Discussion on All-Girl events

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by anfrcguy

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_di...n_intelligence (and the references at the bottom). There is a fairly overwhelming scientific consensus that there are "differences in the capacity of males and females in performing certain tasks, such as rotation of object in space, often categorized as spatial ability," in which a male advantage exists (https://www.researchgate.net/publica...tial_a bility, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1130467?...tab_conten ts are just a couple examples). I doubt many would disagree that spatial ability plays an important role in building a robot.

Note that I am certainly not suggesting that women can't excel in FRC as men can, nor am I suggesting that biology is the sole cause of the gender gap. But to those who dismiss so quickly and confidently the notion that some of the disparities in gender composition could be attributed to physiological differences, I feel that further research would be worthwhile.

I have to strongly question any study along those lines - With our current culture, it has to be practically impossible to control for upbringing differences between males and females. How can you test two people for spatial reasoning skills on equal footing, when one grew up building things with Legos and another grew up with dolls and toy ovens? We give our boys toys that encourage development of spatial reasoning skills, and girls toys that encourage domestic tasks (cooking, child rearing), it only makes sense that, later in life, those same children would exhibit different abilities. Equalize the training kids receive from toys at a young age, and you'd probably see some very different results by the time they got into high school.