Originally Posted by Kims Robot
This provoked a lot of thought in my head... and also a little bit of hurt at first. I remember sitting at the Championship Panel presentation last year staring at all the men. It was frustrating and aggravating. I knew the answer to every question that was asked, and I was a female engineer. But I'm not a "Rock Star". Why? I have no idea really. I can talk gear ratios, battery capacities, power curves, PID loops, PWM wiring, networking, scouting statistics, rules & ranking points with anyone. But the odder thing was sitting there, knowing I knew all of that, yet I couldn't think of a single other female mentor that I knew that knew all the same. Every "involved" female mentor outside of my team that I could name was a team leader, a mom, a teacher... none were engineering mentors. Even sitting here now, I am dumbfounded to think of one. But I also think about nearly all my posts here on CD. Most have to do with organization, leadership, scouting, strategy, rules, etc... I don't do a lot of the tech-e talk here. And maybe thats what makes an FRC engineering rock star?
I graduated from Clarkson with an Electrical Engineering Degree and have worked as a Systems Engineer for nearly 9 years now. I have a nearly complete Masters in Robotic Intelligence from RIT. In looking at my career and watching other women, I have to say that I think some of what I have noticed has spilled over into FIRST.
In general, Women are big picture thinkers. They are organizers, they are managers. Its the reason I gravitated towards systems engineering. I liked the big picture better than sitting at a desk drawing up digital electronics for the rest of my life. I like having enough technical depth to work with customers to define their exact needs and define the requirements & specifications for our products & systems. Am I doing the board layout? no. Do I do the packaging design? no. Do I design the power circuits? no. Do I program in the networking stack? no. But can I tell you a heck of a lot about all of it? of course. Its the same reason I liked being an FRC team leader, and the team's systems engineer.
I guess I wish I knew how to change this. We need to find the female engineering mentors in FIRST and start having them present/co-present technical conferences at the championships. We need to start showing the girls on the teams that there are female engineering "rock stars" to look up to.
But personally, I think its fine to have all-girls teams. For the original poster... Think about the DC regional you were just at... even with 2/63 FRC teams being all-girls, I guarantee that less than 20% of the students attending the event were female. (And heck, I know the boys on our team loved having the all-girls Waldo team to "hang around" with!) Plus I am pretty certain that there was an All-Boys team there... and no one complained (Boys Latin School).
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