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Originally Posted by nehalita
Just a thought:
After reading these comments, many of which I agree with, I'm making a hypothesis.
There is confidence in numbers.
Boys see other boys doing mechanical work so they feel more invited to do the same.
If there are girls also doing mechanical work, the next girl might feel encouraged, but if there are only boys working on the robot, then the girl would have to break the "invisible barrier". It may be, in fact, that there is no barrier, but to a girl who sees only boys working or designing the robot, they might have a preconditioned barrier of their own to cross.
This could be with anything. What if only girls did the electrical work and always do? I'm sure some boys might hesitate and do something else instead.
Just throwing this out there....
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You should try gathering some statistical data on this problem.
Come up with some type of questionnaire, or a poll asking about girl's interest and participation in science and technology. You can distribute it to your school to come up with some small scale results. If you like the idea, I do recommend making a Chief Delphi white paper out of this, and trying to get as many people as possible involved in the distribution of this poll.
I think it would be pretty neat to get something big like that going, because you would have some solid numbers to work off of. You would also be able to see how girl's perspective on engineering varies throughout different regions of the country, and try to draw some conclusions off of that.
What will this do to help the problem? No idea.. the balls in your court for that one. I just think doing something like this would be a worthwhile undertaking.