[Kmo]

Originally Posted by Matt H.

I feel very conflicted posting on this thread. When I became club president this year one of my agenda items was female participation. Perhaps one of the things I most quickly learned was that simply encouraging people to go for it and to be involved does very little in terms of results. I could tell the boys to let the girls have a hand in the projects or encourage the girls to find their own projects, but eventually the girls would inevitably end up in our business area rather than the fab shop.

I found that the best way to remedy this was to simply get a group of girls tell them I needed a part built in x hours and that was their job. When given a "trial by fire" such as this they would excel and doing as such has helped them to become more integrated members of the team. Carl Hayden has taken this philosophy to the next level by having a girls only regional. Having seen those girls I also admired how quickly they learned and improved upon the robot in the pits.

On the converse side of the argument I am very strongly against affirmative action and would prefer to see something along the lines of regulating the boys out of the pits or off the drive team for one regional. This I believe would be a much fair way to achieve the same effect.

Remember you would have to consider the fact of how many students can be taken out of school at one time. Yes that would be interesting to see, but that takes out the whole point of an all girls trip. The trip was meant to push girls into doing something they normally don't do. Sure you can hand a girl a tool and tell her to start working on the robot or any kind of project, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she would follow through. Telling someone to do something is much different from the person actually wanting to do it. If the girls on the team have some kind of motivation I'm sure they would be willing to do whatever the guys do.

Tell me what is FIRST all about? It's about changing the culture, what we decided to do goes beyond to what most people would find unfair. Maybe on some teams the girls are as equal to the guys, that you don't even look at what gender they are just weather they are good at what they do. But that always true on others. Can you honestly tell me that there are more than three girls that work on the robot or something that does not involve scrapbooking, scouting, cheering for the team, and/or going around collecting buttoms or any other item from other teams.