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I'm the only girl on our team of 10. Let's see... what do I do? I design and maintain our website, strategy (the only one), scouting, and I did the chairman's award. When I'm not doing that, I try to help with the robot.
I do a lot for my team; however, I encountered a HUGE problem at regionals this past week. I debated about whether or not I should tell the story, because I didn't want to make my team look bad... but I sort of want everyone's opinion on what I can do about it, because I was extremely offended.
One of our two mentors (and we have no engineer) is an ex-marine who has a completely old-fashioned view of gender roles. He believes that women can not and should not do any sort of labor or manual work, basically. I didn't really know that he felt this way until regionals when we were in close proximity. Every time I attempted to do something in the pit (we had a very cranky, breaking robot), he'd take it away from me or yell at a guy to do it. Now I KNOW that's not in the spirit of FIRST, at all. I confronted him about it, and he still doesn't understand how incredibly insulting and belittling it is when he acts like this. He will continue to treat me like a frail little girl who can't even carry a 5 pound tool box. Short of throwing a temper tantrum in the pits so that every other team will see what a chauvinistic man he is (which I almost did, but then thought better of it), what can I do?
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