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Re: Girls on FIRST teams
I think there is definitely a stigma on our team about girls, but it's getting better. A girl I know spent three years on the multimedia team (often where girls get pushed) and then her fourth as a machinist/safety captain. She had a pretty strong personality, and I think that other girls haven't had the guts to just stand up and say, "I want to do this!"
Bottom line: girls shouldn't have to work any harder to do what they want. That one's a fault of the guys and the attitudes. A lot of them are unintentional and subconscious. It is harder to accept a girl as "just one of the guys," so to speak.
On the other hand, there's a stigma amongst girls too. I really don't want to believe that girls are "naturally" disinclined toward science, technology, machining, or robots. However, I think if you did a survey, many more girls would call this kind of thing boring, stupid, uninteresting, or (in the case of manual work) dirty. Why is this? Society, women included, has decided that women don't like this kind of thing.
Until we stop talking about "woman engineers" they will always be a novelty. By that I mean that they can't be a spectacle, a statistic, or a quota. They need to do this because they want to, and we (as a whole, women and men) need to accept them because of their skills and enthusiasm, not their gender.
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MORT 11
-2005 New Jersey Regional Chairman's Award Winner
-2006 Palmetto Regional Winner
-2007 New York Regional Delphi Driving Tomorrow's Technology Award
-2008 New Jersey Regional Finalist, Chesapeake Regional Winner, Championship Event Overall Top Seed
HB 2399
-2009 Buckeye Regional Delphi Driving Tomorrow's Technology Award, Pittsburgh Regional GM Industrial Design Award
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