Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have a lot of girls on our team, though we have had many more in years past. However, I think a big part of that has to do with the fact that I am the team coordinator/leader and I'm female. The girls see that if I can run this team, they surely can contribute to the team and they have done very well.

I have a student team coordinator that is a girl (Stefanie Keffaber, 11th grade) and she has been a team leader for two years. She holds the highest ranking position for a student on the team as she oversees ALL of our sub-teams. (Sub teams include manufacturing, CAD, animation, chairmen's, and web) She is one of our best on the manufacturing team and has much influence, input, and actual build time on our robot.

In addition to Stef, we have four girls on the web team (on a team of five), five girls on the chairmen's team (out of five), and just Stef this year on manufacturing.

Like many others have said, it doesn't matter if they aren't directly working on the robot...the girls involved are making career choices that have been inspired by involvement with FIRST, they are marketing our team to sponsors and helping me find funds, and doing a LOT of work that must be done in order for this team to survive.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team is pretty small, and we have only 4-5 girls on our team. THey do help contribute milling, drilling, soldering, etc., but I dont think we involve them quite as much as we should. Partially this is due to a lack of knowledge of the actual electronic components (etc. spike vs victor, difference in relay vs pwm output, etc), but next year we will focus on EDUCATION for the first part of the year.

But guess what? Our mentor that helped me learn C (well, machine based) was a woman (i guess a girl because she's reallly young)!!!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'm one of three girls on my team, and at most meetings, I was the only girl there. I helped with electrical work, wrote our team's Chairman's Award with one of the other girls on the team. I'm also co-captain and manipulator. I was the only girl at most meetings, but I didn't let that stop me from doing anything. It wasn't too hard for me to become part of the team because my brother has been on 121 for 4 years and I know most of the other team members from school. I haven't experienced any discrimination other than good-natured teasing. It's hard to relate to the guys sometimes (like at regionals when they're checking out girls), but we're all one big happy family most of the time.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

:D team 233 (aka the PINK team) has a pretty decent guy to girl ratio. i'm not sure of the exact figures, but its pretty close to 50:50. the girls do so much for our team, if i do say so myself. Those of you who saw the girls painted pink at the 2004 UCF regional (yeah i was one of them) but thats not all we girls do! sure we females are there for spirit (boys paint themselves pink too!), but a lot of us helped with building the robot, our practice playing field, scouting, etc. We've got 2 girls in Pit crew... one is our lovely Tool Girl, who does a very nice job i might add (shes a sophmore), and out pit cheif (who is a junior) is also a girl, and its even her first year on the team! a lot of girls tried out for human player and driver too. we girls help a lot with design and things like that, and i mean, seriously, our team color is PINK. you all just KNOW that had some female influence. ;) there were also three girls, including myself, who worked on our admission for chairmans award (yours truely was the project manager), and i also helped with making the little pink team trading cards we have.. good luck if any of you can find them. lol i'm also the team 'seamstress'... i made a flag and button banners.... anyways, i'm living proof of the "little sister factor".. i got interested in robotics because of my brother (hes the arm operator for our robot this year!). the girls have been welcomed and accepted to the group, and its just like a great big family! ^_^ (i've even become an adopted little sister by some of my teammates lol) but yeah anyways, girls on team 233 arent just there to just stand around and look cute, we have some major imput to our team and are every bit as valuable as the boys!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

There are about 25 students on our team, five of wich are girls. We are all doing PR this year, but i know i definatly will be helping more on buliding next year! I hope that next year more girls will want to join, i don't think the boys would mind.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

When you are demonstating your robot at different events it's good to have some of the girls on your team there. This way when other girls are interested they'll feel more comfortable talking to the female members of your team and they will also realize if you can be part of the team, so can they. Let them know they can program, machine, weld, assemble, wire, and drive the robot and not just doing the chairmans award and misc stuff.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Exactly!
The culture on our team several years ago were girls and freshman to be tolerated, not encouraged.

For the past couple of years we've changed that culture. A girl has to be up on the drive team each time, all members work on something robotically AND PR wise.

It's helped shift the guys or upper classmen perception about gracious professionalism and being inclusive rather than exclusive.

It also helped our team to double the number of girls on the team, and encourage 2 of them to take the jr college welding class and become TIG welders. It also helped this past weekend in AZ for the brand new girl to realize she could participate in many ways, AND choose to be trained as a programmer for this next season.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

8 girls out of ~40 members on GRT (192), one of whom is our team leader this year. We all participate in designing the robot as well as machining. Some of us also work on other projects, like Chairman's and website. About half the girls have experience in everything (except for a couple areas like animation and programming). Other than that, we usually ask around to see if anything else needs to be done.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

There are 8 girls on our team of about 34..........but of those 8 girls, all 6-7 consistantly show up and do thier job. I am currently the only girl in the machine shop, i had another freshman girl, but she got caught up in other things. We have 2 girls running battery and myself and another girls on drive team.
Its interesting to have girls, because (as i've found) we tend to think differently about almost everything, and having an all guy build and all male engineers, i tend to think totally different then them, which can help at times or we can just confuse each other:yikes:

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We're a small team of 15 students, 3 of which are girls. One of these girls does electrical, another is on PR, as well as mechanical, and the other girl does PR and mechanical as well. I've got about 3 or 4 girls to join the team next year, who will do much more than just PR. We believe greatly that no student should be left out of anything. (That's why there are more GUYS on PR than girls! Lol) Oh and I must say the girl on electrical is the best student electrician the team has ever seen! :)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 40 students on our team, 10 of us are girls. Two of the girls are solely devoted to robot and course build. Our marketing team is run completely by girls and we find that females generally have better organizational skills and can get this type of work done quickly. Our marketing team has stayed strong and busy all season as we are one of the hardest component teams of our group. When the girls from marketing felt like taking a break, we worked on building the course and learning as much as possible about robotics. This has been a great experience, and I would encourage and girl to take advantage of robotics and try to learn as much as possible. Don't let the guys think the only good thing you can do is serve food, clean up, and make buttons.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

This year, we have "3" girls on a team of "23" students. :) In reality, only 1 girl out of 15 members show up. Most of the girls on our team seem to have preferred electrical work, but many of them did mechanical work as well. Oddly, no girls on our team have ever worked on programming. Maybe I scared them all away...

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team has 5 girls, and is about 20 big. We have 2 who work on the robot, one of whom drives and is our leader. We also have 2 who do PR and promotional stuff, and 1 who actually was one of our human players. Additionally, this may sound a lil sexist, but it's true: girls are really useful in the pit if you need to borrow something from another team. People are a lot less likely to say no to a decent-looking female than to a pasty-loking male...especially if they have spent the past 6 weeks in the shop building the robot with no contact with the outside world. (notice the number of females doing analysis, too...most teams realize the advantage females have and use it to benefit their team). I'm not saying females can't build or drive...our team is a living testament to the fact that they can. I'm simply saying that females do have an advantage over males when it comes to persuasion and extracting information

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we have several girls on our team. One of them is our HP. She is a really good HP and rarely misses. She also represented our team in the alliance picking process after the qualification matches.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

on our team of 35, 14 of which were active members, 2 are girls. i did scouting at the event, but at school, i was part of construction, and design. the other was mainly programming and whining about boys being dumb. (ok, so i did that when our guys fudged it up, i admit...) but it was nice seeing other teams having girls, though i personally find it easier to talk to men, because in some cases, they just think *oh, female, listen, stare, flirt, talk.* but mostly the guys i spoke to were very knowledgable on all subjects even the pr.... so even though the guys generally stick the chicks with the "simple tasks" they are capable of it all, and so are the girls. so, if youre a girl readin this, stand up for whatever position you want, and if it comes down to skill level in that position, show your skill, chances are, if you are confident, you will do just as well. so.. boys, dont automatically assume that girls deserve menial jobs on the team, or jobs that require less physical work, just give em a shot at what they say they can do. you might even like having a girls opinion there to help out...

Re: Girls on Teams
 

oops looks like someone forgot to turn on their sarcasm detector! :eek:

Re: Girls on Teams
 

[quote=Jay H 237]When you are demonstating your robot at different events it's good to have some of the girls on your team there. QUOTE]

I dunno maybe I am looking at this wrong and if so pleas correct me but couldn't that be portrayed as a bit shovanistic that you parade your female memebers around just so you can increase your numbers on the team? I am not saying lock them up in a room so people don't know you have female memebers, just to specifically bring female memebers to events to increase your numbers seems wrong to me. They should be dealt with as if any other person and not specifically do a certain taks based on there gender... or am I just reading WAY to into this?

Re: Girls on Teams
 

MisterX-
Th rest of his post makes more sense than the first line. Basically, he's saying that it is a good idea to have girls present when you are demoing (trying to spread word about ur team anyway) so that any girls that may be interested in joining ur team know that they wont be the only ones on it. Hope that makes sense.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

[quote=MisterX]I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm sorry if my post came off that way to you. My idea isn't to parade the females around as models for our robot or the team for that matter. The fact is there ARE females interested in careers in the science/technical industry. The fact is SOME females are reluctant/hesitant to talk to, let alone join the team when all they see is males on the team thinking they won't be accepted or allowed to join. When they see other females on the team they realize that they could join also and that we don't discriminate against them. When they find out that some of our female members machine, program, assemble, wire and drive the robot they realize that they could do that also and start pursuing thier interest in science and technology. It's unfortunate, even in these days, but some people ARE still sexist and don't feel females should be doing (or can't do) machining, programing, wiring, ect.

Just remember the idea of FIRST (other than GP) is to allow ANYONE thier interest in pursuit of a career in the science and technology fields.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'm actually very proud of the role of girls on the Linn-Mar team 967!...we've got 9 girls out of a total of 35 students. We've got a system where we have leaders for each team, and there are like 8 teams. 3 of the leaders for the teams are female!!! (Myself included) We have a mentor who does a TON of stuff for our team like you wouldn't believe! I am the documentation team leader which means i oversee about half of the team including the whole website team. My best friend, kelsey is the PR/Finance leader, and the travel coordinator is also a female. The guys were gonna be our cheerleaders at competition but, let's face it, most guys can't handle that kind of pep. SO, we also play the role of cheerleaders as well, but that's jsut basically us freaking out over the stuff that we helped accomplish and knowing that our team would be nothing without us :rolleyes: yep, progress is being made considering we had 3 girls on our team last year.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 30 students on our team, 7 of which are girls. We used to have more earlier in the year, but every year with time, girls and guys fade away. Last year there happened to only be 4 though. Most of the girls do scouting, media, business plan, chairman's, other awards, that type of thing. Me and one other girl are on the build/pit crew and we get our share of work. On our team, work is work and whoever is told to do it or who wants to do it is expected to do it, regardless of anything.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

My team, 449, has seven girls of about 20 kids. I've definitely encountered a bit of a "glass ceiling;" it's hard for guys to realize that they're being patronizing to girls, or that they're undervaluing our contributions, because for most it's not a conscious thing. Still, it's a lot better now than it used to be; when our team was founded five years ago, there were only two girls on the team. One was pretty shy and because of that got all jobs taken away from her (except scouting and programming, which she proved EXCELLENT at) by more assertive guys. The other.... well, I knew her, and she was "unique." She was one of the more important members of the team, mostly because she was rather hard to ignore ever.

Last year, though, I joined and so did several more girls; last year's total number of girls, 8, was the highest total number we've ever had. (Although as the team itself is smaller this year, 7 might be higher percentage-wise.)
What do they do? Well, I'll admit that at Regionals this year I mostly did PR work--but that's because this year the drive train (the system I mostly worked on) worked perfectly! Drive is mostly the province of the girls; there's only one guy on the drive team. All the girls are on drive except one; she's our treasurer and resident programming genius/general genius. Two of the drive girls also do scouting, and they're amazing at that; they sit in the stands, watch every match (even the practices) and remember every. single. one. We'd definitely be crippled strategy-wise if it weren't for their detailed reports on the robots in our upcoming matches.... (oops, did I just give away the secret of our sucess? :p)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Looking back on my four years as a high school student. My first year a freshmen on 180 (S.P.A.M.) the girls did work (there were at least 5 and a number of them were seniors) in the assembly and machining of components. Second year same amount roughly but only 1 of them actually did anything productive. Like my last two years on S.P.A M., the over whelming majority of them were more concerned about…. Socializing over working. We’d ask them to do something and sometimes it’d be why? Or they’d just do that and have absolutely no follow up (like deburring a part… well they’d do 1 of the 6 parts that needed that). Part of it they never stepped up to do any of the work on the other side of the coin. But I admit I am guilt of shunning out girls from the Pits and doing work, partly preferring to deal with those who knew what they are doing and those who volunteer versus volunteering somebody.

One of my mentors, Warren, told us this my freshman year of high school (was it really four robotic seasons ago?) that one mentor solved part of his problem of the girls not doing any work on the robot. They were afraid of getting themselves dirty. So he lines them up and has them stick their hands out. He sprays them with WD-40 and basically tells them… now you’re hands are dirty so get to work.

The point is as mentors we really do have to in some ways police this issue. Not so much to spray someone whose afraid of getting their hands dirty but to make sure people get a fair chance at getting to do some of the work. There are some girls who will basically tell it to the guys and say let me in on this. Others we seem to have to make way for them. This in itself isn't a good thing either cause a mentor may not always be there to do so.

But really in the whole grand scheme of things is that it is about changing the culture. Something FIRST is about and that is one aspect we ought to help strive to change. Those of you who have been mentors longer than one year please feel free to contact me or respond to this message.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

yeah we got about 20 kids on our team, if that... and about half of them are girls... and they do a lot for our team... if u've ever seen 716's hook and how fast it worked... yeah a girl designed that that and we love it....


if anyone's going to nat's .... see you there

Re: Girls on Teams
 

If we, Chief Delphi, has not responded... then I will! 16 females out of 27. Half and half. The females on the team are responsible for taking photos, cheering, PR, and of course building some sort of part for the robot during the robot build.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'm happy to say that on our team we have a fairly large group of girls who (for the most part) are very active in building the robot. Our team has a lot of mechanical talent in our female members, and we wouldn't be able to do nearly as well as we do without them. We have a few girls who mostly do team spirit, but they are never relegated to that role, it's just what they prefer to do. The only lack we have is that we have no female programmers. I'm not sure why, but the past three years I've never seen any girl on our team take a serious interest in programming. Next year, after myself and the senior mechanics move on, our mechancial section is going to consist of mostly girls, which I think is really cool.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Out of a realitively small team (15 students) 1/3 of the students are female, 1 of our teacher/mentors is a female, and our PR plannign person is a female. If it wasnt for the contibutions of these "girls" then our team would not be what it is today. I'm glad that some people are actively working to get more females into mathmatics,science, and engeineering by getting them involved with the FIRST program. If not for all the contributions of all the females in science our world would not be what it is today. And hey, guys, if you dont want females involved with "guy work" then your probably in the wrong program becuase we all know that FIRST is for people of all races,sexs,heights,weights,etc. thats why we love it!
(Oh yeah and by the way, I'm all for getting females intrested in technology becuase face it, we all want to meet smart women who are interested in the things we are.)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

oh ya i forgot Emery Collegiate Institute has two teams this year an all boys team and and all girls team, so that make 4 all girls school teams in the Canadian Regionals that i know of

Re: OOPS!
 

If you didn't notice, I posted that a year ago. On 3-25-03.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

out of 40 or so students we have about 6 girls, 5 are in public relations and 1 is in our programing group. We also have 2 female mentors that are engineers. One is lead of public relations, the other is an electronics sub team lead mentor.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I can't speak on behalf of the female students on RAGE team 173, but as an adult mentor, it appears that the females and males are treated equally on our team.

Approximately one third of our team is female. Our team Captain, Keiko173, is female, and is also our drive team coach. One member of the drive team is female. Females and males were given equal opportunity to try out for these roles.

Our team is organized into many different committees, and students were allowed to select whatever committee they were interested in. As a result, there was female representation on nearly all of our committees.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we have one girl who does girly stuff. She's the girlfriend of our team president. I guess we also have another girl but she does jack. I only saw her at the competition.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'd be interested in reading about what "girly stuff" entails.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I second that!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

AMEN, SISTAH!! :ahh: !!! YOU TELL IT!!!!!!!!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

You know, girly stuff. =)

This conversation developed earlier in this thread. I assume he means things not related to actually building the robot: specifically scouting, PR, making buttons, web design, etc. But I'd also like to hear what he has to say for himself :p

As for Team 30, females are taking over next year. :ahh: *evil laughter*

It just happened to work out that a lot of core members who will be seniors next year happen to be female. Or maybe it's more that most of the females happen to be core members who will be seniors. In any case, Kristi will be head of the electronics team, I'll be working with mechanical, and Tetty, Sarah and Selena will be all over everything else: PR and fundraising and Chairman's award. The plan is to do active recruiting and get lots of people involved in those areas, but those girls will be leading those sub-teams.

In terms of "girly stuff," though, it seems interesting to note that during this current season, our animation, photoshop, and web design teams were all male (with one exception).

Or maybe that's just what happens when your school is about 70% male. =)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'm the only other girl besides one of my friends. We get equal chances with the boys. There's really no 'girly stuff' I work on scouting, of course. But I also am on the group that builds the pratice field. In fact I'm the student head. The other girl is the student head of scouting, but frankly she really didn't do much, so I took over. We really need dedicated members for our team. But as long as the person works hard and does their job, they have a equal chance at everything. No matter what sex.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Almost every year our team has had many girls on the team. Granted our team isn't very large but its still about 50:50 and our pit crew is mostly girls. This year alone we had 6 girls and 4 guys in the pit at nationals. In fact our team started with girls. Most years (with few exceptions) our team captains have been girls. This year all 3 of our pit bosses were girls and I was taught how to fix our drive module by girls. We do so much on our team.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

At Nationals, a few of the girls on my team (Mary, Tiff, and I) went to the Robotic Chicks Union meeting, and next year, we are going to try to start some type of "Robotic Chickettes" in the elementary/middle school age students to recuit girls to join are team and possess an interest in science and engineering. On team S.P.A.M. now, there are over thirty students involved, only 12 of which being girls. Out of all the team membors that went to Atlanta for the championship, only 8 were girls, less than 1/3 of the students who came with on the trip. I am the only active female team member from my school this year, and during the "rookie meetings" in the fall, there were only two girls in the entire class out of about 20. Go robotics girls! Go Robotic Chicks Union! ;)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team is based out of an all-boys school, so we don't have any girls on our team for obvious reasons. However, we are considering partnering with our sister school for next year.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

okay i must say i'm a girl and well i do more than a lot of girls on our team-- i'm one of the only girls on the pit crew at competition other is mary-- and well i'm pretty much the pit boss gal--
and without me the team would be a mess-- i organize all the tool-- i know where they all are and well the guys count on me-- jame jones always makes me organize the pit, color code tools, and it's busy work but it's my job and i don't mind it cause i still get to work on the bot and machine parts!! I LUV USING THE BRIDGEPORT! and well even our machinist jack says he likes working with girls rather than guys cause the girls on our team that he works with are willing to learn--not bashing any of the guys but that's what he says-- and it's good though for girls to be out teams and other teams-- some dont' have to work in the pit or do the cheering or whatever- each have a part of the team and help the team-- everyone does the guys and mentors too!!
but to those girls out there--keep on going--dont' give up and feel that u can't do something-- just go and get u'r hands dirty-- dirt and grease will come off!! and well just have fun in FIRST b/c it's totally awesome!!!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Well, I'm one of 3 or 4 girls on a team of about 20. I'm a machinist and the drive team coach/mentor person. I like to believe I added that much needed feminine touch to everything I made on this year's robot. "It's pretty!" rang through the rooms when I really liked something. One of the other girls helped with building the crate, among other things. Come competition time, she was the Queen of all of our scouts. She was in control of, not only the scouting forms, but the scouts themselves. The other two were helpful during the building season with just about anything that needed doing.

Besides being good at building, machining and the like, the Queen and I did some of the pit interviews for our scouting notebook. We never realized how good we could be at it. :rolleyes: But we met some great people doing that!

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Despite what our guys want to believe, more than half of our team are girls, and our entire pit crew is made up of only girls, and they rock! They built most of the bot this year, and continue to be practically the only ones who work on it. Our boys have ended up in the stands working on scouting, with the rest of the girls on our team. Our human player this year (and last) was a girl, and the main operator this year was a girl.
So all you girls out there... keep up the good work... we ARE taking over! ;)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we have 7 girls.. some their jobs include:
some working on Chairman's
PR
Spirit (as the rest of our team)
Business

I am the photographer, so i take care of that ;D.. i also work with PR and business.. and i help around wherever available (building, etc) even helping with dotting the i's and crossing the t's :D.. In my first year with FIRST/Robotics team.. i didnt know much about construction and such.. so the only way to learn is to get yourself involved as much as you can.. so im just helping around right now.. and ive learned a lot ;D..

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 5-6 girls on the team out of around 25. Four came with us to nationals. All of them work on the robot (actually, everyone on our team does at least some handiwork with the robot).

Any ideas on how to attract more girls to the team? Also on how to attract people to do PR, fundraising, etc., and not work on the robot? We always only get people who want to handle the power tools and do the design, and no one who's willing to focus on other stuff like sponsorship that is also vital to the team.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

This was the same situation for Brother Rice (Team 573) in 2003. They partnered with their sister school (my school), Marian that year... and I must say, what a good idea that was! 25% of our team was composed of girls the first year and participation from Marian has grown since then.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team was 25% - 35% girls, and they had absolutely crucial jobs. one girl was our HR rep, one girl built the drivetrain with three guys, two girls made our pins, designed our t-shirts, banners, stickers... they learned photoshop from scratch and now are more skilled than most average computer users. one of our girls managed our $30,000 budget. one girl was our shooter, and she was one of the best shooters in atlanta hands down.

i am the team president (a guy), but i fully support girls' roles and one of our goals next year is to make engineering and FIRST more appealing to girls at our beautiful University of Washington campus.

hope this helps.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

When you do recruiting in your school, emphasize that there are many roles to play on the team -we have a brochure that lists the many different skills we are looking for; i.e. writing (public relations, Chairman's Award), computer animation, computer programming, sports (don't forget those human players), mathematics, business, finance, accounting, art (designing buttons, t-shirts, painting wall murals at our facility, designing posters), etc.

One way to attract people in those areas is to contact the teachers of those areas to see if there is anyone they think might be interested.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Out of 48 students, 7 are girls. 2 seniors, 2 juniors, 3 freshmen (freshwomen ;) ). One is in controls, one does CAD work, one is in marketing, PR, and occasionally indulges herself in 3DS and controls work, one is Marketing, PR, and occasionally CAD and Manufacturing. One is Manufacturing and Marketing, one is Manufacturing and hopefully will soon be working in controls, and I am involved in Marketing, PR, and our Web team.
We're all really busy, as you can tell... but our team (particularly the girls on it) is really well-rounded.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we're an all girl team too... so we do everything... i'm kind of disappointed that other teams don't have that many girls on theirs :(

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I take back my previous statistic of 6 females out of 22 members.

Most of the freshmen on our team qualify as females, so I would alter this figure to more like 13 females out of 22 members.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Team 648 has 7 girls on our team out of 22, and they are invaluable. (two are mentors, but they are still dedicated to the team). They do many things on the team, but 3 of them have recently taken to making the team scrapbook before the end of our season.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Team 1305 has 23 members on the team and 6 are girls. 1 is PR and the rest are engineering. We also have two mentor females and have many female parents helping out. Without the girls the boys would be lost. Next year your cheif engineer is a girl. Which is awesome. :)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Sorry. We have 4: webmaster, helper (and 1 of 3 who went to kickoff), parent-who-made-flag-and-banner-and-buttons, and parent-who-drove-the-programmer (my mom)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Im from team WildStang #111, and we have about like maybe about 12 girls involved on the team and the rest are guys. There is like 60 sumthin guys on the team. But this year was a very good year for girls to get involved with the robot. Out pit crew had 3 girls on it...all ivolved with electrical stuff. And the good thing is that next year all our electrical mini pit crew is going to be made up of girls. So well have like 4 girls on pit crew. Then the other girls that go to the competetion are either scouting or video taping. :D

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We've got 6, but 3 are fairly useless, and 2 are graduating (one going to caltech, and I'm going to Olin), so next year's team will have.... you guessed it folks, ONE fully functional female. I just hope the poor thing doesn't pass out from a lack of estrogen in the shop.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

When I said this back on page 1, my main idea was that girls are a part of every single aspect of our team. I just wanted to clarify that in order to dispel any rumors that I am an insensitive loser. It was merely an attempt at humor through verbal irony. Lo siento.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

On my team, there aren't many girls who do much "engineering work" but those of us that do are very good at it and work hard.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have five girls on the team, two do pr work, one helps with mechanics, one is for support, and the last one does like all of our welding, so we love her.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we have a couple of grls on our team over in hauppauge and each and every one of them do their part if its welding or putting together weels setting up programs ext. but yeah they don't just sit around and do nothing they help out.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Right now, I can think of five girls (not counting teachers) on 1293 for 2005.

One does PR, one is a programmer, two of them work on the robot (one specializes in drilling holes), and one just got in yesterday, so I'm not really sure where she'll settle in.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

This year being our team's rookie year we dont have many students involved because they dont think its very interesting. We are doing our best to keep the students working on ideas and getting their friends. I wasn't able to attend a meeting until tuesday but there are supposidly 3 girls, maybe a 4th on our team, currently we really only have one group and all the girls like the guys are helping with ideas for parts and brainstorming, we are all equals doing the same things.

-Mike

Re: Girls on Teams
 

im a female i handle the rules and building(drive train) because mainly the guys of my team care else

5 girls and 30 on the team

Re: Girls on Teams
 

What are all the girls in FIRST doing on their team this year? Im involved with mechanical this year. Its a new step for me. I am the only girl on mechnical and the boys are very nice to me with using tools and everything which i really appriciate it. I think that girls should get involved with the robot and should do whatever. I think throughout the year more and more girls will become involved with FIRST that itll scare the guys! :ahh: lol
-Court-

Re: Girls on Teams
 

On our team we have 6 girls. Three of them write for our website and publications, the other 3 are actively involved with our robotics project. At least one of them is gonna be an excellent engineer one day.. :)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I am the only girl on the robot team

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Scare the guys? no way, we'd like it :D

Re: Girls on Teams
 

we have 3 girls, and their all involved in strategy and documentation, nothing mechanical.....
:(

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 5 "active" girls on our team (there´s one other, but she´s kind of an on-off sort of participant) , 26 students overall. This saddens me a bit, considering last year we had 7. It cheers me up, however, to see that the female work isn´t concentrated towards one area (which is usually Marketing)...2 of them work with PR/Marketing, one is a mechanic, another works with electronics and I´m a mixture of Documentation, Logistics, PR & Programming. Being the minority, we can get left out at times but it doesn´t come to a radical point where we do nothing at all. Some may disagree, but I certainly feel as if we´re being discriminated...
This whole FIRST-guy bias thing needs to be broken...all we need to do is prove that gender doesn´t reflect that person´s ability whatsoever. But sometimes the difference between those that can prove or not depends on one thing: opportunity.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

i'm a mentor for an all girls team

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team has 26 members, 9 of which are girls. That's almost a 2:1 ratio. In my mind, that's a ridiculously high ratio for a FIRST team. But the girls on our team do a lot of different activities. From publicity, to awards, to documentation, to showing the guys (who are to belligerent to even listen to each other) a new approach to something. If it weren't for them, we'd probably tear each other's heads off.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

unfortunately our team doesnt have nearly enough girls. we have probably about 15 out of 60 people on the team (this is better than the two on the team my freshman year). The girls do all jobs on our team, we have no bias, although some girls are a bit timid with working with machines they still help build the robot.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team is Team 1243 From Swartz Creek, MI. We have a group of about 6 students who are there all the time and 3 who shows up occassionaly. Our team consists of 3 that show up all the time and 2 who show up occassionally. Our girls on the team do just the same work as the guys. As a matter of fact of team leader of students is a girl. The girls work on the robot in any way they can.


James

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Ah yes this beauty lives on.
Well the X-Cats are back to their girl heavy look this year with 18 girls and 14 boys and we make sure they participate in all aspects of the team.
Our coach and assistant coach will be young ladies this year.
Also our student liason, our scout master (mistress?), project planner and our spirit leaders are all young ladies.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

ours didnt really do much of anything last year, but its changed quiet a bit this year. i think they gained soem confidence and they are actualy quiet helpful now, without one of them, we would be broke and not have anuff money to enter this year :]. not to say that the guys did anything... out of like 15 kids only 4-6 of us did much. it has changed with them also, we got soem new guys who know their stuff, or are willign if they dont. the actualy number of kids who do stuff if much better than last year.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

almost half of our team consists of girls (12 out of 30), me being one of them. 3 work just on the robot (Me and two others) and the other girl does the math. All the other girls work on animation, website, marketing, I just wish more would get involved with the machines.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I'm one of 4 girls on the team. (last year we only had 2! :ahh: )

I'm the only one of those 4 that isn't new this year, and the others haven't quite found their niche yet.. although one of the girls has started to work on robot construction the last couple meetings. I was a programmer last year and I'm thinking I'll work on electronics/sensors this year.. I was also a driver last year :D

Our team is pretty good about including the girls.. then again, our team is pretty small, so we need everyone we can get! :rolleyes:

Re: Girls on Teams
 

the 2 from last year that we had are gettining into the machine work, im glad they are cuz its fun, helpful, and a very nice skill to have(nothin better than a woman who knows her way around a shop, honistly). they made plywood prototypes all nite on wedsday while the rest of us bickered over designs :D.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have about 40 people on our team (845) including the engineers. We have about 13 girls on our team.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I am the only girl on my team of about 30 people and I am the President.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team consists of 3 girls out of maybe 25. One of the girls has been very helpful in discussions and design. The other two, we're starting to think, don't really care. Perhaps this was a college application club for them, I'm not sure. They don't really come to meetings so we give them public relations jobs. But whatever. Not much you can do about it. It would be nice to have more girls interested in engineering, programming, etc. in the club, but that's not something we can control just yet. Soon our club will be big enough to inspire such things.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our numbers have gone up this year... We started out with 60 students... Consisting of about 19 girls... When people realize what kind of work we put out, the numbers have dropped to 45 overall and approximately 15 girls...

(Our passed 3 captains have been girls but not this year)...

Re: Girls on Teams
 

There are 45 students on my team. 10 are girls. 6 are very involved in spirit. 2 are very involved in assembly. 1 (me) is involved with designing (CAD, etc.). The captain (me) is a girl. Both co-captains last year were girls.

In recent years, I don't believe there have been any female members of the drive team, but let's see if this year changes that. ;)

~ Jill

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 7 girls on our team this year! Finally! Haha. We haven't had over 2 girls in over a few years. Quite sad, really. But here's the rundown on what they do:
Me -- Business Coordinator (Chairman's, Image/Spirit, Public Relations, Scouting at competitions, etc.)
Jamie -- Photography, Business with me.
Brittany G. -- Drive
Komal -- Auxiliary
Brittany W. -- Artist (for our t-shirts)
Sonia -- Image with Brittany W. (unsure exactly what she does.)
Kirsten -- Drive
We have about 32 people on our team as of yesterday. We've had a few people join on Monday. Quite an interesting thing that was.
=)

Re: Girls on Teams
 

our team has about 20 students, and of that, about 8 of them are girls. Most of the girls on my team are seniors (we have 0 senior boys this year), and so are very active in every aspect of our team. Most people choose what they want to do pertaining to the club, and most of the girls want to do the scouting at strategising on our team.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Not sure if this was covered... (13 pages! Wow.)

Way back in the day, when I was in 8th grade, we had a prospective students night for the graduating 6th graders. They would come in and see all the school's facilities, especially for the elective classes. (They would choose shortly after that night.)

The woodshop teacher would only accept girls as volunteers for demoing tools. (I was into woodworking back then, and I got turned down for demo night.) Seeing my disappointment, he explained why:

1.) Girls come into woodshop and see other girls using powertools, getting their hands dirty, etc. It breaks down some of the gender barriers for them.

2.) Guys see a woodshop full of girls.

He figured it was a good way to get both sexes to join woodshop. My advice to teams who want more girls in engineering roles: Take the girls you have, and give them important roles during demonstrations: speaking, fixing, and driving.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

That is what my team needs a woman mentor on the mechanical side of things.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Looking at our website, it seems that we have a total of 13 girls on the team this year, with three of them working directly on the robot.

818 is split up into several subteams which are created by the mentors; girls are free to apply to whatever group they wish, but it seems like most of them end up in the scouting/spirit/fundraising group. I don't know if that's by design, chance, or something else entirely, but that seems to be how it's worked for my time on the team.

That said, it bothers me that we still think about this and still make a big deal out of it. With any luck, we'll be able to reach a point where we don't need to do that sometime soon...

Re: Girls on Teams
 

This year, our team has 11 girls out of a total of 33 members. I myself, a female, am team president. Three out of the eleven work in our manufacturing department, 1 works in animation, and the rest of us are part of communications/PR/marketing (a secretary, 2 photographers, several newsletter editors, fundraising, web managers, team spirit, chairman's/hall of fame, etc). Having girls represent a third of the team is definitely a positive thing, though it would be awesome to inspire more girls to join in the years to come and pursue interests in manufacturing and animation.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

'bout 21 kids on the team, 2 gals for sure, 1 who keeps flunking and can't participate and 1 whose parents don't let her come all the time
I do communication pr and writing stuff
ariel would do machining if she was ever here
and Jesse does electrical if she would stop burning herself with the sautering iron
and carlyn who would also do electrical if she were ever here.....not too great a representation...doesn't help that none of the people in our school are like us and that we live in a lake of preps.... :mad:

Re: Girls on Teams
 

there is one girl on our team (student, that is... there are also a couple of female mentors) and she is in our programming/electronics subsystem.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Our team is composed of the Honors Advanced Physics class and then other students. In our physics class, we have 15 girls in our class of 28. We currently have about 65 members in addition to the class. Probably about half are girls. The girls in the class hold most of the administrative tasks. However, these are jobs we picked at the begining of the year. Girls are give any opportunity they want to work on anything they want. At the begining of the year, they were able to learn from other team members things like programming. I personally am the communications officer and publicist. But I specifically fought for my position.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have a grand total of about 11 people on our team. 2 of those are girls. Kepp in mind that we DID NOT force ANY position on the team on them. They chose their positions ON THEIR OWN! They do work as our publicists and make good relations with teams and when the rest of the team is at the field, they will be staying behind and giving info. about our program and bot while we are away. Our 'head mentor' if you would like to call him that is extremely encouraging more girls to join our team. It just so happens that at our school has more guys who want to join the robotics team than girls.

P.S. We also have our girls run most of our presentation that we do for businesses that might want to sponser us.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 10 girls on a 28 member team this year. About half of the girls do public relations, and the other half helps building.
Jackie

Re: Girls on Teams
 

We have 6 girls on a team of about 20. One is head of programming, 4 of us make up the electronics group and then one is the head of PR.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

I know that my team is not the norm, but over half of my team are girls. Two of our officers are girls and three of our sub groups are also led by girls--arm design, programming, and electrical.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Hello, I am a girl from team 698. We have 6 or 7 girls on our team out of about 40 in the team and we have many jobs. We don't slack either. We have 6 officer positions--President and VP are guys--but the other four are held by females, including myself. If there is any advertising done by girls on our team, it is our choice. Our PR is a girl, but good luck trying to get us as cheerleaders. Sure we'll cheer on our team, but we're not here for just looks. Our girls work with programming, pnuematics, animation, electronics/special teams, and building and designing our robot. We don't let guys push us around ;) Anything planned or organized is either done by a girl, or helped by a girl. Some of us show more drive, determination and dedication than the others, but that's human nature. We are very upset when we hear that girls don't do a lot of building and try to break all stereotypes. One of our famous phrases is "Girls rule with power tools!" We are just as capable as the guys and try to help out as much as possible by doing any job that comes our way--building, designing, advertising, anything.

Re: Girls on Teams
 

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. If your motivation for doing something is "to break stereotypes" you are defining your actions in the context of a broken system and playing into the hands of the "adversary", be it the male patriarchy, the vast right-wing conspiracy, or the RIAA.

Feminists often get a bad rap for this, modeling their lives around the inverse of stereotypes, which is a very low form of protest, as they are still allowing themselves to be controlled by the stereotype. Had the stereotype been otherwise, they would be acting differently, and thus are not thinking for themselves at all, but rather acting on a knee-jerk contrarian sentiment. Are you rebelling for the sake of rebelling? Is this really rebellion at all?