Request for data on impact of FIRST for Women in Technology

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Joshua Lynn

Since there is absolutely no reason to think that young women can't be bright and talented, yet they are statistically underrepresented on our team as well as in engineering, one can only conclude there is an untapped resource pool that could be of benefit to all.

I'll throw in my "two cents" here, having worked with an all-girls team for 6 years now. The team comes from a private all-girls catholic high school, and the students are all incredibly bright, motivated and involved. That presents our first problem, as a team: students are involved in so much other "stuff" that they often can't fit robotics into their after school schedule. As a result, out team remains at about 20 members every year, and hasn't been able to grow (I know for a fact of at least several interested students in every grade that don't join because of other commitments).

When the students come in, they don't know anything about building a robot. It's not an exaggeration to say we have to teach them how to hold and use a drill, and go through every item in our tool box. Once we get past that initial learning curve, I'd put my students up against any other students in FIRST for capability though.

But, that learning curve is steep. As a kid, I followed my dad around when he did projects around the house. For fathers day when I was 10, my grandfather and I built my dad a new work bench, complete with shelving and cabinets. In cub scouts, I built pinewood derby cars, bird houses, and the like. I played with Lego's. I build model airplanes and model cars. In short, I grew up building things and working with my hands.

On the flip side, my sister grew up playing with dolls (not to use a stereo type, but its true). She was in girl scouts, but that focused on selling cookies and arts and crafts. She didn't build anything. She wasn't hands on, and didn't know how to use a drill.

There's a cultural image we all share of what a girl is "supposed" to be like growing up, and what a boy is "supposed" to be like growing up. That image is changing, but it doesn't happen over night. How do you combat and change that cultural bias?

Looking at two backgrounds that are so extremely different in this area, how do you interest both in robotics? How do you overcome the the fear one might have of not knowing what to do? How do you give girls the confidence that they'll catch on quickly and soon surpass the abilities of the boys on their team?

When you do get girls to show up, how do you put them on a level playing field with guys that have so much more experience, just from growing up in our current culture? How do you spend the time bringing a student who doesn't know the tools up to speed, without completely boring the student who does?

When you have an environment with such drastic background differences as these, you end up with the "more experienced" group running the show and naturally pushing the less experienced back in order to "get things done on time". It's mostly not something that's done consciously, or something that is necessarily all that obvious. But when you have two people standing at the robot and one knows what needs to be done and how to do it based on previous experience and the other doesn't, one will just start working while the other stands there and watches. Add to that a gender difference and the normal hormones of high school students, and it can be tough to jump in and work side by side.