Team recruitment

[GeeTwo]

Here are three recent threads on recruitment, two of which actually focus on recruiting girls:

• Girls on Teams
• Recruiting Girls
• Recruitment

One of the most effective means of recruiting any minority (gender, racial, lifestyle, whatever) is to do a targeted recruitment of one charismatic or well-spoken person of that group, and encourage and support that person in recruiting more. (This is in addition to continued efforts on other fronts, of course!) Try to get a female mentor, preferably somebody who's a professional in STEM, as well, and get her to as many of your recruiting events as possible, as well as technical sessions.

We've been pretty successful recruiting girls on our team, but the retention rate is not nearly as good as for boys; we think this is partially due to a lack of female technical mentors and partially due to girls' greater likelihood of giving up an activity when the personal drama gets to be too much. We try to keep drama to a minimum in any case; we discourage dating within the team, and will rearrange work crews to give couples some space from each other in the team setting when it does occur.