[Steven Smith]

I'll take a gamble at addressing a few of these. Please take a second to consider that I'm really not trying to say you are "wrong" but to just give you an alternative way to look at it. You are obviously as entitled to your opinions as I am to disagree with them.

Spout all theory y'all want, but we're engineers, and we know that theory doesn't hold up in the real world and we must deal with it. The best way is to practice. The worst thing to do to a budding engineer is to give them a false sense of what reality is. I have never coddled, and will never coddle my students- whether it's about discrimination, workload, etc.

As an engineer, I'm often asked to look at a data set and explain outliers. In my case (and I know you weren't specifically referencing my post), I really wasn't trying to "spout theory", as much as try to explain a known outlier (% of women in engineering), with a combination of what I've read and heard (theory) with what I see (experience. Many of the things I have read do seem to show their head in the real world, and industry.

You use the term "coddling" in a negative way, which is defined as "to treat tenderly; nurse or tend indulgently; pamper". I would argue that almost every FIRST student has been coddled in some way, and the entire purpose of FIRST is to "coddle" students by providing them a safe space to grow their skills. If you would like to not be coddled, we could make it to where if a team loses a regional, the team folds, the members lose their jobs, they lose their houses and belongings. We could make it such that at every season, you do a performance review of the your team and the bottom 10% are laid off. I don't think trying to make FIRST "more like the real world" in the sense of making it more harsh and "survival of the fittest" is fair, when the world (engineering) currently defines the "fittest" as male, regardless of other attributes.

Why is the burden on the girls to integrate with the boys anyway? History? Why is it that if a girl wants to be an engineer, SHE has to learn to work in a system that tries to push her out. What have we done as boys to earn that luxury of king of the hill. No one is arguing that women should be sheltered and protected their entire lives from working with the boys, and/or that they will never have to do so. It is literally a single event, for a weekend, where the girls can see firsthand that all that is amazing about FIRST can be run by girls. They are not going to go start an FRC for Girls league to get away from the boys, they are going to better integrate into the existing FRC program by stepping up for that lead volunteer role, or pit crew lead, or try out as a driver when they wouldn't have before.

(This is about the direction I feel FIRST is going in in general. I feel there's too much hype and superficiality and quite frankly, disconnect from industry in general...)

If you are referring to the push for increased diversity and/or encouraging women in STEM, then I would strongly disagree about a disconnect from industry, being involved in a large multinational company for years and being directly involved with our corporate citizenship and university recruiting teams to witness what/why the policies are. It is not to check a box, it is not to win awards in magazines... it is because a diversity of people brings a diversity of thought and new solutions and ultimately makes us a stronger company. The companies that understand this will benefit.

Someone mentioned that so many females leave STEM fields after joining. Even if bucking up female involvement is a goal, is false advertising somehow NOT hampering retention?

If the thing driving women away from engineering is the feeling that it is a boys club and they are not welcome, then yes, you are correct, advertising upfront that girls aren't welcome will improve retention. Only the most dedicated girls and confident girls will enter in the first place and are more likely to stay. However, retention isn't the sole issue, it is also encouraging girls to join in the first place and give it a try. In that case, instead of advertising that FIRST isn't for them to improve retention, I'd advocate for improving the root issue, by making them feel welcome, valued and respected after they join.

Personally, I just want more freaking great engineers. I don't care what they look like.

I agree. I just hope you realize that there are probably alot of potential freaking great future engineers that never discover they would have been one, because society told them they weren't welcome.

Karthik, everyone seems to be up in arms about the lack of female representation in engineering. In my opinion, that ostracizes men more than anything else. The very graph you posted shows fields with almost no males, and nobody seems to be upset that there aren't more male kindergarent teachers. At the same time, I don't see anyone complaining that men almost completely fill the most grueling jobs on this list. This isn't a very good argument for "equality".

Choosing to focus a discussion on a subset of a problem does not mean we immediately accept every other problem as "solved". You give the example of kindergarden teachers, I'll add to the example nurses. Nursing is a huge need and a growing field, one that historically men have not been involved in as heavily. I have friends that went into nursing, and there is a degree of "lulz, a male nurse" that is no more acceptable. If a woman wants to be a cement worker, or another physically grueling job, she should be able to. Similarly, there are a lot of other "grueling jobs" on the female side of it, though some perhaps more mentally/emotionally grueling.

There is nothing wrong with this situation. Really, this isn't going against any law or infringing on any of your rights. This is a group of men going out to have fun, it is fully within their right to choose who they want to hang out with. Do you honestly think you have the same definition of fun as them? Both guys and gals like hanging out with people most similar to them, there is nothing wrong with that.

*Smiti, I apologize for speaking about you in the 3rd person and if I'm offbase speak up and I'd gladly edit it out.

Clearly, there was something wrong with the situation to Smiti, which is presumably why she posted it as an example of when she felt excluded. Her example is not the only one, I've seen many others.

Is it illegal? No. Should the "boys" be "forced" to invite the girls, absolutely not... personal liberties and what not. Should her desire to be included necessarily override their desire not to include her... debatable.

However, based on her post, I know that she was in a lab, working with boys, and the collective group of them probably have an interest in materials science. Smiti likely has a number of other interests that overlap with her peers, and she felt that the lack of an invitation meant she didn't "fit in". I honestly think I probably do have enough of the same idea of "fun" as Smiti, as she probably enjoys robots, engineering, and we'd have plenty to talk about over lunch. I actually did an undergraduate study in computation materials engineering and haven't talked about it in 10 years... so she could probably catch me up on cool new things in the field. None of this has anything to do with the fact that she is female and I am male, nor should it in a professional environment. If the sole reason she was excluded was because the boys didn't want to invite a girl, I'd say that it is a shame they missed out on getting to meet another one of their lab mates.