Female Captains and Girls on FRC Teams

[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.

7 of our 20 team members are girls and 1 of our 5 mentors is female.

Out of four student leadership roles (CAD, construction, controls, and communications), two are held by females (including myself). Our team makes a point to make sure that each team member gets to spend some time with each sub-team, regardless of gender. You might be wiring the robot one hour and helping with CAD the next or walking into the shop to take photos only to find yourself drilling a hole in a component.

Comments geared towards the girls on our team are generally positive, one of my favorites coming from our head mentor on our open house/robot reveal day: "You ladies look wonderful all fancied up; it shows that you can be techy and still stunning."

[runneals]

I just came across this post in the Washington Post that was posted on the Goldie-Blocks page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-gender-roles/
Thought it was perfect post for this thread.