Attracting Females to STEM/FIRST

[Jon Stratis]

Having worked with an all-girls team for the past 8 years, I've had a chance to see some of this in action.

First off, I've heard anecdotally from a teacher involved in FLL that the problem isn't attracting young girls - it's keeping them. From what she's seen, you can get girls involved in FLL very easily, and have large numbers of them. But then they move from elementary to middle school, and lose their connection with the team. They don't have anything at the middle school level to support their interest (at least locally, FLL has primarily been elementary school, and FTC hasn't really gotten big here yet) and so they move on... by the time they get to high school, peer pressure and other interests prevent them from joining an FRC team. As a community, we need to work on capturing students young, and ensure they have a clear path of involvement all the way through to college. Get them into an FLL program, graduate them from there straight to an FTC program (along with all their friends who were in FLL with them), and from FTC to FRC. Don't let there be a gap of a year or two between programs, because that's when you'll lose them.

From my team's experience, sometimes you just need a critical mass of girls. It can be extremely intimidating to be a female walking into a male-dominated team. Last fall my team went to another school in the area and did a promotional demo along side an experienced team from that school. After the demo, the team had a surprisingly large number of girls sign up - the girls just needed to see that they could be successful. They needed to see that girls could be included right alongside the guys, and be just as successful.

As guys in this male-dominated field, we need to be truly inclusive. We need to treat everyone the same, promote those females involved, and ensure we don't leave anyone behind. Girls and boys grow up in very different worlds. I got experience with machines and tools early as part of just being a boy - I build birdhouses and toolboxes in cub scouts, I helped my dad replace light fixtures and run cable around the house, and had all sorts of opportunities to do such "manly stuff". The girls we get in our program don't have those opportunities. We have to teach them how to use a drill and a saw and which way to turn a screw driver.

I think some (many?) coed teams forget this vast difference in backgrounds (and to be clear, the difference can be between anyone, not just male/female... it's just the gender gap that often is most apparent). The boys step in and use their prior experience to push forward and try new things, while the girls get intimidated because they just don't know as much right from the start. We need to make sure we have orientation and training for everyone on the team that starts right from the basics and works its way up. As mentors, we need to constantly push forward those students (regardless of gender) who tend to sit quietly in the back of the room. The biggest success we can have is when a parent comes to us and tells us we truly changed their kids life (for the better), and not just by providing a team, but by the direct interaction we had with that kid.