[hstanger]

As a female mentor and engineering student, I can affirm these are definitely issues for women in STEM, along with many other issues.

The suggestions I see on here are great. But there is one recommendation I would add: teams need to seek out female mentors! There are interactions that female mentors are more likely to pick up on and they provide some insight into these issues. Female mentors also set role models for their female students and give male students another opportunity to interact with females in an engineering role before they are in college or the workplace.

And I would say also to keep conversations focused robotics as much as possible to prevent both parties from focusing on appearance (whatever they choose to talk about at lunch is different, but not while the team works). And make sure female members are just as willing to get in there and work on the robot, they can pick up a drill for themselves and don't need someone to load the drill bit in for them, etc.