Quote:
Originally Posted by alipdx
I am a team parent and I was very disappointed that during opening ceremony at Championship, the male winners of the Dean's List award received hand shakes and the female winners received hugs. I found this extremely disrespectful to the women and very unprofessional. I wrote to FIRST about it and received this completely unacceptable excuse:
"...What could not be seen on the screen or from the stands was that nearly all of the young women award winners approached the stage with jubilation and tears of joy. From that perspective, the response of these three caring gentlemen seemed appropriate..."
I was actually in disbelief when I read this. The "caring gentlemen" were justified to comfort the emotional women by hugging them? Plenty of the young men I saw "approached the stage with jubilation," yet they were not hugged.
I'm not sure what to do from here. I was hoping for a much better response like...Thanks for calling that to our attention, we will amend that policy immediately and treat all genders equally, since that is what we advocate for in our programs.
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While I understand your frustration as valid and agree that FIRST could (read: should) be more understanding and informed, I'm really not sure that the hug/handshake thing had much to do with gender.
I won Dean's List in 2014, and after reading this post I was trying to remember what we all had done. I know I (embarrassingly/frantically) shook hands with everyone on stage. I remembered all the others doing the same. So I looked up the awards ceremony from that year (
https://youtu.be/ttBLdXXgxrc?t=36m41s) and turns out, it was pretty much hand shakes all around.
I also looked up 2015, after the Dean's List Ceremony got moved to the big stage (
https://youtu.be/RWoLpRCP7Iw). Here, Dean hugs everyone, while Don switches between hugs/high fives/hand shakes and Woodie switches between hand shakes/hugs. I think with most of the students and besides with Dean hugging everyone, most of the students initiated the hug/hand shake, but maybe others see something different.
I couldn't find video for this year, and while I watched the ceremony, I can't recall exactly what happened.
My closing point is that I think a lot of it has to do with how a person is, not necessarily what gender they present. Some people like hugs, some people don't, and the precedence of what is 'correct' on the stage, I think, changes from year to year based on the group, what the first person does, etc..
(That being said, as mentioned in many threads before, FIRST & STEM have problems with including/welcoming young women, definitely agree with you there.)