Female Captains and Girls on FRC Teams

[IronicDeadBird]

We don't distinguish between gender because leadership has nothing to do with thee amount of chromosomes in ones body.

[annabananapi]

Last year, we had a ratio around 3:1 guys to girls. Out of those, five out of seven of our captains were girls. However, many of them graduated. This year, with fewer girls on the team, we have 3 female captains; one is a co-captain (me) and 2 are department captains. I am with fabrication, and I only work with one other girl, which is really sad. I don't feel uncomfortable though. As far as mentors go, we have only 2 women, and they are both on the marketing half of the team. Maybe when I grow up, I'll mentor a team on the fabrication side...

[CaptainDanger]

Hey Rachel,
I'm a girl and I'm build captain, safety captain, and human player on my team. Our electrical captain as well as all the members of the electrical team are females. Our mechanical captain is female, as are about half the members on the mechanical subteam.
Our drive team consists of three girls and 1 boy, so it is mostly females.
Our team has a male to female ratio of about 2:5, so it's almost 50/50 but
I honestly don't think gender has anything to do with how motivated a team member is, I think it comes down to how passionate each member is. The males on your team may just be more passionate/ have different passions than the girls, so that may be why you see them take on stronger leadership roles or work around the robot more.
In terms of your team, perhaps the girls are shy or intimidated by the guys, so maybe team bonding nights (during off-season) could help? That way they could become comfortable with everyone on the team and are more likely to take initiative or step into leadership roles.
Hopefully you can get the girls more involved in the team, but don't pressure them if they'd rather work on something like business or awards, everyone has a different nook and as long as they enjoy being at robotics, that's good

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by rmiko

I've found that a lot of girls who do join the team are less assertive, motivated (whatever you want to call it). There are also far fewer females in leadership positions.

I have also felt that when I, as a female leader, try to be assertive, I get called bossy or catty.

You've touched on a really important point here. There is a social stigma against women leadership, especially in STEM, and women ambitious enough to plow through this stigma have to deal with an extra level of scrutiny that men do not. Your earlier point is probably related to this. Women are already breaking the traditional gender mold a bit by joining a STEM club. Seeking out and pushing for a leadership role invites unwanted scrutiny that students, who are still trying to figure out if STEM is right for them, don't want to deal with.

I don't want to elevate someone just for being female, but I feel this is relevant issue that my team doesn't talk about. Out of our mentors, 3 are male and help with building/designing/programming, 1 is male and helps with administration, and 2 are female and help with administration.

One of the effects of social dynamics, the "leaky pipeline" in STEM, etc. is that by the time professionals make it to the workforce, there are disproportionately fewer women in STEM. This makes the challenge of finding female STEM role models to mentor your team very difficult. I can tell you that having a confident, assertive female engineering mentor can make a world of difference in inspiring certain female students.

I feel like when I go to competitions, I see the same pattern. A handful (at most) of driven females on co-ed teams, and the rest are in supportive roles (not that being in supportive role isn't extremely helpful and useful). There are also very few female mentors, and even fewer technical ones.

I definitely notice this trend too. It's been a problem on my own team as well. We want to definitely be as welcoming as possible, and from what I can tell our work environment and attitudes aren't particularly hostile to women, but few end up joining our club. All of our technical mentorship is male, as has every person who has ever been on the drive team. One year, our team didn't have any female students at all. This year, we have two women on the team, both freshmen, who are some of our most driven and promising new members. I hope we continue to improve.

Teams may be surprised to find that their work environment is more hostile to women than they would ever expect. It doesn't take a lot, honestly. Tolerating sexist jokes, a lack of role models, an over-willingness to push women into the "administrative" roles (media / PR / etc) are all culprits.

By the way, check out this thread. It's a very eye opening look at the way female students are treated in FRC: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/28120

Originally Posted by fox46

I really don't think you have a male/female distinction here. On all teams there is a mix between core members and satellite members. Whether they are male or female in my experience is simply chance. For every group of 20 students there are typically about 5 (this of course is not a rule) who become heavily involved with the team. Motivating more students to become heavily involved is what I consider to be one of the biggest challenges in running a team.

You can't just erase the effects of gender on FRC team dynamics because you don't want to see it that way. This is the kind of thing you have to actively keep an eye out for, as it's really easy for an organization to subconsciously become exclusive.

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

We don't distinguish between gender because leadership has nothing to do with thee amount of chromosomes in ones body.

Gender doesn't either? You're thinking of genetic sex, which is a different thing.

While leadership ability doesn't depend on gender, the social norms and attitudes that affect how different genders are treated matter. Your team isn't immune to these.

[Christopher149]

857 is one of those teams that has had big swings in female membership, and it's always (well, as long as I've been around, anyway) been light (never swinging past 50/50 to a male minority). We've usually had a mostly-to-entirely male mentoring group. The numbers are a bit better this year with 3 girls on the team to about 15 guys. Back in 2010?, we had 5 or 6 girls, and the driver/operator pair was two sisters.

Having more girls might be nice, but we can't fight every battle (inspiring any students, regardless of gender, can be hard enough!).

[JoeWithTheSpecs]

We've got a fair amount of girls on the team this year, 22 girls on a team of 75, both numbers constantly growing with each year. Out of our 15 sub-team leaders, eight are girls. Five are leaders of business teams, and three are leaders of engineering sub teams, although, both of our team captains are guys.

Personally, I don't see a difference in leadership between the girls of the teams and the boys of the team. They all get their teams on task and are hard workers so....

We do have some competitions where a girl drive team is required, so when we go to these girls-only competitions we call the girls on our team "EveBots".

I personally am proud to say that three of my six sisters have been on our team though (with one of them potentially moving to another team in North Carolina once the rest of the family moves).

[ehoyla]

We are proud to say team 1311 is now OVER half females and every leadership position is filled by a female except for one. Our girls are extremely motivated and awesome. I think that the key to motivating girls is to really push them. You have to tell them to do something because they won't do it by themselves. Keep giving them things to do and soon enough they are telling others what to do. Promise it works every time!!

[Spatel7793]

I'm from New York and when I was in high school, there were two teams, 1155 and 2265. One was officially a co-ed team, and there was the all-girls team.

Speaking from experience, this causes a problem. As much as we love to promote STEM for women, having an all girls team creates a bad public image for the brother team. It looks like one team doesn't allow girls and sends them over to the all-girls team. You have to explain to everyone that while yes we are a co-ed team, all the girls are on that all-girls team. It perpetuates the "boys vs girls" feud and personally I think it's stupid.

That being said, I see the benefits of having an all girls team. You can put girls in leadership roles because I will be honest in saying that when I was captain, there were definitely people on my team who didn't respect our sister team. There were no girls on the co-ed team during that time. They automatically went over to the Iron Maidens (2265). On that team, there were pretty good leaders by the time I graduated. During 2010, they even made it to Championships. I myself had a pretty good relationship with 2265 so there were hardly any issues. I even helped them scout during regionals.

As for recruiting more students, there are definitely people on teams that you could do without. And don't give me that self-righteous speech of "Oh you should include everyone...." Out of necessity for members, you have to take in some people who you know could be trouble down the road. If we had had only one co-ed team, a truly co-ed team, I'm certain it would have been fantastic. There were smart, dedicated people of both genders who on a single team would have done well. It's definitely a case of united we stand divided we fall. Divided is just not good.

If the choice is up to me, I don't care whether you're male or female. If you step up, do your part well, and are a good person, you can lead. So what if you're called catty or bossy? It's only because you step up where others do not. They may not like being told what to do, but how else are things going to get done? It's a team game, not a one man or woman army.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Spatel7793

If the choice is up to me, I don't care whether you're male or female. If you step up, do your part well, and are a good person, you can lead. So what if you're called catty or bossy? It's only because you step up where others do not. They may not like being told what to do, but how else are things going to get done? It's a team game, not a one man or woman army.

I like what you said, but this part (emphasis mine) I feel like I needed to respond to.

The problem is that you wouldn't call a guy 'catty' or 'bossy' if he were in charge. You'd call him 'driven' and 'a leader'.

It's a really unfortunate double standard in our society.
There's a great Pantene ad about this that illustrates the point I'm trying to make: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjNcZvwjxI

As a woman, who even as a high school student was a leader on my team and in other subsections of my life, I couldn't print some of the things I've been called just for stepping up and taking care of work that needed to be done. It's part of the culture- within FIRST, and out in the real world too - that we need to change.

Edit:: I have more thoughts on this thread, but I've gotta head to class. Perhaps later.

[Bob Steele]

I didn't really think much about this until I was sitting in our leadership team meeting one day and noticed that of the 8 student leads.... 6 are female.

This includes the overall team student lead and the pit captain...
We are proud that we have a greater percentage of girls on our team than the overall percentage of girls attending our school.

It didn't start that way though... we worked in the first few years to attract more and more girls.

[WaterClaw]

I walk around a lot in the pits and talk to a lot of teams. Some of them are all girl teams. Now, when I evaluate other teams, what I catch onto very quickly is anxiety and tension. We all want to win and react entirely differently to it. With high school students, there will also be an added variable of insecurity from how I'm looking at it. I see it in girls and boys alike.

What you're picking up on I think is a failure to communicate. When talking with the girls of teams in the pits, I can easily see how enthusiasm could be misinterpreted as over confidence or being confrontational. Body language is an art to read into, and one never truly mastered. Actions are different for every person and when you've been talking and taking stock of teams all day, you tend to revert to thinking from only your own perspective and interpretations as a pose to the intended message.

[IronicDeadBird]

Took a while for anyone to notice what was said but now that what I did say was noticed I will admit that leadership roles have nothing to do with what gender you have, if you are an introvert or extrovert, there are all sorts of things that make a good leader. Conformity be darned a leader to me needs a way to sense what is going on, the ability to calmly react, and just competence. Who cares how you get it done as long as you get it done? (I mean within reason we aren't going The Prince in here.)

[Animal Control]

Our Team has 5 female students and all of our coaches are female (3 of them) but there are 28 kids on our team. We have 7 male mentors one female.
So you are not alone.

[gabrielau23]

I'm currently the Strategy Captain for Space RAIDers 2537 (in charge of Drive Team, Scouting, and Season Strategy), but I'm a guy. I can, however, safely say that I wouldn't be where I was right now if it weren't for an extremely influential female lead and Captain. For some reason I still think of her as my captain. Anyway, she had a very strong presence on the team. Very influential and was well respected by everybody. Truly one of the driving forces behind my initial and continued passion for robotics. She didn't really like to back down to much, either. She was super nice and super funny, but she made it clear that nobody was going to push her around. A great role model.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by rmiko

I suppose what I'm asking is, does your team have strong female members?
Any female leaders/captains? mentors?
What is your witnessing the roles of females on your or other teams?
If you are a female on a team, what's your role, how do you feel about it, what do you want to be doing?

I'm just going to give our data point here:
2007: 1 of 2 captains, 2 of 2 drivers
2008: 1/2 captains, 1/1 pit captain, 1/2 drivers
2009: 2/2 captains, 1/1 pit captain, 2/2 drivers
2010: 1/2 captains, 1/2 drivers, 1/1 pit captain; coach
2011: 1/2 captains, 2/2 drivers, 1/1 pit captain; coach, programming head mentor
2012: 1/2 captains, 1/2 drivers, 1/1 pit captain; coach programming head mentor
2013: 1/3 captains, 1/3 drivers, 1/1 pit captain; coach, programming head mentor
2014: 1/2 captains, 2/3 drivers, 1/1 pit captain; coach, programming head mentor

Basically, we've had at least one female captain and driver for the last 8 years, and our pit captain has been a girl for 7 years straight. We've had women in lead robot-centric mentorship roles (in addition to other female mentors) for 5 years. This isn't intentional. We vary maybe 30-50%ish girls, and in selecting [mostly by men] just on merit, they are very over-represented in leadership. In fact, they're well over-represented in technical leadership roles.


The "how" is tricky because we didn't do anything special. We didn't do anything at all--never tried to instigate it, never differentiated, don't actively maintain it, don't recruit for it. And yet, we could ruin it if we tried (not that I would, clearly). For us, our mentors let it happen, and it did.

For myself, since you asked, I'm the '07-'09 driver, '08-'09 captain and pit captain, and '10+ coach listed above. I feel I've achieved the roles I wanted to earn on the team. Anecdotally, I think the over-representation comes from an overall average higher level of organization and attention to, essentially, what needs to get done. As both a student and a mentor, I feel it does help to see girls and women already on the team succeeding. Model your role to your friends/students, and they tend to follow naturally.