I'm currently on an all girls rookie team called the Girls of Steel. We come from eleven different schools, and we're not from any organization like Girl Scouts or anything like that. We're simply a bunch of girls from a 400 square mile area around Pittsburgh that wanted to get involved in science and technology, and none of our schools had FIRST FRC teams. Most of us really didn’t know each other before we started the team in October, but now we are cohesive team, all friends.
We also now know how to work all of the machine shop tools, design and build new parts, and how to use CAD to pre-prototype the parts we want.
So far this year, we've made it into the Pittsburgh Regional elimination rounds, won Rookie All Star in Pittsburgh, and then went on to win Rookie All-Star in D.C. as well. We're going to St. Louis in April (can't wait to see all the awesome teams there!)
We've also received some flack because we don't allow guys on our team. People have told us that by being an all girls team, we're discriminating against guys. But within a 10 minute radius of where our team meets, there are about 3 others teams that accept guys -- and one that only accepts guys (all-guy catholic high school). So it's not like because we don't have guys on our team, there aren't any options for guys to become involved in FIRST.
We've also been told that we're not getting "real world" experiences. And I wholeheartedly agree—we're not getting “real world” experiences. And that’s the way we want it to be!
We don't want to follow the "real" world model, where women make 77 cents to every dollar a guy earns. We don't want to mimic a world where the science and technology fields are populated by a large majority of male workers and women have to fight to be heard. We want to create a new "real world" and we want to change how the world views females in science in technology.
We also want to support and encourage more girls to get interested in these fields through opportunities like FRC, FTC, FLL, and other programs. By giving
anyone (guy or girl!) the chance to feel valued in these groups, all FIRST participants will be more likely to be more interested in science and technology. Because there are so many all guy or mostly guy teams already, we want to create an environment where the girls can explore science and technology without competing with the guys to be heard so that when we get to college and our careers we will have the confidence to succeed and level the playing field.
Most of our mentors are guys, and we work with a lot of other co-ed and guy teams as well. We are proud to provide a different opportunity for high school girls in the Pittsburgh area and look forward to the opportunity to share our team’s story and the principles of FIRST to inspire many others—both girls and boys of all ages.
