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Originally Posted by smitikshah
I think by recognizing that there is a disparity between genders in leadership positions will help us move forward and address those issues by their root causes.
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I agree, the issue here is root causes and future efforts, and what we need are hypotheses and more complete data.
For instance, 1640 is another team in which women are traditionally equally or over-represented in merit-based STEM leadership positions. I'm drawn to the hypothesis that this has to do with the baseline difficulty of joining and staying in a male-heavy environment and discipline. I thus wonder how common the over-representation phenomenon is, and I'd be interested in studies that scientifically test hypotheses like it.
If this hypothesis has merit, there are major actionable recruitment implications. On its face the ability to encourage representative STEM leadership in young women would seem indicative of a team's success in that area--but in fact it could point to extreme gender differences in attrition and recruitment. We could be losing countless girls on the margins that might have joined if they were male. There many stones like this that we cannot afford to leave unturned, and we cannot properly assess our ability to foster STEM involvement and leadership across both genders without accounting for variables like these.
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Originally Posted by smitikshah
As a woman in STEM, and one that loves engineering, I don't find the lack of women in STEM due to how people are treating us per say. I don't think that kind of oppression exists, especially in the FRC community.
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There are 78,000 students in FRC this year and 3.4 billion women on Earth. Please don't make such sweeping generalizations. I personally had an older mentor discourage me from STEM as an FRC student, not to mention a few male students. I've handled many cases like this from other FRC girls. And treatment outside FRC? Whoa. I hate to say this, but give it time as you grow up. (You're a full decade younger than me.)