[karinka13]

A mentor sent this thread my way and said I might want to weigh in, so here I am (I know, I know, I haven't been on this forum in quite some time).

While I would certainly never agree with telling a team how to run itself, I think a very important point to bring up is that when you purposefully separate by gender, you MAKE gender into an issue. Hear me out.

I'm not saying there aren't gender gaps in the world anymore. As a senior studying engineering at MIT, I can fully attest that girls have to work harder to earn the respect of their peers, even the other female ones. In many cases, especially the other females. I love working in the machine shop in my lab, and it took me at least a year to earn the respect of the shop guys. But now they give me free range and all is well. It takes extra work, but the end result is worth it. Besides, complaining about it isn't going to make anything better, anyway.

See, if you constantly run around talking big about how you're a "female in engineering" or an "all girls robotics team," you're making your gender a major part of your identity. My gender is a part of who I am as a person (see my love of miniskirts and Victoria's Secret), but it is not a relevant part of my professional life. If I were to make it part of that, I would be opening myself up to being judged based on my gender.

An all-girls robotics team that uses that label to define themselves invites themselves to be the point of judgment for all robotics teams. This means whenever they do poorly, that all-girls stamp will do poorly as well. When they do well, that stamp just adds to a thought of "look, they did well, and they even overcame that obstacle." It's a way of thinking that we aren't going to outgrow as a people anytime soon.

But if we do want to outgrow it, we need to stop labeling ourselves so strongly. Stop throwing those stamps in people's faces. When I was a member of 433 (a team from an all-girls high school in the Philadelphia area), my theory on the matter was always something along the lines of "Oh, we're all girls? What an odd thing for you to notice."

Refusing to make it a big deal is really the only way we'll ever outgrow this.