[MentorOfSteel]

I am a (male) mentor on FIRST team 3504, Girls of Steel, a FIRST team composed of girls from all over the Pittsburgh area. This thread is timely for me. I undertook mentoring 3504 with many of the same reservations about all-girl teams that have been expressed in this thread. But my experiences over the past six or so months have convinced me that all-girls teams are a good thing and can play a real role in increasing the number of girls who decide to pursue technical careers.

As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, I have been involved in robotics research and education with students ranging from highschool to Ph.D. for the past ten years. I have seen first hand many of the negative dynamics that have been reported in this thread. There are small numbers of women in our classes. I have seen women who marginalize themselves to fit in better with their more aggressive male peers. Alternatively, I have seen women assert themselves and suffer socially for it. You can point to these symptoms as an indictment to society, or our educational system, or even my own poor skills as a teacher. But these are deep seated issues that have no immediate solution, or at least not one that I know of.

What I can say is this: the girls of 3504 are thriving in ways that I have never seen girls/women thrive in a co-educational setting. They are gaining confidence and taking on responsibilities that many of them would concede to the boys on a mixed-gender team. Sure, they will need to work with boys/men someday, but when they get there they will have the skills to go head to head with them and the confidence that goes along with it. I find it surprising that anyone can criticize my actions as "counterproductive". If you don't believe me, you are welcome to come help us mentor 3504 and see for yourself. Or better yet, start your own all-girls team.

I'll finish this post (my first ever on CD) with an attempt to provide some perspective that I have not yet seen in this thread: The world needs more engineers, this is one of the underlying tenets of FIRST. Girls represent a great, under-tapped pool of future engineering talent. We should be doing everything we can to encourage them and to give them safe places to learn how to stretch their engineering wings.

-George