Are all girl FIRST team counterproductive to the philosophy of FIRST?

[Jaine Perotti]

Like Kim, this is a topic close to my heart -- as I am also a female engineering student who is close to completing her degree.

There is a false equivalency being presented in the OP's poll question, which asks -- "should exclusive teams be allowed in FIRST?"

The question implies that having a female-exclusive team is equivalent to having a male-exclusive team. Let me ask you this question -- do you think that a team which only includes ethnic minorities is just as discriminatory as a whites-only team?

I sure hope that the answer is no -- as there is a clear difference between starting a team to give a leg-up to underrepresented minority groups, versus starting a team which allows only white students (who already enjoy a great deal of cultural advantage within STEM fields).

Likewise, starting a male-only team only serves to reinforce dominant cultural narratives that engineering/science is meant only for boys. There is already a WHOLE WORLD out there telling young men and boys that -- yes, if you are smart enough and work hard enough -- science and engineering are easily accessible careers for you. To deliberately exclude women from a team (other than by circumstance, such being from an all-boys school) is unequivocally sexist, just as a whites-only team would be unequivocally racist.

But what about the girls? We are not advantaged in the same way men are. All of our young lives have been punctuated with subtle messages that we should leave mechanics and electronics and computers to the guys. Starting literally from day one, media (especially advertising) shows us that girls play with dolls, furry animals, and tea-sets (and generally act passively), whereas boys play with legos, transformers, and nerf-guns (and generally act assertively). Just take a walk down the toy aisles at Toys-R-Us, or watch the advertising on a channel like Cartoon Network that's geared towards children -- it's clear that these ideas about technology and gender are instilled in us from a very young age.

When I was in high school, I ran several Lego League teams and summer camps. One summer, I ran a girls-only camp called RoboCamp for Girlz. We surveyed the students about why they never felt comfortable joining the co-ed Lego League team or summer-camp. The responses were summed up by one particularly memorable quote by one of the girls -- "I was afraid that it would just be taken over by the boys." We have been conditioned since birth to just leave the mechanics/electronics to the guys... and holding our own in those realms can be pretty intimidating sometimes.

Some people have expressed worry that girls-only teams will not prepare girls to work in a mixed-gender environment. I disagree however -- my RoboCamp for Girlz helped the girls build a foundational level of confidence -- such that they had no worries about being pushed aside by the boys once they joined the co-ed team. The boys already had that foundational level of confidence just by virtue of their upbringing. The girls-only program merely served to level the playing field.

I really believe that there is a place for programs which give a leg-up to culturally disadvantaged students. They enable the participants to envision themselves successfully completing engineering challenges, without external judgments about their gender or race weighing them down. One of the hardest things about being a woman in engineering (and probably for ethnic minorities in engineering too) is having your failures being representative of your gender (or race), not who you are as an individual. The following xkcd comic just about sums it up:



-- Jaine