Discussion on All-Girl events

[ASD20]

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.

Please, someone just close this thread.

[Zealii]

The more important thing to notice is that everyone is different in their own special way. Males and females both bring different skills to the table to help the team succeed. Even two people of the same gender have different strengths. For example, one male may be a fabulous machinist while another may be great at writing grants. It is the combination of all of these different people, male and female, who make a great team.

IMHO, the reason for All-girls events is that typically, females are better at certain roles on the team. These roles can sometimes mean that they don't get to participate on the drive team or pit crew at regular season competitions because they are busy contributing to the team by doing what they do best, whatever that may be. Also, it is always interesting to watch an all girls event because of these differences. Females do generally attack a problem a bit differently than males (not saying that either way is better) so some strategy is different.

I love to compete at all girls events because it gives me the chance to be on the drive team. During the season, my skills are better used talking to judges and leading the team as team president. That doesn't leave a lot of time for drive team. I really enjoyed IndyRAGE last year and I hope that I get to attend again this year.

[anfrcguy]

Originally Posted by Zealii

The more important thing to notice is that everyone is different in their own special way. Males and females both bring different skills to the table to help the team succeed. Even two people of the same gender have different strengths. For example, one male may be a fabulous machinist while another may be great at writing grants.

Well said -- I couldn't agree more with this.

Originally Posted by Zealii

I love to compete at all girls events because it gives me the chance to be on the drive team.

Aren't there boys -- maybe those whose strengths involve writing grants -- who would also love a chance to be on the drive team who never had the opportunity? I just think that a "try out new role" type of event would achieve the same goal, but be far less exclusive.

[smitikshah]

Originally Posted by ASD20

Please, someone just close this thread.

+1

Please can we just end this thread. I feel like we've squeezed all the productivity we possibly can out of it already.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by anfrcguy

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.

Yeah, you see, there's a world of difference between "there is literally no difference between people who, all other things equal, have different sexes" and the thing I actually said that you were responding to. But I mean, you've created a brand new Chief Delphi account to argue about gender, snipped a single line of a post made two weeks ago out of context, and then dropped a link to a Wikipedia article as some kind of justification for institutional sexism, so I don't really think productive dialogue is going to result from this conversation no matter how I respond to it.

[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.

[anfrcguy]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

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.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680714/ supports that "the sexual dimorphism in the structure of the parietal lobe is a neurobiological substrate for the sex difference in performance on the Mental Rotations Test." In other words, neurobiological differences in the brain are likely causing the performance discrepancies.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

But I mean, you've created a brand new Chief Delphi account to argue about gender, snipped a single line of a post made two weeks ago out of context, and then dropped a link to a Wikipedia article as some kind of justification for institutional sexism

My point is that the disproportionate gender gap in itself isn't enough to show that institutional sexism exists. There are certainly cases of sexism in FRC, and the community should work together to address those cases and avoid future ones. I just don't think an all girls event, where the only male focused item on the agenda is a lecture on "Unintentional Bias" is going to help boys or girls.

[frcguy]

Originally Posted by smitikshah

+1

Please can we just end this thread. I feel like we've squeezed all the productivity we possibly can out of it already.

+2

Also, if there was any question I am in no way related to this "anfrcguy" nor do I endorse or support what he is saying.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by anfrcguy

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2680714/ supports that "the sexual dimorphism in the structure of the parietal lobe is a neurobiological substrate for the sex difference in performance on the Mental Rotations Test." In other words, neurobiological differences in the brain are likely causing the performance discrepancies.

I think the implied conclusions you are drawing from this study are a bit broader than the actual result shows. The implicit assumption is that the differences in neurobiology are the result purely, or predominantly, of biological sex's effect on brain development. But we already know that brain development is heavily influenced by a wide variety of outside factors, and it is impossible to isolate differently sexed people from social and environmental factors influenced by others' perception of their genders.

An oversimplified example: Say a boy and a girl go to the same preschool, which assigns the boys blocks to play with and the girls doll houses. These kind of external factors impact which parts of the brains are exercised during play and thus what part would foster growth. We can't isolate the variables enough to say what portion of the development is caused by something inherent to the human's sex and what portion is caused by differing life experiences based on being treated as a member of that sex's associated gender.

Even so, this point is kind of tangential - you can't use generalized trends to justify treating specific people differently. There are many women with better spatial reasoning with many men, but if sexist attitudes in society work from the generalization that women are weaker in that area than men, those women may not even get the chance to try and exercise the skills they have due to this perception. Social factors are everywhere. Events like all-girls events just try to eliminate those social factors for one day and let young women try whatever they want to try on a robotics team. For one day.

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by anfrcguy

Aren't there boys -- maybe those whose strengths involve writing grants -- who would also love a chance to be on the drive team who never had the opportunity? I just think that a "try out new role" type of event would achieve the same goal, but be far less exclusive.

Yeah, that is completely a possibility but not really part of the grand narrative that a girls event is addressing. I don't think I've ever seen anyone assume that the boy in the pit is only there to talk to judges because obviously they do chairman's, whereas I know it happens with girls. When you think about that, you might see how a girl is more likely to be pushed into the paper-writing role on her team and pushed out of the driver/robot repair crew. The idea behind a girl's event is to negate a lot of the societal pressure/influence that girls experienced throughout their life... the pressure that comes from not getting legos and lincoln logs as a kid but instead a play kitchen and princess dresses.

Are there boys who would benefit from a push to try new things too? Yes. I'm not saying that those situations don't exist. But boys -by and large- are not actively discouraged from STEM the way girls are, and girls events are about addressing big, system wide problems.

[bduddy]

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?

[Hitchhiker 42]

I wanted to add one last insight - maybe something that could help.

I myself am part of an all-boys team (we're from an all-boys school), and that forces our students to develop interests in all parts of the team. We have both a large build/programming department, as well as large, well-developed business/outreach departments. Though I have little experience with all-girls teams, I would assume the same would hold true. I think IndyRAGE is basically just a taste of what all-girls teams do all the time - have girls involved in all parts of the team. In this sense, I think it is a very positive experience to have, if only for 1 event, to empower girls to take charge in parts of the team where they are historically less involved (largely due to social pressures).

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by bduddy

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?

Im assuming you meant the OP (if not please forgive me)

Originally Posted by Ed Law

I am not defending Swaggy P here. I don't even know him. He may not be intentionally hiding his identity. If you check his previous post, you would know he is/was from 4692. It matches with the city he said he is in. He said his rookie year was 2013 which was when that team started. He may have just graduated and may have removed his team number because he is no longer on that team. That is his choice. Also many people do not put their real name in their CD profile. It is allowed although I think everybody should put their real name but that was just me.

Originally Posted by The Swaggy P

I would like to also point out here, specifically to the people who are flaming & bashing me, rather than trying to talk reasonably about my posts, that I, as a boy/man/male (whichever you prefer), have been discriminated against multiple times in High School.

When my club got an opportunity to host the concessions stand for a football game, I was treated by the women running this event as if I was nothing but a "dumb shop kid". Only the girls were allowed to handle money, or take orders. I was only allowed to pour cheese on tacos.

When my father applied for jobs as a grade school music teacher, when he was not chosen for two of the positions he applied for, he was told, and I'm not making this up, that they "Wanted a woman". When he went to a lawyer to ask about filing a discrimination lawsuit, the lawyer told him that there was no point in filing a lawsuit, because a white man had no chance of winning.

In my own Robotics club, the teacher recruited cheerleaders from our school to join, because it was apparent that our four-man team would never be chosen for Playoffs without girls. The girls could only come to about half of our robotics meetings, and couldn't make the first competition, because of a basketball game. For the second competition, our drive team was told they had to give up half of their scheduled matches to the girls, even though the girls were first-year members, and the current drive team was made up of 3-4 years.

I am not a troll, and I am not against women's events in FIRST. I was originally ONLY against the gender labeling of lectures at a lunchtime meeting. It seems that I cannot express this intention enough, as I still see users accusing me of trying to bring down these events.

I have received private hate messages, both directly & indirectly insulting me. I've been called names, I've received veiled threats. And after looking into my sudden reputation drop to 5 negative reputation bars, I found out that between 12:00 AM & 9:00 AM this morning, 400 negative reputation was added to my profile without any additional rep comments. For these reasons I choose to remain anonymous, since I don't want to be yet another victim of discriminatory violence in a country that supposedly allows freedom of speech.

I am only a high school student, and you have shown me the worst of what the future has to offer here. I will no longer be posting or responding to users in this thread, as I will clearly only receive hate in return.

Reading the thread helps you answer questions you may have.

[MariOlsen]

While I've been reading this thread since it started, I've been avoiding posting for a while because I don't want to simply rehash the same old arguments. Plus I've been busy (perhaps ironically) teaching at the Women's Technology Program, a summer camp introducing rising high school senior women to EECS and having lots of conversations with my colleagues on this subject. But I've been talking with a friend who reminded me that there seems to be a trend that females are more likely to allow themselves to be marginalized in conversations, are more likely to use qualifying language to express uncertainty, and are more likely to keep quiet/doubt that they can contribute to the conversation, so I'm attempting to refute that I found Pauline's post extremely insightful, and I want to expand on it.

Originally Posted by Pauline Tasci

I do not want to start more debate, but would rather have other individuals see my side of being an unrepresented person in STEM who is not respected the same as her male colleagues.

Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

This is beautifully put, even though I've had it incredible easy. My parents gave me Tinker Toys and my favorite toy as a kid was a wooden tool set. I've been extremely lucky to have been supported my whole life in my dream to pursue engineering, but even so I have faced harassment and people's assumptions that the "cute little girl" must not really know what she's doing with the complicated tool. I've had some truly spectacular men help me along the way -- and I think that's the main crux of my complaint, that practically all of my technical/engineering mentors so far have been male (before this summer it would have been "all"). None of them have ever condescended me or tried to turn me away from engineering; in fact, I've received nothing but "good for you!"s and praise, which I'll always be grateful for.

But there's a frightening lack of representation of women in the most technical pursuits, and I think it's difficult to realize just how bad it is until you walk into a room and realize how alone you are. I was often the only girl at builds. I sat in on a Turing Computer Science Honors class at UT Austin: my presence brought the number of women in that room up to 20% (from 7/39 to 8/40). HackMIT runs a puzzle of programming challenges with automatic admission to the hackathon as the prize: out of the first 250 to attempt the puzzle, only 8% were female. I have no doubt that the number of women pursuing computer science outside of Turing is more balanced, as is the actual number of women attending HackMIT, but it's almost uniformly men who have more exposure to CS from a younger age, allowing them to dominate the higher levels of the field, at least at first, which only gives them more and more legs up: they get to take the honors classes, participate in hackathons, practice their skills, have access to fantastic resources... Most of the male programmers I know have been programming since they could type. Most of the female programmers I know learned their first year of college (or later).

A pair of MIT 2016s published a fantastic Report on the Status of Undergraduate Women at MIT http://news.mit.edu/2016/report-on-s...en-at-mit-0225 which essentially says that women come in with less experience and confidence in their abilities, but by the end of their time at MIT women had caught up or surpassed men in several metrics of success. FRC teams have the same ability to level the playing field, as long as we're careful not to accidentally steer girls away from technical parts (although it's also critical that no one be forced into something they don't enjoy). Just because she's happy doing marketing/outreach doesn't mean she wouldn't also be happy CADing or soldering if you give her a proper chance.

When I was in high school, I did some of mechanical/electrical stuff, and started out doing drive team, but I did a ton of outreach and paperwork because no one else wanted to do it. And as a result, by the end of the season I had been pushed off drive team. Which was fine because the guys really wanted to do it, and it made them happy, and they probably did a better job than I could have, and anyway outreach stuff is fun and important. For similar reasons, I never learned how to solder in high school: by the time it came up we were in the middle of build, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it made them happier to solder than it would have made me, and anyway, what if I messed up? My friends and I have speculated about girls being conditioned to be polite and considerate and please others and so on, but it's not speculation that these definitely aren't isolated incidents, despite the best efforts of my mentors.

And like most of the women in STEM I know, I find myself moving more and more towards more managerial/logistic extracurriculars, which I almost feel guilty about, as if I'm letting down future generations of women, but it's what I truly enjoy more. But I think that's because I know I'm good at it, because it was easy to get involved in those sorts of activities, whereas the activation energy required to start technical projects was much higher. I wonder if my choices would have been different if the shop where the technical teams work wasn't a pretty long walk in the dark from my dorm. I welcome anything that attempts to negate the many factors nudging girls away from technical fields.

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by bduddy

Since when are anonymous trolling accounts allowed? Is there some rule change we haven't been made aware of?

I am assuming you are referring to anfrcguy who created an account today and only posted on this thread.
If the moderators are not going to enforce the rules of anonymous (second) accounts, I am going to ask the community to stop engaging in discussions with trolls. Let them say whatever they want. If nobody responds to them, they will go away. I even put some of them on ignore list so I don't have to see their posts.