[Trying to Help]

I didn't read all the pages in this discussion but maybe my two cents might help.

Erin, robotics shouldn't be the place where you hear sexist jokes all the time. I think we can all remember the one late night when a student says something like "I have a stripper for each hand!" but the number of times that's happened in my nine years of being involved with a team are less than 5. I can only remember two or three but I'll allow that I've forgotten a couple. The point is, it should be so rare that it is something you remember as an anomaly.

If someone went up to another adult and said "Would it be OK to make sexist remarks to you?", you can bet the answer would be NO. (Excluding edge cases, OK?) People should understand that by doing something, they're effectively asking if it's permissible. Your mentors need to get across to all the students that one, it's important to say No and two, no one should be making other students uncomfortable.

Club or team rules should make this clear. And there should be clearly delineated consequences for failing to follow the rules.

I'm glad that I found this thread. I think it's going to be important to reiterate to our students all those rules. And then when we bring in new students, go over them again. When mentors and students are running on five or six hours of sleep for days during a competition, it might be easy to let some details slide. And the details around what's permissible can't be the ones that get dropped.

Brighid