[mathking]

One of the things I urge my teaching colleagues and fellow mentors, and current and future student team members to consider, is that when you observe something happening there are many other things that lead up to that point. If you think that providing extra or a different kind of encouragement for a girl to get involved is in itself sexist, take some time to sincerely look back and see the times that you were encouraged to get involved in STEM stuff. There is a good chance this started at a very young age. And it is entirely possible that you got a lot of encouragement. So you might not need so much right now.

Last year I had a discussion with a student who felt that need based financial aid was inherently unfair. That he was just as or more deserving of aid than a (hypothetical) poor student with similar or lower grades and scores who was getting a grant while he was having to take out a loan. I asked him if it was fair that he had parents who were a doctor and an engineer while this hypothetical student had a single parent who had never gone to college and could not afford to pay anything for his college education. His first reply was "That's different." But then he stopped and thought about it. The next day he told me "I never really thought about that way before."

I have encountered more than a few people who will go out of their way to encourage a kid who is quiet, lacks confidence or is socially awkward. They will push such kids to get them engaged. At a multi-team training session one of them (a former student of mine who was mentoring another team then) once remarked that he was uneasy giving what he perceived as "extra" encouragement to some a pair of girls to get them engaged. I asked him what he would do if he saw a pair of socially awkward boys standing to the side not engaging. He told me "I guess I am still learning Mr. King." and got those two girls to assemble and test a pair of gear boxes. I told him "That's a good thing. So am I."

It has taken us a long time to get to our current 38/34 boy to girl ratio. I think the two biggest keys for us were a strong FLL program that was getting kids involved before they got subtly pushed away and having a succession of girls who were good leaders. Those girls not only served as examples to other girls, they actively sought out more girls and helped found our "STEM Sisters" club. This year we actually had a few more girls than boys as team leaders. We had some younger boys who were not happy that they worked on a team with a girl involved. And were really not happy when a girl corrected them or offered advice. But for the most part (there are still a couple of holdouts alas) the younger boys were won over because they realized the girls were really competent.