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

[Dorienne]

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?

The participation on my team is very rare. I'm the only girl as of the end of this past season. There have been a lot of girls in the past, but each year it's decreased. I don't see why, but I do have a small opinion. It's because most girls find FIRST to be "nerdy" and "uncool".
The reason I think this, is because some girls I've asked (some being my friends, some just acquaintances) have said they either a) aren't interested and b) don't think it's cool. I find this to be a really week response. Mainly because these girls have yet to see that FIRST is really an amazing experience. Then again, I do understand where they are coming from, because no girls (except for me) are involved in FIRST at my school. They don't know that hundreds if not thousands of girls are involved.
It offers technology skills, business skills, PR skills, etc. The possibilities are endless! I just hope that our school can somehow get more girls involved, besides bribing them (ahem, Nate..)

Originally Posted by Franchesca

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?

I think that our school should actually make a small video to show on the TVs during homeroom. A teacher at our school gave us the idea about doing a documentary for it. I think it's an excellent idea, and he wants me to head it up. So, I hope this will really draw some attention to the team. We may do posters like previous years, but that was hardly successful. Normally we also do demos at open houses for incoming freshmen, and give small demos at our school fair, and at our state fair as well (which won't be happening...), and we do demos at other big celebrations or whatnot at the school. I just hope we come up with some creative ideas this summer...*sigh* I don't want to be the only girl!
--d0ri
p.s. Franchesca, excellent thread! you rock.

[Koko Ed]

This years team was the first in my three years that leaned towards male dominant. My wife and Ms. Foos gather freshmen and sophmores to recruit and don't push for any particular demographic(we do not discrimanate against race, gender, religious standing or GPA). We would like the team to be diverse but we also would like people who are enthustic about partcipating as well so we tend to lean towards the latter.

This year, we only had one girl on our team, and she only showed up to a couple of meetings. Whenever she was there, she worked a lot though. I think it's probably because she was a senior, they generally have odd schedule at our school. Our team is also not very ethnically diverse, so we need to either branch out more, or revise our recruitment techniques.

I think we need to not use the 'tools scattered everywhere, people with grease all over their hands bending over a big hunk of metal, loud noises, geeks bent over computers" image as much.

Unfortunately, that is basically what our meetings look like.

Any ideas?


Thaine