[Alyssa]

Recently, our team hosted a screening of Slingshot, the documentary about Dean Kamen, DEKA, and their attempt to solve the clean water crisis. In the documentary, he makes an early point that both women and men are welcome to be on his wall of personal role models and inventors. This sparked a conversation on our team about what female engineers in history we would put on our personal walls of STEM role models. Gender equality in STEM related fields has been an ongoing topic of discussion, and it’s something we are really passionate about. We are hoping to create a conversation around the issue of gender equality in STEM and create greater insight into the issue for ourselves and other teams.

Having role models to look up to is incredibly important and motivational. Qualcomm, a great sponsor of FRC teams in San Diego and globally, does a great job of addressing the gender gap in STEM fields by hosting annual events for students to network with women in science and technology. Although our team does not have a 50/50 ratio, Team 2485 makes working toward gender equality a priority and recognizes that there is more that our team can be doing to help.

That leads us to the main point of this post. These conversations have reinvigorated our team’s drive to work towards equality. We know a lot of teams are doing great things to address these issues, and we are always looking to improve our program. It would be great if teams could share any programs and/or strategies that they use to tackle this complicated issue.