What happened to the "Patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism in robotics." thread?

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by E Dawg

We can all work harder at reaching out to girls specifically. I find (at my school) that many girls don't want to join simply because they think it's too "geeky". I find that they think FIRST is a bunch of boys sitting in a cave and never talking to each other.

This has been an issue for us in the past, but as you get more and more girls on the team, it goes away. It's much easier for girls to recruit other girls.

I think it all sort of boils down to the culture you create in your team, and how you introduce new members (in this case, specifically female members) to that culture.

New female members may be hesitant to jump into power tools and robot building, and so may gravitate towards marketing, or spirit, or business/administration departments within the team. I always like to have new members hit the ground running so to speak, have them try to jump into robot design, or our off-season project, or start learning about power tools, just to see how they like it. If it doesn't take, and they want to do marketing and spirit, cool, but at least they tried it.