[MechEng83]

Our team is 1/3 female as well. Our overall team captain is a senior girl and our non-engineering captain is a junior girl (though she started out on the mill and lathe her freshman year). Our engineering captain is a male.

Several of our non-engineering subteams are led by females who have greatly improved that side from an operational standpoint. We are lacking in female leadership on the engineering side (aside from the overall captain, who is the most capable student I have in the machine shop)

Of our 20 mentors, only 2 are female, both on the non-engineering side. This is not for a lack of recruiting, though. It's tough to find mentors willing to dedicate the necessary amount of time to the team during build season.

We have a good number of sophomore and freshmen girls who are very interested in the engineering side and participate actively -- they're just underclassmen and haven't had the opportunity to lead yet. Several started out timidly, but are learning to be vocal. It's really different than in past years of the team where the girls would just try to be "one of the boys" since there were so few.

As far as seeing other teams, it's not surprising that most are male-dominated. There's a push for culture change to make it a 50-50 endeavor, but that takes time. We're on our way there, running programs to encourage elementary and middle school girls to try engineering/robotics. I think you have to hook kids (boys or girls) while they're young to get them passionate about engineering. The female technical mentors will come, eventually, when the girls who are learning to be leaders through programs like FIRST come back to mentor.