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Originally Posted by Dumper FTW 435
Maybe they want girls because they want the kids to have strong female role models? But I hate that idea. Why do they assume that a kids role model has to be the same gender as them? I have both male and female role models that I aspire to be more like. It seems sexist to show a girl a strong female role model for the purpose of saying "even girls can be good at this!" instead of showing them any strong role model to say "this is the type of person you can become if you work hard!".
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I'm not at all advocating turning male mentors away from female teams, but yes, in my experience, it is incredibly for women entering male-dominated fields to have female role models (as well as male). In fact, part of the reason is exactly what you said, to show that "even girls can be good at this". Why? Because many girls, including me at that age,
really are asking that question ...because yes, the situation at large really is sexist. So it is a very big, very real, often painful and sometimes humiliating question. It needs answering, preferably from a mentor who can prove it. (In fact, many girls I've known aren't/weren't asking that question because they already knew the answer was no, we can't be. That's not going to be displaced in most cases without examples.)
It's the myth that's sexist. As for the solution, I don't see one that wouldn't include gender identity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phcullen
for the past 2 (possible 3) years my former team had an all girl drive team despite not being a all girl team and i would be very interested to hear from them on weather they experienced this as well.
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Not really. We're usually a co-ed drive team, though more often majority or all female than majority male, and the person leading the interaction is almost always female (usually me). We haven't faced gender discrimination between drive teams and years, but I do remember some as a student. There were a few 'wow, you're all girls' moments 2-3 years ago, but not detectable discrimination. Then again, most of our interactions are within districts now, which means we both know each other in the majority of coach-coach interactions in a given season+off-season.