What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

Was it removed by the OP, snowflake?

Or was it nixed by the moderators?

I thought we were having some good discussion there, and I learned a lot about different viewpoints and issues present in the FIRST community that I had previously not been aware of.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

The OP deleted it. I would consider it a closed issue.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

Fair enough. I wish it hadn't been deleted though. But if that's the way she wants it.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

Maybe someone should consider creating a similar thread but more for discussion of issues instead of a personal narrative.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

How about this thread?

I don't know what sort of discussion was involved the the original thread but I'll add something.

I was a judge at a couple of FLL and FTC events last fall. At one event (probably an FLL event but I don't remember for sure) I asked the team how they were organized.

The answer was: "The boys designed the robot and the girls designed the T-shirts." I was so surprised by the answer I didn't know how to react.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

There are cached copies floating around on Google if you wish to read the original thread.

Seems that we, as an entire community, have a lot of work to do.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

I've heard this more than once judging FLL. "The boys all work on the robot, and the girls work on the project." It is quite disapointing.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

I didn't see the thread posted last night until it had been deleted. Some of the responses were disappointing, to say the least.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

In general I find on most teams the boy/girl ratio is poor at best. I think FIRST still has a long way to change the the culture that leads to both less girls joining the team, and more girls leaving. It's difficult to determine how many girls are put off by sexist attitudes both on teams and in society, but I'm willing to say that there are many.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

The boy/girl issue will persist as long as society in general doesn't treat men and women as equals (not just on paper, but in reality).

I try to encourage girls on our team to do building, but they (on average) are more reluctant to. I am happy though that we have several girls who are happy to do work cutting, drilling, building, designing, etc. ...unfortunately there are pretty much only girls on the "spirit team".

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

We can all work harder at reaching out to girls specifically. I find (at my school) that many girls don't want to join simply because they think it's too "geeky". I find that they think FIRST is a bunch of boys sitting in a cave and never talking to each other.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

This has been an issue for us in the past, but as you get more and more girls on the team, it goes away. It's much easier for girls to recruit other girls.

I think it all sort of boils down to the culture you create in your team, and how you introduce new members (in this case, specifically female members) to that culture.

New female members may be hesitant to jump into power tools and robot building, and so may gravitate towards marketing, or spirit, or business/administration departments within the team. I always like to have new members hit the ground running so to speak, have them try to jump into robot design, or our off-season project, or start learning about power tools, just to see how they like it. If it doesn't take, and they want to do marketing and spirit, cool, but at least they tried it.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

I didn't see the original thread, but I think everything is a matter of conditioning. I'm a transgender individual and I find if I ever launch into an intelligent opinion of some sort, people tend to gender me male more (no matter what the gender of the speaker). There are many many root issues to fix.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

Surprisingly, even though our team is based at a private all boys school, we have roughly 40% girls. For the most part they are involved in building and they take particular pride in their all girls sub team that this year worked on our floor pickup (which unfortunately did not make it on our robot this year due to weight but they had a very similar design to many of the top teams).

We only have 2 girls that are never actively involved in building but we have about equal number of boys that are not as well.

Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
 

Speaking as a girl, I've never at all been interested in doing PR or spirit. That's not why I joined a robotics team. We're never pushed directly away from design or building, but we've often encountered sexist attitudes from other students - not the experienced members, who know to back off, but newbies who seem to think they know everything.

Sometimes our lead mentor makes jokes about us not being able to drive. He never questions our mechanical abilities, and we know he actually doesn't believe in whatever it is he's saying - he's an equal opportunity offender - but his jokes lead others to think that those kind of comments are acceptable.

Many of the girls on the team have grown so sensitive to this issue that any time someone says something that can be looked at as sexist, we jump down his throat. There's a whole culture change that needs to occur to fix this.