Quote:
Originally Posted by Kimmeh
Other topics I've had brought up via PM:
Lodging. Many teams segregate students by gender. How do you handle out LGBTQ students?
Another person brought up how to deal with negative statements said by members of the team and specifically brought up joking about rape. We’ll also extend this to include everything from slurs and stereotypes to jokes and off-hand comments. Does your team do anything about comments like these? (I can see this being less of an issue that some of the other things we've addressed. It’s still worth bringing up.)
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I wasn't exactly out to the majority of the team while I was on it, but this was a huge reason I always roomed with my mom. At my school it was kind of an "everyone knows but she's not out yet" thing, and I didn't want to make our female teammates uncomfortable (you know, more than the gender ratio already did). Also a huge reason I'm relieved I have a single in my dorm in the fall - it was for another accommodation (because 4/5 things different about me aren't enough), but I'm relieved I won't have to go through the rigmarole of having a roommate my freshman year, just to be safe.
That said, I don't think it's ever come up on our team, and even clauses in the handbook about romantic relationships were made specific to boy/girl. I don't know if it's been mentor oversight or "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it".
As for negative comments/rape jokes/slurs/stereotypes... At least in my early time on the team, mentors seemed to expect us to handle that on our own - not that I agreed at all. As a result, I usually found somewhere else to be in the 20-30 minutes between school getting out and the robotics shop opening up, lest I deal with 4-5 teenage boys making comments that could be from promoting stereotypes to outright misogyny. The years after my first drastically improved, but the first was so ridiculous that it made me appreciate our mentor's efforts to curb that behavior much more.
Despite all their efforts, and mine in leadership with other students, those kinds of comments never really stopped. They lessened in frequency (especially as some of the older boys graduated/left), but never stopped. I'd hate to think this is the norm on any
FIRST team - especially if
FIRST is intended to be a preview of real-world engineering. I'd rather not have to deal with such a large portion of my male colleagues behaving this way - you know, because "boys will be boys". (Note: I'm not saying men are the source of the problem. I'm saying that male team members were the ones that most often participated in events that made me feel excluded from my team, and boys are often excused for aggressive behavior more than girls.)