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Re: What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?
I attend an all guys, Catholic, Jesuit college preparatory high school. Our FIRST robotics team is 15 dudes, and gee whiz does it show. Ditto for our high school and academy (7th/8th grade) Lego/Vex teams. Our school is, to put it nicely, bad at teaching us not to be overly-argumentative, boastful and yes, sexist, young men. The problem for my school and the whole robotics program at said school starts from within and crawls outward like the worst kind of monster.
As I reflected on my own life earlier this year, I came to the conclusion that first I, then all the people I'm supposed to have some influence over (as a co-president of the robotics and engineering club), need to work on treating young ladies (and other groups of people who are so frequently tread upon for whatever reason) with the kind of respect and dignity they deserve as human beings.
With that in mind, I've spent this year telling my teammates and fellow students to step it up. Be classy. Stop calling girls "hot" and quit objectifying women like they only exist for your pleasure. Competitions are one of the worst places for this, because, as previously stated, we don't have girls in our school. It is too easy for guys to get caught up in their primal, animalistic urges, leading to stupid comments and generally dehumanizing behavior. It makes me uncomfortable, and I know that unfortunately sometimes the issues between girls and guys at these events go far deeper than a couple of guys quietly discussing just how callipygian someone on another team is.
I don't know the answer for everyone. I know that for me the answer is forcing myself to overcome four years of drowning in an environment where casual sexism and homophobia are the rule. I'm getting there, and FIRST is helping me do so. Having done some work with teaching robotics to middle schoolers, I've discovered that girls are sometimes (that should say 80-99% of the time) orders of magnitude better than the boys at problem solving and teamwork. Even in high school this can hold true, as I saw at the YES! Expo in November, where two girls naturally excelled at driving/operating our robot. It is one of my great dreams to eventually work with an all girls FRC team in some capacity, because if there's anything I love it's destroying cultural stereotypes, and what better way to do that than a program expressly designed to change culture?
Sorry if this is rambling and incoherent at times, but this issue plagues my mind these days.
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I'm Bubba. I make noise, sometimes it comes out as music, and I love robots.
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