What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Last year, my team of 45 that is only 25% female had 80% of leadership positions (mechanical lead, team captain, business lead, etc) covered by young women. This next year we are looking at nearly 100%, which I find interesting. I'm curious as to what other teams' leadership looks like.

I might add that selection for leadership positions on our team is both election and merit based, so we don't have any girls in leadership positions simply because they are girls, but because of their expertise and abilities. Thanks!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

We have a pretty low demographic of girls. I was one of three girls on the team this season (around 25/30 members) and all three of us were leads (co-captain, photography lead, and mechanical (specifically drive train lead).

Next year (discounting incoming freshman), I will probably be the only girl on the team. Since freshmen aren't allowed to be leads their first year in FRC (team rules), looks like I will continue my co-captain duties, and only female leader.

Our club (more specifically our mentor) is super welcoming to any girls interested in joining the club - and trying to get some of his female students to join things like FRC and The Society of Women Engineers. Lack of females on our team is probably because of the current lack of female interest in the club. Even I initially was super intimidated before completely joining and as one of the only females on the team and I am working on changing that.

I took upon myself the responsibility of outreach, and am now working on developing Female in STEM programs where we go around and do activities normally associated with "female" interests (like making jewelry), and revolve it around STEM! This could involve learning how to cut, strip, and crimp wire, and then make wire bracelets (using anderson powerpoles to connect them). This is still in the making but hopefully by doing things like this in the community we can inspire girls to pursue STEM in high school, resulting in a higher yield of female leaders.

The future looks exciting!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Our team has not many girls (less than ten on a 55 person team), but this year they held treasurer, PR, outreach, and admin. Our president and build team manager (Vice President) were both guys.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

In 2015 our leadership was 100% female. Mostly because we only had one leader and she was the one who really got the club going. This year it was all male since the majority of our team is male. Next year is all up in the air but it looks like it will be our first coed leadership team.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Dawgma's statistics, for those who are interested
Total Team Members*: 30
Female Team Members*: 14
Total Officers: 6
Female Officers: 4

Officer Breakdown:
Co-captain - 1 male, 1 female
Mechanical Lead - male
Programming Lead - female
Awards & Scouting - female
Public Relations - female

Drive Team:
Driver: Male
Operator: Female
Backup Driver: Male
Backup Operator: Female
Human Player: Male
Backup Human Player (yes, we did actually use this once): Male

*(who come to meetings for a reasonable amount of time)

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

It might also be interesting to learn similar information about a team's mentors.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

For the past two years, I've been the captain and drive coach of my primarily male FRC team. I'm a graduating senior, and our coming leadership is male (with the exception of our programming captain).
My all female FTC team has girls in all of our leadership positions, and we are heavily student run.

I suspect that high rates of female leadership in mostly-male teams, especially when those positions are decided on skill and merit has to do with the level of commitment, dedication, and passion it takes to stick out a male heavy environment in order to participate in something you love doing.

I'm also curious about female representation within drive teams. During the Einstein finals, of the 8 teams that made it (4 drivers apiece), only one (1405's human player, IIRC), was female. 1/32. This stunned me. Thoughts?

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I agree with your hypothesis on why we find more female leaders on male dominated teams.

I am also this years drive coach (student drive coaches have been female as far as I know - again of pure merit) and even just attending and being on drive team for one regional the lack of females on drive team was obvious. I don't think it has anything to do with teams intentionally putting males on drive team but more so a thing of intimidation by the current abundance of males on drive team. Like I said even before I became a leader on the team I was hesitant because I thought it was super intimidating. Had I seen more girls doing the same things it may have felt a bit more inviting to me.

This might apply to drive team as well - and I think its completely subconscious.

I now have come to love being on drive team and meeting and competiting with all the new people regardless of gender.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Team 2502's Breakdown:

Total Team Members: 42
Total Female Team Members: 10
Notes: As with any team, there are varying levels of commitment on an FRC team. We have seen fewer girls take on that less committed level than we do guys. I suspect that is because, in the male dominated environment, girls are more likely to just quit than to stick around on the outskirts. However, it does mean that the vast majority, if not all, of our female members are highly committed to the team.

Total Number of Leadership Positions: 11
Total Number of Females in Leadership Positions: 4
Leadership Position Breakdown:
Business Captains: both female
Engineering Captains: both male
Awards Lead: female
Outreach Lead: female
Marketing Lead: male
CAD Lead: male
Programming Lead: male
Design and Fabrication Lead: male
Strategy/Scouting Lead: male
Notes: I was honestly disappointed by the breakdown of our business leadership vs. our engineering leadership this year. There was a huge gender disparity with no engineering captain or lead positions being taken on by females. We did, however, increase our gender ratio in general team members this year, and I think that will reflect in our 2016/2017 leadership. Tomorrow we will find out for sure, but I am hoping that we will have one female and one male engineering captain. There are also several girls who were rookies this year who have told me they will be applying for engineering lead positions that will likely get them.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I will add to Smiti's post with our leadership from past years.

In 2015 we had 4 leadership positions 3 of them were filled by females.

In 2014 we had 4 leadership positions and none of them were filled by females.

There is also some science pointing towards Woman being better leaders.

This article talks about it a bit.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

On Texas Torque, a team of approximately 40-50 active members, we have a nearly 50/50 gender ratio, something that we have worked hard towards and continue to recruit both guys and girls to the team constantly.

At least for the time that I've been on the team, the leadership genders are split fairly evenly. We've had both male and female team captains, along with build being fairly split as well as the business side of the team having both male and female leadership. This, I believe, stems from the team being based out of a science and technology high school, so both genders are evenly and fairly represented within the school and both have a passion for STEM.

This year, the president and vice-president are both female, and while the vice-president also precedes over build, the rest of build leadership is male. We are also looking at a fairly heavily female dominated business side of the team, but that stems from the strengths that people show versus them being pushed towards those roles.

While I would say that our team is extremely well rounded in both genders being fairly represented on leadership (based purely off of skill, talent, and dedication rather than "filling a quota") one interesting split that we have is in drive team. This past year, I was the first girl on drive team since 2013, and I'm curious as to the genders of the drivers before even then.

Overall I believe that 1477 is very well rounded and every student on the team is just as passionate about the program as the next. I hope to continue to push and lead my fellow students to the positions of leadership that fit them the best, so that they succeed in whichever field they work best in, and that their gender has no bearing on that.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

4215 has 22 students, 6 are female.

Out of the 4 leadership positions, 3 of them are filled by females
3 of our 4 drive team members are also female

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Honestly,
In a way this thread is backtracking on everything women have STEM have worked for.

We want to be recognized as just engineers.
Not these special creatures that need to be shown in a public eye.

Defining your leadership based on gender IS NOT moving the fight for equality forward

It makes the gap larger.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

It varies year to year. Last year, we saw 63% of the leadership female, out of a 37% female team. I don't know the percentages for the whole team, but it looks like we have 38% female leadership for this coming season. This drop is in part due to a graduating leadership class of all women.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

2959 Had the following leaders:
President - F
Vice-President - F
Drive Captain - F
Programming Lead - F
Scouting - M
Data Collection - F
Spirit - F
Build - M
Finance - F
Electrical - M

The team was about 60% or so female. Though all but a couple were seniors this year so it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I think by recognizing that there is a disparity between genders in leadership positions will help us move forward and address those issues by their root causes.

As a woman in STEM, and one that loves engineering, I don't find the lack of women in STEM due to how people are treating us per say. I don't think that kind of oppression exists, especially in the FRC community.

I just think it's the lack of women currently in the community, due to girls traditionally not thinking of it as their place. Now by showing the world how females can be such great STEM leaders, it helps to show girls what they can do. I don't think it really has to do with putting us in such a public eye, but more with inspiring younger generations.

I think by recognizing females in the community as the leaders they are will help boost long term female enrollment, closing that gap.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I agree, the issue here is root causes and future efforts, and what we need are hypotheses and more complete data.

For instance, 1640 is another team in which women are traditionally equally or over-represented in merit-based STEM leadership positions. I'm drawn to the hypothesis that this has to do with the baseline difficulty of joining and staying in a male-heavy environment and discipline. I thus wonder how common the over-representation phenomenon is, and I'd be interested in studies that scientifically test hypotheses like it.

If this hypothesis has merit, there are major actionable recruitment implications. On its face the ability to encourage representative STEM leadership in young women would seem indicative of a team's success in that area--but in fact it could point to extreme gender differences in attrition and recruitment. We could be losing countless girls on the margins that might have joined if they were male. There many stones like this that we cannot afford to leave unturned, and we cannot properly assess our ability to foster STEM involvement and leadership across both genders without accounting for variables like these.

There are 78,000 students in FRC this year and 3.4 billion women on Earth. Please don't make such sweeping generalizations. I personally had an older mentor discourage me from STEM as an FRC student, not to mention a few male students. I've handled many cases like this from other FRC girls. And treatment outside FRC? Whoa. I hate to say this, but give it time as you grow up. (You're a full decade younger than me.)

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Our team membership consists of ~25% girls this year, which is way down from last year. Most of last year's outgoing seniors were female, which brought down the percentage quite a bit for this year. Also, we did major recruitment last year, and our team is larger than it's ever been, but most of the new recruits were male (some females, but many stopped coming due to involvement in other activities).

That said, our leadership is predominantly female.

Leadership positions:
Team Captain: female
Mechanical Lead: female
Programming Lead: female, male
Media Lead: male
Strategy Lead: female
Social Media Lead: female
Safety Lead: female
Communications Lead: female

7/8 of our leadership positions were female. Our leads are chosen by nominations, elections, and confirmation by our lead mentor, so girls don't have positions just because they're girls.

I would attribute this partly to the higher maturity levels of girls in high school, at least on our team. Many of the boys who sought positions, and weren't elected remain bitter and upset about it...nearly a year later. Overall, I would say on our team, girls bring a higher level of maturity and dedication to the team, and therefore win lead positions.

Additional Info:

Drive team:
Driver: male
Manipulator: female
Human Player: male
Drive Coach: male

Last year's leadership:
Leadership positions:
Team Captain: female, male
Mechanical Lead: female
Programming Lead: male
Media Lead: female
Safety Lead: female
Communications Lead: male

A little more balanced, 4/7 were female. The drive team makeup last year was demographically identical to this year (including respective positions).

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

4607 is 40% female and leadership is 50/50.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Reading through these posts gives me some ideas. Would anyone be willing to take a survey on their team demographics? I'm interested in seeing some relationships, and looking at some of the theories proposed here.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

If there's anywhere you're gonna get the data, I think it would be here. Unfortunately, it's probably going to end up a bit skewed due to what types of teams are on Chief Delphi. I would also be really interested in such demographics and I'd be happy to pass it along to other Minnesota teams that may not see it here.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Right now with 22 students, 4 female, we have a 50/50 split on leadership roles.

In 2010, with 14 females and 14 males, we had 75% male leadership.

In 2013, with 19 students, 4 female, we had a 100% female leadership team.

At least for 1551, there doesn't appear to be any kind of correlation. But then, this is the least cliquish and most peer-group mobile place I've ever even heard of.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I'd like to propose one other hypothesis as to why so many females end up in leadership positions on teams:

Females tend to see the bigger picture rather than focus on the details.

One of my previous teams which was co-ed tended to have females in leadership roles every year.

My other previous team was all-female, so it doesn't count.

My current team is looking at having 2 of three positions be female (actually named by current students and outgoing seniors) based on the leadership qualities the team came up with at the last meeting.

Interestingly, subsystems have been a mixed bag of being led by females and males. Some years we had some really strong, knowledgeable females, others it was heavily male dominated. But it truly was based on knowledge and wanting to lead it.

Finally, to address the mentors:
First team: 1 female (myself), 4 males, 1 male teacher (typical year)
All-girls team: 1 female (myself), 3 males, 1 female teacher (non-technical)
Current team: 1 female (myself), 1 male, and 1 female teacher (currently teaching robotics and programming at the HS, but learning FRC)

One thing that NONE of my teams has ever done has said, "You can or can't do that based on your gender." It has always been, "You can do this, let me show you how," or "You can't do that because it isn't safe," or "You should do this because it's a better way."

I was lucky to grow up with a mother that encouraged my to follow my own preferences. She wanted a girl that she could dress up, instead she got a tomboy. There's a great picture of me at age 2 or 3 in a dress standing on a piece of wood climbing a brick wall in the yard. She always bought me Tonka trucks. She never said, "You can't be (blank) because you're a girl." Instead, she knew I wanted to learn to use my dad's table saw and scroll saw, so she asked another teacher at her school to come over and show me how to use them safely. Because of the environment that I grew up in, I have a hard time understanding females that say they are discouraged or told they can't do something.

And, for the record, she still tries to get me to dress up and wear make-up and jewelry. I'm better about dressing up for holidays, but make-up and jewelry are still arguments. *LOL*

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Our team is approximately 35% female, and I'd say leadership and drive team are roughly the same. If you sum up our 3 top leadership positions, our CTO, CEO, and CCOO, and the drive team, 2/6 are female: the CCOO and the primary driver.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

http://goo.gl/forms/xfaZb4RzCHCK9Ecv1

If anyone is interested, this is the link for a form about team demographics. If you could share this form with other teams who may not be on Chief Delphi, that would be great!!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Team 2052 this year is 35% female counting all students. 80% of our captains this year were female. For next year 40% of our captains are female.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Suggestions: 1) Change the wording to allow teasm to fill it out multiple times in order to provide data for different years. 2) Separate STEM and non-STEM leadership positions. Not because one is worse than the other, but because this is often a topic of discussion and would provide useful data.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

The number of girls on my team has definitely increased with the growth of the team over the past four years. We have had a female presidents in charge of the team for the last three years. Even though our team is only around 20%-25% female, we have always had a more equal number of girls in leadership. This year, we have girls in the roles of President, Director of Business, and Directory of Outreach, and Secretary. We also have girls co-leading in all but one of our five tracks.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Can do!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

http://goo.gl/forms/xfaZb4RzCHCK9Ecv1

Here is an updated link!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Quite similar to many of the posts I've seen above - last year, all of our veteran female team members were in leadership positions, including team captain, drive coach, and head of programming. Our team is recently about 25% female, but that fraction moves towards 50% at the leadership levels.

Despite a few attempts at targeted recruitment, all of our female mentors to date have been non-technical.

Edit (hopefully obviously):
We do recruit mentors with skills we need, regardless of gender. We get all three of your points above with male recruits as well; we have a mechanical PhD and a pneumatics tech/former electrician (both male) who are doing mostly non-technical functions the last year.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Hopefully not derailing the thread here:

Some reasons I see things like this happening to females who are completely capable of mentoring in technical roles:
1) Someone believes that they are not as qualified to do/mentor X as someone else - this could be the lady in question or someone else on the team
2) They don't have the energy/don't care enough to "prove" that they can mentor X
3) The team needs mentors in the non-technical roles that the person either is pushed into or settles into (see 1 and 2)

and possibly relevant to your specific problem: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=14

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

For the 2016 season, the CyberCards had four male mentors (three technical, one nontechnical) and five female mentors (three technical, two nontechnical).

We have not met another team with >50% female mentors - even the "all girls teams". I would love for somebody to prove me wrong!

We would love to find out similar data for other FRC teams. I'm not sure if HQ tracks mentor demographics or not; does anybody know who to contact for data?

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

We don't have student leadership on our team, really, so I don't have anything to contribute to that conversation.

With respect to our mentors, however, there are 7 women and 11 men. Two of the women are technical mentors. All 11 of the men are technical mentors. Our lead advisor is a woman.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Maybe we should get a way to get more fair of a sampling throughout the community. Most people that see that link are those that go through this thread. I bet a lot of people are women and/or leaders on their respective teams, and so to get a less biased data we figure out how to distribute this link even outside of CD.

I really want to get an accurate representation to have an idea and think the survey is a wonderful idea! In fact, I was looking for these statistics somewhere just to get an idea about the topic myself.

For the distribution I'll send it to some teams I know in my area (that aren't that active on CD), and I hope others can do the same!

Can't wait for the data!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

I suggest betaing the questions first. Maybe give it a few days of submissions to ensure questions are worded well and cover everything worth asking. For instance, the thread has now brought up a similar question for mentors. Should the survey ask for this data as well?

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

You don't have student leadership? That seems like a really big lost opportunity to teach new leaders.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Student leaders naturally emerge. We recognize that and will often give those students additional responsibilities and privileges, but the process for doing that isn't formalized.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Why not? A student leadership title is very helpful come college applications.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

What's more important than students developing leadership skills for their college applications is simply the fact that they are developing leadership skills.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

A student leader should not be chosen because it looks good on college apps, that's not what leadership is about.

Leadership is when anyone steps up to the plate and takes initiative for the improvement of their own team not for a line on their college apps.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Well of course. I was more addressing the fact that they were leading without it being formalized.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

469 went a similar route. Instead of having formal leaders, those that lead naturally emerged and were respected all the same by their peers. Teamwork was one of the most important principles taught to the students; the team operated on the basis that everyone, mentor or student, was an equal member.

In terms of college applications, most of these student leaders (for the four years I was on the team) went to Michgan, MIT, or Rose to pursue an engineering degree, so I'd say the lack of formalized titles wasn't a detriment.

IMO, this process also avoided a lot of internal drama that afflicts other teams when leaders are chosen/elected for specific positions. It also reduces the amount of scramble when an elected/appointed leader doesn't furfull their duties; without formal leaders the responsibility natrually progresses to someone else.

To contribute to the original intent of the thread, 469 was roughly even on the gender split of student leaders when I was on the team. 5188 has always had a female team captain and non-engineering lead, and male mechanical and programming leads.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Our team is over a third female. We have two co-presidents; a girl and a guy. Mechanical had mainly male leads this year, but next year, due to more freshmen girls joining, there should be more female leads. Our electrical lead for next year will probably be a girl. Our software lead this year was a guy. The marketing lead is a girl. Our Integration and Safety lead is a trans guy. Our girls tend to show up more and become core members (probably since we had a really tight group our rookie year and the girls are just really inviting and friendly). Really, whoever befriends marketing tends to stay for the long haul? Marketing is so nice, gosh!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Thanks everyone who has responded so far! It's interesting to see the hypotheses about why in some teams, the girls seem to do quite well comparatively. The theory that the girls who can stick it out in a male dominated environment are also the girls who have the motivation to go for leadership and have leadership skills makes sense to me.

It's also interesting how people have observed that there's less girls on teams that are wishy-washy about their dedication to robotics. It's that way on our team also. We have so many boys that come about half the time and don't use their time very well, while most of the girls on our team are heavily involved.

By the way, I would really love to see the results of that survey!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Formalizing leadership also helps resolve disputes. If a student is qualified and well-suited to lead, and is offered such a positions and accepts, they deserve respect as a leader. FRC is full of teenagers, who might not be the most complacent to a student leader in the same way they would be an adult (not every teen is this way, and some teams don't really have this problem, but it does happen). Offering a formal position can come with an outline of "here are your responsibilities, and here are your privileges". For example, maybe a CAD leader can delegate CAD duties to people on a CAD team. While all team members have input, the delegation and final approval of parts might be the responsibility of the CAD lead. If the CAD lead is given an actual title and formal position, as well as some authority to make the decisions in their jurisdiction, things often flow quite smoother, and the design process can be streamlined.


This year, the person leading our CAD was not really given any way to enforce their responsibilities. Thus, people who disagreed with the CAD lead didn't bring their ideas or designs to her to discuss before finishing them and adding them to the final assembly. Soon enough, a few weeks had passed, and there was no time to go back. Despite the frequent queries from the CAD lead to inspect and discuss design ideas FIRST, the design ended up being cobbled together. Consequently, the mechanical parts constructed from those designs didn't work very well together.

TL;DR: Actual leadership titles and responsibilities that are actively backed up by mentor support can really matter when disagreements arise

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

There's already been a significant amount of great conversation and well written points made in this thread, but I thought it would still be worth putting my and my team's two cents in.

One major change that our team faced this year was how most of our veteran members either graduated or left the team, leaving us with an abundance of rookie members that knew little to nothing about FRC, FIRST or even STEM for that matter.

Because of this, along with other factors influenced by the amount of team drama built up over the past few years, 4343 opted against creating leadership roles for each department of the team (finance, electrical, etc.) and instead only having two student-lead positions: Director and Assistant Director. The Assistant Director role is filled by two students rather than one, lightening the load on the Director and the Assistant Director.

These positions are filled through a written application including a resume, cover letter, and three references, with an unbiased third-party interview with applicants conducted later. Our director for the First Stronghold season is Male, and both of the co-assistant directors are Female. On 4343 we don't consider gender when the selecting the candidate, and we have had Females holding the top position in the past.

It's also worth noting that it's more common of the female members on our team to demonstrate and utilize leadership qualities, regardless of their experience or knowledge. When they want to get things done, they get things done!

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

THIS! It shouldn't matter if your leadership is male or female as long as they are the most qualified and best suited individuals to lead the team. As soon as you start pushing people into roles, especially if you try to push girls into technical/ leadership roles they are not going to self commit to, you are just hurting your team and making the gender equality gap larger. If you truly want to help women in STEM, don't give them special treatment or recognition just because they are females doing the same things males are doing.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

That isn't what this thread is about at all. Complaining about identifying girls/women in FRC leadership is like complaining about studies that examine gender variations in business and academia. We can't know what isn't measured or investigated, and just because something shouldn't matter doesn't mean that it doesn't. We can't assess this one way or another without developing hypotheses and ways to collect good data.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

We do not define our leadership on gender; we strive to base it on dedication and leadership ability. However, as the primary mission of FIRST is to inspire, we should look at who we are inspiring, and who we are not inspiring. These sort of statistics help identify those who we may be able to reach but currently are not -- and inspiring those who begin on (or outside) the margins of STEM makes a greater difference, certainly in improving the STEM workforce and probably in promoting equality.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

My entire point is that to promote equality you can't also promote being a female in STEM is special.
We want to change a culture and make women feel more comfortable in STEM from a young age, but to make us feel truly equal we need to stop bringing our gender into everything we do.
I just want to be a leader, an engineer, an inspiration to ALL.

This clip shows my feelings on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Mod note --

Can we please avoid rehashing a debate that's happened here many times previously and focus the discussion on the original questions?

If you feel strongly about discussing effective methods for promoting STEM careers to girls and young women, please search and revisit an existing discussion (e.g., http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=147043)

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

welp

I'm not the police but if the impression Pauline got from the thread was that this thread did a disservice to the community because of some implications, it should probably be discussed?

I guess she could go to the thread that you linked; it just so happens that it was one that was filled with some impressive posts like this one on why we should be ok with gender-based harassment at events

and this shiner of why thinking this behavior is terrible and shouldn't exist is "unrealistic"

but I mean, whatever. I guess that was an acceptable level of discourse for Chief Delphi, but not this tangent. Gazing into the crystal ball of the Chief Delphi Moderating Corps would probably render me blind and mute.

---

I believe Pauline's concerned with this solicitation of information potentially being weaponized into an objectifying statistic. It's not a position I agree with, but I see where it's coming from. On 422 our senior leadership historically identifies around 1/3 female, 2/3 male. As more people have joined the team, I expect throughout leadership next year we'd be at 50/50. It's not consciously based on how the members of the team identify their sex or gender, but the underclassmen girls are pretty much the only reason we executed a successful program this year.

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Total team members: 50-something
Total number of girls: 12
Co-captains: 1 male, 1 female
Asst. captain: male
Scouting leaders: 2 male
Mechanical leaders: 1 male, 1 female
Programming leader: male
Electrical leader: male
Business/Outreach leader: female

Total number of active mentors: 15
Female mentors: 4
2338 alums: 3
No engineering background: 3

EDIT: oops, I messed up and posted in the wrong thread. All these threads about the same thing is getting confusing. Here's that post:

I'm an awkward high school student (well, high school graduate now I guess) and awkward people do awkward things. But, just because I'm awkward doesn't give me the excuse to flirt with people unnecessarily. Although I've had ample opportunity to flirt, I wouldn't consider it. Why? FIRST competitions are a mostly-professional setting (For the sake of keeping this on-topic I'll skip why I said "mostly"), and keeping it professional means keeping it in your pants. Now, that doesn't mean avoiding girls like the plague, trying to make sure you don't come off as "flirty," as that would just perpetuate the issue of alienating girls in FIRST, and in STEM as a whole. Even if you don't intend on flirting with someone, basic perception of body language can tell you if someone thinks you're flirting with them. Know when to chill out, and don't overstep boundaries. If something does go too far, then yes, the offending party should be disciplined.

Some food for thought: We have FTC teams that all prospective FRC students who didn't participate in FLL spend one season with before they become a part of the FRC team the next year. (basically, if you were in FLL, you can join FRC in your first year of high school robotics. If not, you do FTC your first year and FRC for the remaining years) I noticed something kind of interesting, though- the proportion of girls on the FTC teams was much higher than the FRC team. This would seem to indicate that the issue of getting girls involved with FIRST is due to the environment on a FIRST team, not recruiting methods. It could also indicate that somewhere in the difference between FTC and FRC lies the reason FRC teams struggle to retain girls. So, what could a team do to make their shop, and general team dynamic, more welcoming to women?

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

3324 used to be majority female, but since our women in engineering workshops, that has begun to change. In the 2015-2016 school year, our team of ~65 students had about 2/3 females. Over 75% of our leadership team was female.

Here is the breakout for main leads(non-assistant leads):
Project Manager - F
Treasurer - F
Secretary - F
Robot Lead - F
Mechanical Lead - F
Design Lead - F
Co-Electrical Lead - M
Co-Electrical Lead - F
Programming Lead - M
Strategy and Scouting Lead - F
Fundraising Lead - F
Media Lead - M

Our Drive Team for 2016:
Primary Driver - M (me :D )
Secondary Driver - F
Human Player - F
Driver Coach - M

Re: What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?
 

Our team only had 3-4 girls maximum each year (given we only have 7-12 students combined each year) throughout the 5 years of our existence. Most of the time they are simply not actively involved enough to be in leaderships roles (simply the fact). The one role that is sometimes filled by a female is media head (person who takes care of all the media stuff to report back to school/social accounts), but this year even that role was filled by a male.