What's the gender demographic of your team leadership?

[smitikshah]

Originally Posted by Pauline Tasci

Honestly,
In a way this thread is backtracking on everything women have STEM have worked for.

We want to be recognized as just engineers.
Not these special creatures that need to be shown in a public eye.

Defining your leadership based on gender IS NOT moving the fight for equality forward

It makes the gap larger.

I think by recognizing that there is a disparity between genders in leadership positions will help us move forward and address those issues by their root causes.

As a woman in STEM, and one that loves engineering, I don't find the lack of women in STEM due to how people are treating us per say. I don't think that kind of oppression exists, especially in the FRC community.

I just think it's the lack of women currently in the community, due to girls traditionally not thinking of it as their place. Now by showing the world how females can be such great STEM leaders, it helps to show girls what they can do. I don't think it really has to do with putting us in such a public eye, but more with inspiring younger generations.

I think by recognizing females in the community as the leaders they are will help boost long term female enrollment, closing that gap.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by smitikshah

I think by recognizing that there is a disparity between genders in leadership positions will help us move forward and address those issues by their root causes.

I agree, the issue here is root causes and future efforts, and what we need are hypotheses and more complete data.

For instance, 1640 is another team in which women are traditionally equally or over-represented in merit-based STEM leadership positions. I'm drawn to the hypothesis that this has to do with the baseline difficulty of joining and staying in a male-heavy environment and discipline. I thus wonder how common the over-representation phenomenon is, and I'd be interested in studies that scientifically test hypotheses like it.

If this hypothesis has merit, there are major actionable recruitment implications. On its face the ability to encourage representative STEM leadership in young women would seem indicative of a team's success in that area--but in fact it could point to extreme gender differences in attrition and recruitment. We could be losing countless girls on the margins that might have joined if they were male. There many stones like this that we cannot afford to leave unturned, and we cannot properly assess our ability to foster STEM involvement and leadership across both genders without accounting for variables like these.

Originally Posted by smitikshah

As a woman in STEM, and one that loves engineering, I don't find the lack of women in STEM due to how people are treating us per say. I don't think that kind of oppression exists, especially in the FRC community.

There are 78,000 students in FRC this year and 3.4 billion women on Earth. Please don't make such sweeping generalizations. I personally had an older mentor discourage me from STEM as an FRC student, not to mention a few male students. I've handled many cases like this from other FRC girls. And treatment outside FRC? Whoa. I hate to say this, but give it time as you grow up. (You're a full decade younger than me.)

[abigailthefox]

Our team membership consists of ~25% girls this year, which is way down from last year. Most of last year's outgoing seniors were female, which brought down the percentage quite a bit for this year. Also, we did major recruitment last year, and our team is larger than it's ever been, but most of the new recruits were male (some females, but many stopped coming due to involvement in other activities).

That said, our leadership is predominantly female.

Leadership positions:
Team Captain: female
Mechanical Lead: female
Programming Lead: female, male
Media Lead: male
Strategy Lead: female
Social Media Lead: female
Safety Lead: female
Communications Lead: female

7/8 of our leadership positions were female. Our leads are chosen by nominations, elections, and confirmation by our lead mentor, so girls don't have positions just because they're girls.

I would attribute this partly to the higher maturity levels of girls in high school, at least on our team. Many of the boys who sought positions, and weren't elected remain bitter and upset about it...nearly a year later. Overall, I would say on our team, girls bring a higher level of maturity and dedication to the team, and therefore win lead positions.

Additional Info:

Drive team:
Driver: male
Manipulator: female
Human Player: male
Drive Coach: male

Last year's leadership:
Leadership positions:
Team Captain: female, male
Mechanical Lead: female
Programming Lead: male
Media Lead: female
Safety Lead: female
Communications Lead: male

A little more balanced, 4/7 were female. The drive team makeup last year was demographically identical to this year (including respective positions).

[Chief Hedgehog]

4607 is 40% female and leadership is 50/50.

[abigailthefox]

Reading through these posts gives me some ideas. Would anyone be willing to take a survey on their team demographics? I'm interested in seeing some relationships, and looking at some of the theories proposed here.

[bmoore]

Originally Posted by abigailthefox

Reading through these posts gives me some ideas. Would anyone be willing to take a survey on their team demographics? I'm interested in seeing some relationships, and looking at some of the theories proposed here.

If there's anywhere you're gonna get the data, I think it would be here. Unfortunately, it's probably going to end up a bit skewed due to what types of teams are on Chief Delphi. I would also be really interested in such demographics and I'd be happy to pass it along to other Minnesota teams that may not see it here.

[pfreivald]

Right now with 22 students, 4 female, we have a 50/50 split on leadership roles.

In 2010, with 14 females and 14 males, we had 75% male leadership.

In 2013, with 19 students, 4 female, we had a 100% female leadership team.

At least for 1551, there doesn't appear to be any kind of correlation. But then, this is the least cliquish and most peer-group mobile place I've ever even heard of.

[indieFan]

I'd like to propose one other hypothesis as to why so many females end up in leadership positions on teams:

Females tend to see the bigger picture rather than focus on the details.

One of my previous teams which was co-ed tended to have females in leadership roles every year.

My other previous team was all-female, so it doesn't count.

My current team is looking at having 2 of three positions be female (actually named by current students and outgoing seniors) based on the leadership qualities the team came up with at the last meeting.

Interestingly, subsystems have been a mixed bag of being led by females and males. Some years we had some really strong, knowledgeable females, others it was heavily male dominated. But it truly was based on knowledge and wanting to lead it.

Finally, to address the mentors:
First team: 1 female (myself), 4 males, 1 male teacher (typical year)
All-girls team: 1 female (myself), 3 males, 1 female teacher (non-technical)
Current team: 1 female (myself), 1 male, and 1 female teacher (currently teaching robotics and programming at the HS, but learning FRC)

One thing that NONE of my teams has ever done has said, "You can or can't do that based on your gender." It has always been, "You can do this, let me show you how," or "You can't do that because it isn't safe," or "You should do this because it's a better way."

I was lucky to grow up with a mother that encouraged my to follow my own preferences. She wanted a girl that she could dress up, instead she got a tomboy. There's a great picture of me at age 2 or 3 in a dress standing on a piece of wood climbing a brick wall in the yard. She always bought me Tonka trucks. She never said, "You can't be (blank) because you're a girl." Instead, she knew I wanted to learn to use my dad's table saw and scroll saw, so she asked another teacher at her school to come over and show me how to use them safely. Because of the environment that I grew up in, I have a hard time understanding females that say they are discouraged or told they can't do something.

And, for the record, she still tries to get me to dress up and wear make-up and jewelry. I'm better about dressing up for holidays, but make-up and jewelry are still arguments. *LOL*

[Green Potato]

Our team is approximately 35% female, and I'd say leadership and drive team are roughly the same. If you sum up our 3 top leadership positions, our CTO, CEO, and CCOO, and the drive team, 2/6 are female: the CCOO and the primary driver.

[abigailthefox]

http://goo.gl/forms/xfaZb4RzCHCK9Ecv1

If anyone is interested, this is the link for a form about team demographics. If you could share this form with other teams who may not be on Chief Delphi, that would be great!!

[jajabinx124]

Team 2052 this year is 35% female counting all students. 80% of our captains this year were female. For next year 40% of our captains are female.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by abigailthefox

http://goo.gl/forms/UfHiRtMQ5b4Nqyxa2

If anyone is interested, this is the link for a form about team demographics. If you could share this form with other teams who may not be on Chief Delphi, that would be great!!

Suggestions: 1) Change the wording to allow teasm to fill it out multiple times in order to provide data for different years. 2) Separate STEM and non-STEM leadership positions. Not because one is worse than the other, but because this is often a topic of discussion and would provide useful data.

[Europa]

The number of girls on my team has definitely increased with the growth of the team over the past four years. We have had a female presidents in charge of the team for the last three years. Even though our team is only around 20%-25% female, we have always had a more equal number of girls in leadership. This year, we have girls in the roles of President, Director of Business, and Directory of Outreach, and Secretary. We also have girls co-leading in all but one of our five tracks.

[abigailthefox]

Originally Posted by Siri

Suggestions: 1) Change the wording to allow teasm to fill it out multiple times in order to provide data for different years. 2) Separate STEM and non-STEM leadership positions. Not because one is worse than the other, but because this is often a topic of discussion and would provide useful data.

Can do!

[abigailthefox]

http://goo.gl/forms/xfaZb4RzCHCK9Ecv1

Here is an updated link!