Girls on Teams

[riboSquirrel]

Originally Posted by AdamT

This seems to be the most common problem. We only have 2 girls on our team, and they both chose to mainly work on PR and such, even though one of them decided to help out where she could on the robot. In her situation she didn't think she was smart enough to do the stuff that was going on. I tried to get to understand that you don't have to understand all of it to be a great member. I don't know if my message got through, but I tried.

I think recruiting women is an important part of the program. And I do mean recruit. You may be lucky enough to have some girls filter into the team by word of mouth, but many times the best female members will come because they are asked. If you ask them to come and they want to, they are more likely to be productive members for the sheer fact that someone felt them valuable enough to ask them to come.

It's important for team members to follow through and invite them to work on different things if they become seemingly unmotivated to be aggressive. This something that not only mentors should do. Team members should encourage other team members to get their say in if they are quiet. Have the older members mentor the younger mentors.

I think the key to having women on a team is to show them that they can do this and it's not a "guy thing." If you tell someone they are stupid and can't do certain things, eventually they will think that (and women are still often told that in respects to engineering). Break that mentality!

In FIRST as in the rest of the world, apathy is our enemy.

we have three girls including myself, one is a junior,i am a sophmore and the others a freshman... thing is... i can't touch the robot(almost killed it last year>.<) but lynn, now SHE is like mighty woman... she is a really good robot driver, and i envy her everfy so often just because she is alowed to touch the robot and i'm not...

[aallen88]

My freshman year I was pretty much the only girl on my team. Now I'm in my senior year and there's a pretty good handful. Just appeal and support. I know I stuck with the team because I had mentors and students that were so supportive and helped me with every and anything. They never made me feel stupid or frustrated. Let the kids at your school know that robotics is engineering, but there's still a little bit of everything that needs to be done. Now I broke the status quo of my team and became the first girl team captain this year. Hell yes!

[Rohan_DHS]

girls on our team are prettymuch free to take on any role they'd like, if there's something they dont know, and want to learn then we teach them. its pretty open. but mostly, the girls choose to do business oriented tasks. last year, our team president was also a girl.