I have struggled with the female and male issues on both of my teams for a few years now. CLandrum3081 already stated what happens on 3081 and I could add more to it but that is a story for another day.
My experiences mainly concentrate on 2470, the Blitz Team. I have found that female students are much more productive then male students on our team, I'm not sure why but that is the way it works for us.
I was originally a student on the team from 2008-2010; after graduation I became a mentor for the team and this year I was given the official name of "Senior mentor" for 2470. We have always struggled recruiting the female gender like most teams out there. Each year I have tried to figure out why and how we can do better at recruiting more females, and we are finally seeing some results.
I have found the first thing that really helps in recruiting more females to the program is to remove as much sexism from the robotics room as possible. That means all of the mentors and coaches need to be on the same page. No sexist comments allowed whatsoever from the adults, that will set an example for the male students basically don't give them an opportunity to say these comments. That being said I still hear the comments from students occasionally in the build room. We solve this pretty easily by hosting Female Engineering Sessions.
Female Engineering Sessions are used to promote STEM programs for females in our school. The engineering classes offered at Jefferson High School are highly male oriented (recently I found a folder in a retired teacher's file cabinet labelled "Automobiles for girls" needless to say it was
very sexist), usually you will have 2 or 3 females in the class at the beginning of the semester and they all drop out for study hall by the end of the first week. The Female Engineering Sessions were designed by a female student on my team and she started leading them last year. The first meeting is a powerpoint presentation on robotics with a concentration in FIRST to recruit females to our team. During the first meeting no males are allowed in the room, not even mentors. The second meeting I will go in and give a basic overview of the team, I take some time to explain how stupid the guys are on our team and I tell them positions on the team. So far I have usually had the entire group go for one activity, this year for example it was programming.
I find that if you encourage females to meet together as a group to accomplish a task it works much better then asking them to meet by themselves or with a few others in a large group of boys. Hopefully that observation is pretty obvious. I also do my best to have weekly meetings during the build season with the females on our team just to talk to them on how things are going and thanking them for what they do.
All of the above being said there are still some things we are working on. One of the big things currently is decorations in our room. We are basically in the metal shop at our school, which means cement walls and flooring with drab colors. In fact I am often told by the female students on my team it looks like a "rape dungeon" so this summer one of our projects is to change that. I haven't been told by next year's leadership what we are doing but I assume it has to do with painting everything.
This year we also partnered with Science Olympiad, most of the Science Olympiad team is female so we offered classes lead by female robotics members on basic shop skills. We helped them build many of their projects and really taught most of them how to build things for the first time. Next year we are going to expand our partnership to include more joint activities, we are going to have female robotics representatives at every Science Olympiad meeting to encourage them to join the robotics team. We are also going to allow them space to build and store what they are working on in the robotics room.
Next year our entire leadership team is going to be female, for some reason I have found females are very good motivators for the male gender. I wonder why?
Thank you for sticking with my jumbled thoughts, hopefully it is somewhat coherent.
Evan