[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by karomata

By excluding males from teams or team activities, you are only creating a split within the entirety of the team. While it is great to get women involved in STEM, pushing out the guys is not fair nor gracious professional.

It must feel pretty unfair to be excluded from something based on your gender. It would certainly be really painful if that happened to you on a systemic and regular basis, throughout your attempted career in a STEM field. That's what happens to women in STEM all the time and continuously. A common term used to discuss this phenomena specifically in academia is the "leaky pipeline", where systemic discrimination against women gradually and continuously pushes them away from advancement.

This happens on FIRST teams as well, all the time. It's rarely the product of someone actively deciding that women shouldn't be doing STEM work. It's in the little decisions and actions of team members and leaders. Gradual and subtle (or not-so-subtle) nudges away from mechanical and software into communications are far too common. A mentor grabs a handful of freshmen that they pick at random to build a prototype; the coding team works together to recruit a few new programmers; the CAD team leads find "buddies" for teaching. All of these examples are simple opportunities for women to be subconsciously excluded or shunned by not being selected into a program.

On many teams, confident and headstrong women fight for their position as a mechanical leader, drive coach, or software captain. Yet, the women who join the team whom are curious about (but not totally sold on) a STEM career - the people FIRST teams should do everything to inspire - are going to have a harder time breaking into these groups. Lots of people on teams join and show up with neither the requisite skill set nor the understanding of where to go to learn. In these situations, it's harder for women to break into a new job or role, especially when they're surrounded by a dozen of their male peers with more understanding and experience. It's certainly intimidating.

Another issue I personally have faced, being a high school senior this year and applying for WPI FIRST scholarships, I have found that they are female preferred. As a 9 year FIRST student who has put much time and effort into contributing to FIRST, learning about science and technology, and embodying the values of gracious professionalism, it really grinds my gears at times to know that I am disadvantaged because of who I am.

A recent study that I will find and link to after my classes indicated that 97% of scholarships do not prohibit white male applicants (the study was also addressing similar objections to race based affirmative action scholarships, but the point stands as "white male" is a subset of "male). You're complaining about a tiny minority of scholarships that aim to help counteract the many barriers to entry that disadvantaged minority groups face in their attempts at STEM careers.

While few to no scholarships actively state that women are less likely to receive them, in practice that's what has happened, especially in STEM. Not to mention all of the accumulating discrimination and social pressure from before and after this point in their careers. Do those people not get to be upset for being disadvantaged because of who they are? In what ways can we counteract and mitigate this disadvantage without producing opportunities that apply to the disadvantaged groups?

We as FIRST participants often speak of rising above the opponent instead of dragging them down, however in a competative setting for scholarships, isn't having a bias towards women dragging down the guys in FIRST?

Not at all, not even slightly. Listen to yourself. You're saying that not giving men eligibility for 100% of the available free college money is "dragging them down". Giving scholarships to women sounds exactly like bringing the bottom up / rising above circumstance to me.