Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
Also, while I'm certainly a follower of "You inspire your way; I'll inspire mine," I am concerned that all-girls teams may in the long run be a disservice to both the girls and the boys. The vast majority of female students inspired to STEM careers will end up working (at least for the first decade or so) in a predominately male career field. The vast majority of males will end up working with women; I project that a majority will end up working for a woman at some point in their career (indeed, it's quite likely that a woman will be my immediate supervisor within a few months). While I've never been one to actively pursue diversity (more power to those of you who do!), when the opportunity arises I'd much rather embrace diversity than to create a segregated culture. Our latest organizational changes require all team members (and strongly encourage mentors) to contribute on both the technical and business side; among the goals is to better integrate the team across gender lines.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by BSV
So far we are really happy with the model of gender-separated teams for FTC and then merging them together for FRC. It's really let people step into leadership rolls in FTC who would likely not had the opportunity if they did FRC alone -- and then it carries over to FRC. We're only one year in, though. I'll let you know how it turns out a decade from now.  |
If teams and meta-teams find it useful to separate genders
as team members are learning what gender means, that's OK. My point earlier was that by High School, most students understand their gender identity, and we should be moving beyond that towards a team structure that is gender-agnostic. And here's the hard part that I've only learned/accepted in quite recent years: this is true even when the team member's plumbing doesn't agree with the member's identity.