We, as a team, have grown quite a lot over the past few years in terms of female involvement. Awhile back, the team started a female recruitment initiative, and it really paid off. We're quite proud of our 60/40 male to female percentage. While not all are involved in the mechanical section of team involvement, many have been introduced to the joys of engineering through FIRST.
We are lucky enough to have many female coaches, and an engineer who serve as role models for the girls on the team. I may not have contributed to building the big robot (as I'm more of the single member of the web team), but my interest in engineering was spiked enough so that I bought a VEX kit and work to build rather complex VEX 'bots in my spare time. I now work over the summer with two of our coaches helping teach a robotics class to 8th and 9th graders in an advanced studies program. This would have never come about if I had not joined the team.
So there may still be the view where the women take the homely jobs and the men work in math and science, but that's changing...fast. Because of FIRST, and similar programs, more and more females are being introduced to these exciting areas. We should never be told we can't do something because society says so.
(We are women, hear us roar!)
We can only hope that this growth in interest will continue far into the future.
I also have to add that we are quite lucky to have these opportunities. Women in the 50s and earlier didn't have much of a chance to experiment in any scientific fields. In the present, women can be anything they want to be, including scientists, politicians, and even engineers. Wonderful programs like FIRST plant that seed in the young minds of the future. Even if these minds don't become great engineers, they could cure cancer, discover how cell signaling specializes young cells to make organs and tissue, or help people live longer and healthier.
FIRST is the starting point, the point from which we all start and all make our push towards a bigger and brighter future.
I've kind of gone off on a tangent, so I best stop.
