Gender Equality: A Work in Progress

[Carolyn_Grace]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

In the beginning of the year we do demonstrations of what we do. From there we have them decide (boys and girls) what team they want to be on. Simple as that. I wish there were more girls on our team into engineering but most of our female members would rather write an essay then drill a hole. There are the exceptions like our engineering vp who is a girl and we have a freshman member who doesn't come much but when she does she goes around the robot and cleans everything up (she's a perfectionist).

So you have a freshman girl who prefers to clean than participate in robot build?

Have you ever thought that maybe that's what she is comfortable doing. Perhaps her tendency to be a perfectionist is what is keeping her back from asking to help with the robot. She may be afraid to mess it up.

When I first started on my team as a student, I had the opportunity to drive the robot. That act promptly broke something on it. I immediately felt awful, thinking I had done something wrong. What helped to shape the rest of my FRC career was one mentor telling me, non sarcastically, "Nice job. Better to break something here than on the field at competition. Now we know what to fix..." and then inviting me over to see what we could do about it.

I, too, was a student who liked a clean shop and would clean around the robot. It was my way of seeing, from a safe distance, what others were doing, learning about tools, and becoming comfortable in the shop.

Now I still prefer to write (heck, I'm an English teacher), but I'm just as capable and comfortable with tools as many of my male counterpart mentors, and I am more capable at strategy than most of them. Thanks 33, for pushing me outside the box of "Girls like writing and cleanliness."