am sure there are dozens of forums that you may find more interesting.

In my case, I had spent months lurking on CD, but I didn't really feel the need to post anything. However, after reading this thread, I felt I had a heavy opinion on this topic and created an account. The thread is clearly robotics related (it's a discussion on robotics events), and so was my post. Also, you say there are dozens of forums that I may find more interesting, as if that's a reason not to participate on CD. I'm sure there are many CD users who find other forums more interesting; would you recommend to them not to use CD?

Also, I find it interesting that you qualify the research as "highly questionable"... I'm curious as to what exactly is highly questionable about it.

[Madison]

Also, I find it interesting that you qualify the research as "highly questionable"... I'm curious as to what exactly is highly questionable about it.

Wikipedia is not a reputable source of information.

[Ernst]

Wikipedia is not a reputable source of information.

Yeah, neither are any of the sources that page cites:

American Psychologist
Personality and Individual Differences
British Journal of Psychology
Nature
Journal of Experimental Pedagogy
Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal
Science
The Spanish Journal of Psychology
Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment
Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
Human Brain Mapping
Journal of Dental and Medical Sciences
Behavioural Brain Research
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology
Neuropsychology
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad
Biological Psychiatry
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
Psychological Bulletin
Psychological Science
American Sociological Review
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology
American Journal of Sociology

[Siri]

Also, I find it interesting that you qualify the research as "highly questionable"... I'm curious as to what exactly is highly questionable about it.I'll speak for myself on this; I don't find the studies themselves particularly questionable. They're peer-reviewed, and their authors are well enough regarded. The Colom paper is very narrow in scope, however. The Linn paper is broader, well-cited and in a high impact factor major journal. It does a good job of reviewing the current debate on gender-based child spatial development research. Note however, that when I say "current", I mean from 1985. I'm not a cognitive development expert, but a cursory inspection of its recent citations indicates the field has moved on in the intervening 30+ years. (I won't claim to know in what direction.)

Moreover, neither of these papers have anything to do with what you're talking about.

All that Colom, Escorial, and Rebollo suggest is that contradictory findings from certain testing methods are attributable to the tests' specific visuo-spatial format. Their study is not designed to address the origins of the differences in spatial performance, nor indeed the veracity of any differences in reality. They are only saying that with regard to this specific test format, the differences in performance disappear when one controls for spatial ability as it is required in that test. They make no claim that this format for testing dynamic spatial performance is a reasonable or accurate reflection of reality, much less whether that reality is biologically (rather than experientially) based. (They do point to a general view of some kind of gap as a reason to check the possibility, but they make no assertions about it.) It's a very narrowly-defined study that only attempts to resolve inconsistencies in previous experimental results, which explains its length and minor reference status.

The Linn and Peterson paper is broader and more interesting. It's also very clear in its conclusions (in 1985) that the origin of any sex differences in spatial ability have not been determined or even fully characterized, and in fact are not decidedly genetic by any assessment. I'll quote for those of you who don't have access to the full version:

To the extent that any biological factors affect spatial ability they would interact with sex-typed experiences and sex-role expectations to produce the observed patterns of performance (e.g., Newcombe et al., 1983; Tobin-Richards & Petersen, 1981). Males and females have differing experiences across the life span (e.g, Bem & Bem, 1970; Cordua, McGraw, & Drabman, 1979; Haugh, Hoffman, & Cowan, 1980; Papalia & Tennent, 1975). The relationship between these experiences and documented sex differences in spatial ability has not been established but may eventually offer an explanation for sex differences in spatial ability (e.g., those in mental rotations) and for the success of training programs aimed at reducing the differences (Connor, Schackman, & Serbin, 1978; Goodenough et al., 1984; Newcombe et al., 1983; Liben & Golbeck, 1984).

In conclusion, sex differences in spatial ability are now more specifically described. The mechanisms that lead to these differences remain to be established, as do the possible influence of these differences on other behaviors. Individuals probably have an assortment of spatial skills rather than a single ability. Furthermore, several mechanisms may contribute to the observed sex differences. Researchers attempting to characterize the nature and origin of these differences and their potential influence on other behavior need to differentiate the types of spatial ability and the processes respondents use for each item type.

So in fact, Linn and Peterson 30 years ago said what several posts on this thread have said about them now: namely that such studies cannot possibly be controlling for environmental and experiential factors separately from biology. It's true, and they were sure to point out as much back then. Efforts like the type this thread is discussing are aimed at addressing experiential and environmental factors that might be contributing to any gender performance differences that do exist. So while neither of these studies do anything to reason away the gender gap via biology as you've alluded, they can be read as a positive for interest in correcting potential performance differences caused by gendered life experiences.


EDIT: Since we've pulled back to the Wikipedia page, the two articles I'm addressing were the ones directly citing in this post:
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence (and the references at the bottom). There is a fairly overwhelming scientific consensus that there are "differences in the capacity of males and females in performing certain tasks, such as rotation of object in space, often categorized as spatial ability," in which a male advantage exists (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223279457_Sex_differences_on_the_Progressive_Matri ces_are_influenced_by_sex_differences_on_spatial_a bility, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1130467?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents are just a couple examples). I doubt many would disagree that spatial ability plays an important role in building a robot.

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.(emphasis mine) My point in particular is that this post drastically misrepresents the studies it actually cites, inserting the word "physiological" where none is intended or implied, and saying that those who disagree with the assertion should do more research. In fact, the research investigated at the links provided in no way support or even address the idea that "disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences". (This is not to say it's impossible, just that it's unsupported. I could easily insert any number of words in for "physiological" in this context and have a similar strength of argument.)

[Siri]

Sorry to double, but I just want to say that I don't intend to assume anfrcguy is deliberately misrepresenting these studies or the consensus quote. I don't know their age or STEM background, and I'm willing to suspect this poster simply made a legitimate error in conflating findings of gender differences with theories of physiology. It's an understandable mistake, particularly as a layperson when reading a site like Wikipedia. The measure of one's scientific integrity is not who is correct first, but who is most willing to address to new findings.

To everyone interested in engaging on the scholastic research here, that is certainly your right and can be a very valuable experience. But do remember, as I think we sometimes forget, that most of the adults in this discussion are STEM professionals in our own right who don't blink at titles like "Sex differences on the Progressive Matrices are influenced by sex differences on spatial ability" and "Emergence and Characterization of Sex Differences in Spatial Ability: A Meta-Analysis". We can understandably digest these articles relatively easily versus students or laypeople. Heck, I have undergraduate students that might mistakenly interpret the former's abstract as a physiological assertion, though I'd hope they then ask how the authors could've isolated physiology/genetics from environmental/experiential factors.

Anyway, no maliciousness meant. I hope this discussion is a learning experience for everyone, both on handling professional digital relationships and on scholarly discourse--regardless of your incoming or outgoing views.

[Lil' Lavery]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Siri again.

[MikLast]

Reading through this thread, it struck me how much of the discussion regarding female-centric events was taking place between males. Wil Payne made the same observation a few pages ago.




Figured I'd give an update on where this lies now, based on my quick and imprecise tabulation.


56 (78.8%) of the individual posters in this thread have expressed themselves as males
140 (76.9%) of the posts in this thread were posted by male users

It may be good to confine this to those who commented in relation to the thread (e.g. any of my comments in this thread) as this thread is a mess when it comes to staying on topic.

[Chris is me]

Yeah, neither are any of the sources that page cites:

(((a bunch of sources)))

Citing a source doesn't prevent conclusions drawn from those citations from being false, nor does it mean the authors of the article citing these sources are without bias. For one example, see the anfrcguy post earlier in this thread - it cites two papers, but then draws a conclusion that cannot necessarily be supported by those papers. The post isn't automatically accurate (or inaccurate) because of those citations, and neither is the Wikipedia article.

Wikipedia is a generally pretty good first pass source for knowledge, but if you are interested in scientific claims you should base those not on the Wikipedia article but on the studies directly that the article points to.

[Caleb Sykes]

56 (78.8%) of the individual posters in this thread have expressed themselves as males
140 (76.9%) of the posts in this thread were posted by male users

Does anyone know approximately what percentage of FRC students are male?

[Siri]

Does anyone know approximately what percentage of FRC students are male?The latest study I see that stat in is 2011 (http://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/resource_library/impact/impact-ftc-frc-cross-program-evaluation-executive-summary-2011.pdf),
where the population of FRC team members is described as 30% female. However, if you're looking for the reference population for this thread, you'll likely want a stat for mentors as well. A stat for off-season active CD users would also be relevant.

Thread readers will likely want to review the various FIRST impact studies if you haven't; I'm surprised we haven't linked these yet (http://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/first-impact).

[Caleb Sykes]

The latest study I see that stat in is 2011 (http://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/resource_library/impact/impact-ftc-frc-cross-program-evaluation-executive-summary-2011.pdf),
where the population of FRC team members is described as 30% female. However, if you're looking for the reference population for this thread, you'll likely want a stat for mentors as well. A stat for off-season active CD users would also be relevant.

Thank you.

If anyone had a reasonable stat for mentors or off-season active CD users I would also love to see it.

I would also like to see a unicorn someday, but since I think that is rather unlikely, I am comfortable looking at horses and letting my imagination fill in the rest. :)

[Karibou]

I've been avoiding posting in this thread because I didn't want to be the one to revive it after a week of inactivity, but for the sake of offering another female's perspective, here we go.

On the original topic (the panel discussions): I think that the post announcing the panel discussions could have been phrased differently, and I think it was taken the wrong way. I don't think the team/poster intended to insinuate that unintentional bias is something that only males are guilty of, but that is clearly how it was interpreted by several people. Unintentional bias is something that affects all groups, regardless of gender, age, skin color, sexuality, etc, but given that this is specifically an all-girls event, I assume that the main focus of this panel would be unintentional bias as it relates to gender, but it could also touch on other aspects of diversity. I could be wrong. But with that assumption, I think that the post would have been better as:
"Career, Opportunity, Education, and Challenges for Females in STEM"
"Unintentional Bias and Actions and the Impact on Diversity (focused on gender)"


On my experiences in HS/all-girl events: In high school, I had a very good experience on my FRC team. Not a lot of comments, actions, or other discrimination towards me based on my gender, and on the rare occasion that those things happened, the perpetrators were swiftly told in no uncertain terms that their comments were not appropriate. I was never told "you can't be in the shop/you can't be on the driveteam/you can't be on the pit crew/etc because you're a girl". I actually always wanted to be on the driveteam, but I proved very quickly that I was not very qualified in that department by driving our robot into a Christmas tree during practice time. There weren't any all-girls events in Michigan when I was in HS, but if there had been, I'm not sure my team would have attended them just because we probably wouldn't have been able to drum up enough commitment from the girls on our team - we were a small team (~25-35 active), and we'd need commitment from nearly all of the girls, and that would have been difficult for us to get with several of us doing fall sports.

I think that all-girls events are great, for the reasons others have highlighted in this thread - giving girls a chance to build confidence in an environment that turns many away because of both preconceived and perpetuated discrimination.

Here's a related post (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1046217) I made on here during my senior year of high school - funny how these topics repeat themselves.


On being a female engineer in the real world:
I graduated with a degree in Materials Science & Engineering, and now work as a metallurgist in a steel plant. While many other "typically male" fields have made great strides in diversity and inclusivity of women, steel is still very stuck in the past and is still very much a "boys club", which is off-putting and intimidating to a lot of women. It's a dirty, dangerous, rough and tumble environment that takes a lot of strength and dedication to stay in, for all genders.

I love the graphic that Karthik posted (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1596696&postcount=7)early in this thread, but as there's no breakout specifically for "steelworker", let me provide some insight. My plant, when operating at a good capacity, employs ~300 people. ~50 are salaried (managers, HR/office staff, and engineers), and the remainder are hourly (machine operators, millwrights, electricians, etc - this number can vary from 100-250). We have one female manager (in HR), and another non-manager woman who works in HR. There are no women in our maintenance department (in either salaried or hourly positions). I am the only female engineer in my plant. There are four female hourly workers, as far as I know. We're a very small plant, but it's not much better at larger facilities either, especially when you only look at employees who work "on the floor" (as opposed to solely in offices - accounting, HR, sales, supply chain, etc).

Basically, as a female, I stick out like a sore thumb.

(As an added bonus, I also have a college degree and am the youngest employee in my plant, so I stick out even more.)

And because of all of that, I know I'm treated differently. Some real-life examples from the past few weeks alone:

Coworkers outright refusing to let me hold open a door for them (chivalry ain't dead, but it sure can be annoying sometimes)
I was with two male coworkers one day, and we had to carry ~20lbs of samples across the plant. I was the one carrying most of the samples (I volunteered), and we were stopped THREE TIMES in a 1/4 of a mile by people commenting "why are you making the poor girl carry all those samples!?" (actual quote).
Someone repeatedly handing me papers with my (male) manager's name written on them, knowing FULL WELL that I was the one responsible for handling the information that was on them, not my manager.
Men apologizing after swearing or making off-color jokes in front of me (It's an industrial workplace. It happens.), or making comments like "I'd say something else, but there's a lady in the room", even though I established on day 1 that I don't mind the language. I know it's habit for many of the men to do it, but it's still a bias and still draws attention to how I'm different than them.
That's the tip of the iceberg, but you get the idea. Some of this is intentional, some is not, some is just habit on my coworkers' parts - many are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, have worked in this industry for 20, 30, 40 years, were raised to be chivalrous and overly respectful of women (compared to today), and/or are not used to women in positions of authority in their workplace. It's a generational thing. It takes time and thick skin to change minds when you're often a one-(wo)man band, and not everyone has patience and thick skin. I imagine these behaviors would be less prevalent if there were more women in my workplace, but this behavior is probably why a lot of women leave this industry. Chicken and egg.

I love my job. I love my coworkers. We joke about the gender disparity a lot. I'm not looking for sympathy or special treatment - I want to be viewed as an equal, not a unicorn. It gets better every day. But I have to actively work to be thought of as just "Kara" instead of "that girl". I hope that someday, this industry will be at the point where women don't have to do this, which IMO is why discussions and education on bias and inclusion are important (in moderation). It's a culture change thing. These discussions are important for everyone, no matter who you are and what field you're going into. This topic applies just as much to men in early childhood education (the most female-dominated field in the graphic Karthik posted) as it does to women in engineering.


On a different note, I think that someone earlier in this thread asked "why do people keep saying 'females' instead of 'women' or 'girls'?" and didn't get much of a response, so I'll offer one: personally, I don't feel comfortable referring to myself as either a woman or a girl. To me, a woman is still someone much older than me, old enough to be my mom, and a girl is someone still in high school or younger. As a young professional, I don't feel like I fit into either category, so I always refer to myself as just "a female". "Females" and "Males" also unquestionably encompass all ages, which is commonly the intent of using those words in these kinds of discussions.

[smitikshah]

I've been avoiding posting in this thread because I didn't want to be the one to revive it after a week of inactivity, but for the sake of offering another female's perspective, here we go.

On the original topic (the panel discussions): I think that the post announcing the panel discussions could have been phrased differently, and I think it was taken the wrong way. I don't think the team/poster intended to insinuate that unintentional bias is something that only males are guilty of, but that is clearly how it was interpreted by several people. Unintentional bias is something that affects all groups, regardless of gender, age, skin color, sexuality, etc, but given that this is specifically an all-girls event, I assume that the main focus of this panel would be unintentional bias as it relates to gender, but it could also touch on other aspects of diversity. I could be wrong. But with that assumption, I think that the post would have been better as:
"Career, Opportunity, Education, and Challenges for Females in STEM"
"Unintentional Bias and Actions and the Impact on Diversity (focused on gender)"


On my experiences in HS/all-girl events: In high school, I had a very good experience on my FRC team. Not a lot of comments, actions, or other discrimination towards me based on my gender, and on the rare occasion that those things happened, the perpetrators were swiftly told in no uncertain terms that their comments were not appropriate. I was never told "you can't be in the shop/you can't be on the driveteam/you can't be on the pit crew/etc because you're a girl". I actually always wanted to be on the driveteam, but I proved very quickly that I was not very qualified in that department by driving our robot into a Christmas tree during practice time. There weren't any all-girls events in Michigan when I was in HS, but if there had been, I'm not sure my team would have attended them just because we probably wouldn't have been able to drum up enough commitment from the girls on our team - we were a small team (~25-35 active), and we'd need commitment from nearly all of the girls, and that would have been difficult for us to get with several of us doing fall sports.

I think that all-girls events are great, for the reasons others have highlighted in this thread - giving girls a chance to build confidence in an environment that turns many away because of both preconceived and perpetuated discrimination.

Here's a related post (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1046217) I made on here during my senior year of high school - funny how these topics repeat themselves.


On being a female engineer in the real world:
I graduated with a degree in Materials Science & Engineering, and now work as a metallurgist in a steel plant. While many other "typically male" fields have made great strides in diversity and inclusivity of women, steel is still very stuck in the past and is still very much a "boys club", which is off-putting and intimidating to a lot of women. It's a dirty, dangerous, rough and tumble environment that takes a lot of strength and dedication to stay in, for all genders.

I love the graphic that Karthik posted (https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1596696&postcount=7)early in this thread, but as there's no breakout specifically for "steelworker", let me provide some insight. My plant, when operating at a good capacity, employs ~300 people. ~50 are salaried (managers, HR/office staff, and engineers), and the remainder are hourly (machine operators, millwrights, electricians, etc - this number can vary from 100-250). We have one female manager (in HR), and another non-manager woman who works in HR. There are no women in our maintenance department (in either salaried or hourly positions). I am the only female engineer in my plant. There are four female hourly workers, as far as I know. We're a very small plant, but it's not much better at larger facilities either, especially when you only look at employees who work "on the floor" (as opposed to solely in offices - accounting, HR, sales, supply chain, etc).

Basically, as a female, I stick out like a sore thumb.

(As an added bonus, I also have a college degree and am the youngest employee in my plant, so I stick out even more.)

And because of all of that, I know I'm treated differently. Some real-life examples from the past few weeks alone:

Coworkers outright refusing to let me hold open a door for them (chivalry ain't dead, but it sure can be annoying sometimes)
I was with two male coworkers one day, and we had to carry ~20lbs of samples across the plant. I was the one carrying most of the samples (I volunteered), and we were stopped THREE TIMES in a 1/4 of a mile by people commenting "why are you making the poor girl carry all those samples!?" (actual quote).
Someone repeatedly handing me papers with my (male) manager's name written on them, knowing FULL WELL that I was the one responsible for handling the information that was on them, not my manager.
Men apologizing after swearing or making off-color jokes in front of me (It's an industrial workplace. It happens.), or making comments like "I'd say something else, but there's a lady in the room", even though I established on day 1 that I don't mind the language. I know it's habit for many of the men to do it, but it's still a bias and still draws attention to how I'm different than them.
That's the tip of the iceberg, but you get the idea. Some of this is intentional, some is not, some is just habit on my coworkers' parts - many are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, have worked in this industry for 20, 30, 40 years, were raised to be chivalrous and overly respectful of women (compared to today), and/or are not used to women in positions of authority in their workplace. It's a generational thing. It takes time and thick skin to change minds when you're often a one-(wo)man band, and not everyone has patience and thick skin. I imagine these behaviors would be less prevalent if there were more women in my workplace, but this behavior is probably why a lot of women leave this industry. Chicken and egg.

I love my job. I love my coworkers. We joke about the gender disparity a lot. I'm not looking for sympathy or special treatment - I want to be viewed as an equal, not a unicorn. It gets better every day. But I have to actively work to be thought of as just "Kara" instead of "that girl". I hope that someday, this industry will be at the point where women don't have to do this, which IMO is why discussions and education on bias and inclusion are important (in moderation). It's a culture change thing. These discussions are important for everyone, no matter who you are and what field you're going into. This topic applies just as much to men in early childhood education (the most female-dominated field in the graphic Karthik posted) as it does to women in engineering.


On a different note, I think that someone earlier in this thread asked "why do people keep saying 'females' instead of 'women' or 'girls'?" and didn't get much of a response, so I'll offer one: personally, I don't feel comfortable referring to myself as either a woman or a girl. To me, a woman is still someone much older than me, old enough to be my mom, and a girl is someone still in high school or younger. As a young professional, I don't feel like I fit into either category, so I always refer to myself as just "a female". "Females" and "Males" also unquestionably encompass all ages, which is commonly the intent of using those words in these kinds of discussions.

I agree with everything you said, how you said it, and the sentiment behind it. Thank you so much for this, I can't express how much I relate to this.

I notice people treat me differently because of my gender (been explained stuff more in depth and had teachers have to carry my hand through learning experiences, but thrown guys right in to fend for themselves, been treated nicer to in the same setting as guys, etc.) and the best advice I've been given is "just deal with it - they are just guys afterall, it's stupid, but you have to put up with it."

Bringing it back full circle to the OP, I think that all-girls events can give the oppertunity to talk to other girls, share experiences, and everything, in an environment where we aren't treated differently, for one day.

Again Kara, thanks for putting this out there. :D