Discussion on All-Girl events

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

The problem with the "I want the best person for the job argument" is explained by Steven Smith:

(by the way, the whole post that I pulled from is really good and is worth a re-read especially for anyone who doesn't understand why affirmative action is a thing)

Thank you for linking Steven's post... I hadn't read it all, and I definitely think there's a lot of good stuff there. That said, it doesn't convince me of the benefit of affirmative action... largely because of this aspect that Steven mentions:

Originally Posted by Steven Smith

Maybe the person that is 5% less qualified on paper has had to work harder to get there, and would make a better employee. Or maybe it’s all backwards and the (hypothetically white male) applicant was the poor one that worked their butt off, and the minority applicant actually had well off parents and got all the benefits plus an extra boost. All that said, it is a fact that these subtle (or less subtle) negative biases exist, and the purpose of affirmative action really just to match them with a positive bias.

Is the goal of affirmative action to reward people who have had to overcome more adversity due to negative stereotypes or is the goal of affirmative action to balance demographics?

I think there is value in "affirmative action" for the former, but not for the latter. Really though, I don't see how it can realistically be done for the former... it seems like to start you'd need to create some "Adversity Index" to determine who has had to overcome the most adversity (which would probably vary by region and profession)... and even then you'd still be generalizing. I believe that determining the degree that someone has overcome prejudice by their resume or college application is not possible without a variety of stereotyping and would prefer to 1) seek to prepare people of every single background for your profession and 2) hire the most capable individuals that result.

No one seems to be criticizing the underrepresentation of men in K and Pre-K Education, Dance, Hairdressing and Cosmetology, and Library work (among others). Should these areas use Affirmative Action campaigns? Why or why not?

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

While I agree a large part of the battle is getting more female FRC students (specifically, more of them involved with build, as they seem to dominate some of the other areas of many, if not most, teams), and getting to them young is definitely helpful, it's way too easy to say "well, it's something FLL will solve for us". Teams can and should do a better job at recruiting females....

I don't mean to imply that FLL solves this for FRC...

Quite frankly, for a long time our team was just bad at all recruiting. Word of mouth was about it. When we had a strong representation of females, we tended to get more females... when we had a lower representation of females, we got an even higher proportion of males. We've been trying to get better at recruiting in general, and recruiting females in particular, but it's very much a work in progress for our team.