[FRC Blog] Something New - SWE Grant

[Hallry]

Posted on the FRC Blog, 10/31/14: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...-New-SWE-Grant

Something New - SWE Grant

Blog Date: Friday, October 31, 2014 - 08:27

Guest blogging this week is Carla Proulx from FIRST Marketing. Many of you may remember Carla from her FRC days but she is now the FIRST Alliance Manager, cultivating national Strategic Alliance relationships that play a key role in our success by creating teams, engaging mentors and most importantly, helping FIRST reach more students than ever before.

HOLA Teams and thank you Frank for the opportunity to share some exciting news with the FRC community.

I’m pleased to announce a brand new grant that is now open and available to both rookie and veteran FRC teams in the USA. Through the generosity of the Motorola Foundation and in collaboration with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), this grant is meant to distinguish teams in the FRC program for their efforts in creating (rookie) or maintaining (veteran) team gender equality while additionally recognizing a woman driver within their ranks for her qualifications to represent the team in such an important capacity.

Additional details:

• Grant is in the amount of $1,000;
• Grant is eligible for re-grant and can be used for 2nd events;
• Submission deadline is 11:59PM EST on Friday, November 14th, 2014; and
• Email notification of grantees will be on November 21st, 2014.

The detailed qualifications/requirements along with the link to apply can be found here:

https://usfirst.submittable.com/submit/2b4381a2-e4a7-45f7-944f-55b52b5c4e07

FIRST is thrilled to collaborate with SWE on this groundbreaking grant and look forward to receiving team applications. Questions regarding this grant should be directed to submittable@usfirst.org and teams should reference SWE Grant.

Good Luck!

Carla

About SWE

For more than six decades, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has been the driving force that establishes engineering as a highly desirable career aspiration for women. A not-for-profit educational and service organization, SWE empowers women to succeed and advance in those aspirations and receive the recognition and credit for their life-changing contributions and achievements as engineers and leaders. Visit www.swe.org to learn more about this valued Strategic Alliance.

[Lil' Lavery]

The driver requirement is leaving me scratching my head. Why must "driver" be the leadership position they chose for this grant? There are plenty of other high profile leadership positions on a team, many of which carry far greater responsibility than driver. Not to mention, many teams don't select their drivers for the upcoming competition season in November, so applying for this grant would handicap their ability to select drivers later down the line.

Seems like a silly requirement for an otherwise good grant.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

The driver requirement is leaving me scratching my head. Why must "driver" be the leadership position they chose for this grant? There are plenty of other high profile leadership positions on a team, many of which carry far greater responsibility than driver. Not to mention, many teams don't select their drivers for the upcoming competition season in November, so applying for this grant would handicap their ability to select drivers later down the line.

Seems like a silly requirement for an otherwise good grant.

I've had a couple of discussions elsewhere online on this one too. I'm going to copy/paste what I've said elsewhere with some edits for wording/clarity, but whatever. Here goes...

--

Being totally honest here, I think this is pretty poorly defined and SEVERAL steps backwards.

1) Requiring a female driver. Why? If a driver is good they're on drive team, it shouldn't matter their gender. (This is my same point about everything on teams. Be special because you're useful, not because you're female.) Also, being a robot driver doesn't necessarily make you a leader, but it does make you a joystick monkey. Require a female captain if you're going for leadership; and even then, it’s a silly idea. Good concept, bad execution.

The problem with this is teams will just throw a female human player in there for the free money. "How many matches does the 'token girl' have to be in for me to get my grant?" Will most teams do this? Hopefully not, but it's an easy way to game the system, and a super-ineffective way of getting women to be actual leaders.

2) The 50/50 ratio. What about teams that are 51/49? 40/60? Do I need exactly 25 male and 25 female students to qualify? Where's the cutoff for 'roughly half and half'. Again, this doesn't do much for actually encouraging women in engineering, it just encourages women on the roster. Not every student on a FIRST team is a robot-centric person, and that's okay too! Not to mention, some teams may have already solidified their roster, so there's not much they can do about that qualification anymore.

The only thing I really do like about this is teams having a plan for encouraging diversity. IMO, the qualification for this grant should be the 'best'/most effective diversity initiatives and not 'throw a girl in your team's spotlight so you can get some money'. We have enough of a team-culture-issue accusing teams of that already without this grant aggravating the problem.

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by Libby K

Being totally honest here, I think this is pretty poorly defined and SEVERAL steps backwards....

+1 on this. Thank you for articulating a viewpoint with which I wholeheartedly agree.

In order to meet the 50/50 criteria, I have to cut half of my team or 2/3 of the boys. Frankly, $1000 isn't worth that, nor is it worth the addition of 32 more people (girls or boys) to a large roster. Also, what if a team is 100% girls? Do they not qualify because it's not a 50/50 split? Is the SWE organization insightful enough to know what names are girls' and boys' names from a roster?

Last year, 2/3 of our top leadership spots were females, even though the team was 1/3 girls. Last year's human player was a female - does that count as a driver? 2 years ago, the girl who eventually became team captain was drive coach - does that count as a driver?

We run programs in the elementary and middle school level to encourage girls to develop STEM skills and gain an interest in pursuing technical education/careers. Does that count for something?

[cadandcookies]

I'm sure for the teams that qualify, this will be a nice source of funding, but I'm not sure many will, and I also don't entirely understand the rationale behind some of the requirements-- if a team is 50/50, isn't it a decent assumption that they're already pretty solid in terms of recruitment diversity and awareness of the issue? It seems to me like two grants were mashed together to make this one-- one for teams pursuing gender equality in their team and another for those who achieved it.

I do however applaud SWE and FIRST for putting this together-- it's always nice to see new partner organizations and funding sources appear.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Libby K

The problem with this is teams will just throw a female human player in there for the free money. "How many matches does the 'token girl' have to be in for me to get my grant?" Will most teams do this? Hopefully not, but it's an easy way to game the system, and a super-ineffective way of getting women to be actual leaders.

Agreed. They don't really define how this will be enforced other than saying pit admin will "verify" it. Let's also theoretically say that 'someone' will verify it during a match. What if my female driver happens to be a chairman's presenter and is missing that match? What if, assuming we need a female driver for all of our events, she ends up being unable to attend an event?

"Driver" being the distinction for a female leadership sounds very arbitrary when there are other (and, arguably more significant) leadership positions that a girl can hold on a team.

[ebarker]

Our team has a solid and positive record on diversity issues, with a solid track record of converting non-prior inclined young women into pursuing engineering and science careers. We send more girls than boys into engineering. The girls are dominate in most every aspect of the team.

We are doing well regarding diversity. For several reasons this initiative is too flawed as it currently exists. Having said that, we will not be submitting for this grant.

I'll discuss it offline if needed.

Ed

[AdamHeard]

By essentially only rewarding those that already meet a final goal, change isn't promoted.

As written, this grant doesn't really encourage teams to shift towards these goals.

Not the most efficient way to throw money around.

[ehfeinberg]

[quote=Lil' Lavery;1407044]The driver requirement is leaving me scratching my head. Why must "driver" be the leadership position they chose for this grant? There are plenty of other high profile leadership positions on a team, many of which carry far greater responsibility than driver./QUOTE]

Who are the four most visible, photographed, video taped, etc... members on any FRC team? The two drivers, the human player, and coach.

FIRST doesn't just want women to have a high profile leadership position on the team, they want women to have a high visibility position on the team. If is 50-50 men to women, but all the drivers/coach/human players are all men, then to an outsider it would look like the team is mostly comprised of men. Having a woman on the drive team would help provide the visibility to outsiders to show that FRC is not just for males.

I am not saying that I think the implementation will be effective, but it accomplishes what the Society of Women Engineers wants to accomplish, making women a highly visible feature of FRC.

[Katie_UPS]

What would teams prefer be the criteria for this award?

[waialua359]

The grant is a great opportunity to promote women in STEM.
Its too bad we cant meet or agree with some of the requirements, even though we fully support diversity in our program.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

What would teams prefer be the criteria for this award?

Something along the lines of measurable attempts at progress, versus already achieving a goal (that could easily be unachievable by some of the best programs by circumstances outside their control).

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Something along the lines of measurable attempts at progress, versus already achieving a goal (that could easily be unachievable by some of the best programs by circumstances outside their control).

I don't really have opinion on this one way or the other, but what is a realistic way to measure this? Number of girl scout events attended? A graph showing the female ratio on team over time for the previous x years?

Do we want to base this grant on feelings or data? Do teams have to include an essay outlining their attempts? Should there be any minimal requirements (such as x% female)?

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

By essentially only rewarding those that already meet a final goal, change isn't promoted.

Presumably, this grant will exist for more than one season, giving teams a carrot to strive towards when it comes to promoting gender diversity.

Originally Posted by ehfeinberg

Who are the four most visible, photographed, video taped, etc... members on any FRC team? The two drivers, the human player, and coach.

FIRST doesn't just want women to have a high profile leadership position on the team, they want women to have a high visibility position on the team. If is 50-50 men to women, but all the drivers/coach/human players are all men, then to an outsider it would look like the team is mostly comprised of men. Having a woman on the drive team would help provide the visibility to outsiders to show that FRC is not just for males.

I am not saying that I think the implementation will be effective, but it accomplishes what the Society of Women Engineers wants to accomplish, making women a highly visible feature of FRC.

Do you know that visbility is what SWE wants to accomplish? Are you certain that FIRST/SWE are prioritizing visibility over experience and responsibility? I feel that's a big assumption to make.

Secondly, you mentioned four people in your description, "two drivers, the human player, and coach." The grant only calls out "drivers." Does having a female human player or coach count? What if the female coach is a mentor?

While the drivers are the highest visibility at the event, many teams have higher visibility individuals during the rest of the year (aka the vast majority of the time). Team captains, lead mentors, PR members, and presenters will likely have a much higher visibility within their school and community than the drivers will (assuming they're different individuals).

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

What would teams prefer be the criteria for this award?

They already have a useful one in terms of the diversity plan they're asking for. Most importantly, I would like better definitions of the requirements (namely 50/50 and drivers) and an expansion of the driver requirement to team leadership.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Something along the lines of measurable attempts at progress, versus already achieving a goal (that could easily be unachievable by some of the best programs by circumstances outside their control).

I would agree. I've been asked several times by judges at competitions if we are an "all girl team" because the pit is often staffed with girls since they are some of the most dedicated students on the team and in positions of leadership. It used to be that we were a 20-30 student team and we had a roughly 50/50 ratio but now we are are 60+ student team and our ratio is more like 65/35. I think we take an amazing number of female students compared to most teams but we are no where near achieving this and I can't fathom putting our team at risk of winning an event by committing in November to have a female driver when it remains to be seen who the best student for that role is (Keeping in mind that our driver who won the off-season event this past Saturday was a freshman female driver. WOOO!).

I love that we have a lot of female students and I always want to see more of them but I'm not sure the conditions for this grant are going to generate more of them for most teams.