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Discrimination vs. Lack of Interest
I am a female and heavily involved in FIRST, but I bearly touch the robot during build season. Just because of my personality and nature, I enjoy the organizing, spirit, awards, fundraising, and other "people aspects" of a FIRST team... and sometimes I consider myself exemplifying the "FIRST female stereotype."
(Nowadays I do everything but the actual designing and building on the robot... but it isn't uncommon to see me in the machine shop helping out. But if you think about it, I give the people who DO build the robot a big advantage because then they don't have to worry about such things. You can't have one group without the other.)
My point, we all would like to see more girls designing, testing, and machining on FIRST teams, and girls are not uncapable of doing such things... but the in most cases the interest just isn't there.
Unfortunately, females in the world today are mostely raised to do 'girly' things. I wouldn't say that it's because of discrimination that there are not many girls are on FIRST teams, if a girl came to a team and told them that she was interested in the robot or already had skills... I'm sure the team would be more than happy to accept them.
It's only when the mentors know they're qualified and still refuse to let them show off their skills that I'd call it discrimination.
I believe that unless there is a drastic change in the American culture, there will NEVER be a 50/50 ratio between guys and girls on FIRST teams. The only way that there could be is to reverse descriminate against guys... which is also wrong.
Ok, so I've just babbled for a little while too long... last year I tried to get my sister to join FIRST, and I learned that it's IMPOSSIBLE to drag anyone on a team unless they have a personal interest in doing robotics.
There are many things that girls can do on a team, it's just unfortunate that most of them won't want to build the robot.
That's the fact... accept it
(But congradulations to all the girls out there who break the stereotype! Keep spreading the word and the enthusiasm of being techy's... and maybe a culture change will occur someday)
ByE
erin
p.s. I'm not completely mechanically inept... I am doing well as a Mechanical Engineering student. I just agree with the more experienced guys on my team that they have the better ideas when it comes to building robots... lol
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