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

[Mikell Taylor]

Alright, so, I can't keep my nose out of gender and engineering threads, so here goes.

Background: I attended an all-girls school for part of middle school and all of high school. That school had an all-girls FRC team that I was a part of (and captained one year), and our mentors were almost exclusively male engineering students from Ohio State. I then went to Olin College, which is about 50/50 male/female, and I'm now a systems engineer and project manager at an 80 person company where I am the only female engineer and the only female project manager.

I understand the frustration at girls-only teams that are sponsored, or supported, by environments that are co-ed. And I think having an all-girls team at the *expense* of giving boys the opportunity is wrong; everyone should get to do FIRST! But fundamentally, whether you're at a co-ed school or a single-sex school, the basic question is, why is an all-girls team a valuable option for a young women interested in FIRST?

True, most of us never got to work on cars with our dads, or had LEGO or Erector Sets as toys, or were encouraged to program, or anything like that. Some of us were even actively discouraged from doing those things, which puts us at a disadvantage against the people -- yes, often boys -- who maybe were more likely to have all that knowledge and experience from an early age. So yeah, that can be intimidating, to know you're walking into that situation.

But let me share some anecdotes from my experiences as a female engineer, and on an all-female FIRST team, surrounded by people -- men -- who are very supportive of me and my passion for robotics. Many of you male commenters are stating that you see "no difference" in how female students on your team are treated, and that many of them are "even better than the guys" at engineering tasks, and "no one makes negative comments." One of you even said "the real world has figured out how to make engineering co-ed, why can't we do it in FIRST?" I applaud each of you for being open-minded and supportive of your female peers, but I'm going to try to explain why things might not always be as they seem.

If you look in the FRC Regional Competition manual you'll notice there's a rule that no one may form a "human tunnel" during the awards ceremony. There's a story behind that. In 2002 my (all-girls) team attended the Midwest Regional at Northwestern. Not only did we make it to the quarterfinals as an alliance partner, my team also won the KPCB Entrpreneurship Award. When we were called up, a human tunnel had already been formed for the award winners to run through. My team ran through. And each of us got our rear ends squeezed, and some girls got touched up front as well. Well, you grope a group of 20 highly opinionated assertive teenage girls, we're going to complain -- and we did. We talked it over with the FIRST staff, committee, and other leadership onsite, who went to go talk to the teams. They agreed to talk with all the lead mentors about the incident and ask them to communicate to the teams that this was entirely unacceptable behavior. After talking with the mentors, several -- from co-ed teams -- went up to the staff member and said, "Oh, I'm glad you said something. A girl (or a couple of girls) on my team experienced the same thing, but I wasn't sure what to do about it."

So think about that. There were girls on co-ed teams, who I'm sure many people thought were great contributors and smart people and "no one treats them differently," but they were, let's face it, harassed at an engineering event and their team leadership, for whatever reason, were unwilling or unable to really deal with this treatment effectively. Had my team of angry girls and very supportive mentors not gone to the Powers that Be to complain loudly about this, no one ever would have known it had happened and these girls could have felt completely marginalized, feeling like their mentors -- the ones who are supposed to be helping them navigate the world of engineering -- weren't willing to stand up for them when they were treated inappropriately just because of being female.

I'm lucky now, even though my company doesn't have many other women, to at least be working with men who are open-minded, progressive, and many of whom are even married to female engineers, so my gender is very much a non-issue at work. And yes, if I felt I were treated inappropriately, with the right documentation, escalation to management, possible legal battles, etc, someone could be fired for treating me that way. However, that doesn't stop visitors to my company from hitting on me after a presentation I give, or telling me I should have a "dream job" like their wives where I can stay at home, or having customers asking obviously leading questions about my experience and background to determine whether they think I'm qualified to be in a leadership position I'm in (when I can clearly observe they're not asking these questions of my similarly aged male colleagues). These things all happen on a regular basis. And it sucks. The real world does not have the co-ed thing figured out by any means.

But thank god, thank god, I started my engineering career through FIRST, with a group of young women who supported each other and encouraged each other, with great male mentors who understood the challenge women face and who worked hard to give us the skills and experience we'd need to be competitive with anyone and everyone. Thank god I had the opportunity to realize, in a safe, supportive environment, how much I absolutely love the world of robotics and how important it is to me to make great things happen. Thank god I know I love it, because if all I knew was that I regularly got treated like crap because of being a woman, well, I'd be out of here pretty quick.

It is getting better. My mother was one of the first women allowed to be hired into a male-dominated environment (the Air National Guard) and she had it much worse than I did. My life is easy compared to what she went through. But it ain't over yet, and unfortunately, that means things like all-girls teams are still necessary if we want to help even out the playing field.

So. The moral of the story is, there is a reason all-girls teams exist. They are not for everyone. One poster mentioned that she thought she was better working with men for having had a co-ed team experience; for me, it's the opposite. I think I'm more assertive, more confident, and more daring in my primarily male office for having had the experience of building all that confidence in an environment that was more comfortable. Not every school can or should offer an all-girls team, but I think for those who can, if it is an option, it can be a very, very valuable one.

Also, just to throw my opinion on another pile: all of the above said, I still really, really hate it when the judges or game announcers make a point of saying that a team is an all-girls team.