[smurfgirl]

When I joined the ÜberBots in the fall of 2005, there were three other girls on the team (of 24 students total). No one really discriminated against us. One of the girls worked a lot with the mechanical side of the robot, one was the head of spirit, one didn't spend a lot of time at robotics, and I was involved with team/physical organization. For competitions, I was a coach and one of them was a driver. That type of diversity in a small portion our team seemed to be proportional to what you would see if you sampled four other people from the whole team.

However, the female population on our team has grown. We have about 10-12 girls on a team of 35-40 this year, and a similar situation last year with slightly smaller numbers for each part. As I see more girls joining the team, I hear them saying things like "I can't help build the robot because I don't know anything about tools. I'm a girl, remember?" It's really disheartening to hear things like this.

At the same time, the one freshman girl on the team last year who did take a big part in the mechanical design of our robot was congratulated for what she did, since "not enough girls are involved in robotics and engineering fields". People commented on the fact that I am the team president this year because "we don't many women in leadership positions". This was upsetting to me, because it seems as if we only got special attention because we were girls.

In some sense, I feel as if the same kind of inherent prejudices against women are still an underlying factor in our judgment in Western society. Since women were once shunned from the kind of positions we can find ourselves in now, we haven't fully "gained our ground back", and are still more rare than men in the same type of positions. This smaller concentration is what causes girls to be singled out, often unfairly.