Will the next year of competitions bring more girls into FIRST?

[Andy Baker]

Originally Posted by Franchesca

1) How you feel personally about the participation that is offered in your team by girls? Do you think that they are active and involved enough or as much as everyone else? Or perhaps could girls be more involved within your team and in which type of type of activities could they partake?

2) If your team is lacking in the number of female members, what creative and useful ideas could you implement to draw more girls into your team as the new year commences?

Good thread Nadia,

Our team has problems in this area. Team 45 is weak with regard to female involvement. We had 3 girls on our team last year, and none were very active. Our boys are fairly dominant. We have had some great gals on our team in the past, including team leaders, welders, and machine operators. However, last year was our worst with regard to female involvement.

We need to address this issue during our fall recruiting. I am passionate about providing more opportunities for girls, since I have 3 daughters. This is an issue that we will target. We don't have a complete plan for this yet, but we need to target demos to female organizations.

Last spring, we had a "women in engineering" conference at Kokomo High School. This introduced students to female engineers and also showed them what opportunities they had in school (PLTW, FIRST, VICA, etc.)

More female adults need to get involved with FIRST teams and become mentors. I appreciate that we have a strong female engineer on our team who also serves as our field coach (thanks, Amy!). We need more people like her to serve as mentors to young ladies.

As I said above, our team struggles in this area. Please post responses to this so we can get some new ideas about how to recruit girls on our FIRST team.

Andy B.