All Girls Teams?

[Katy]

Give the kid a break! Soccerguy868 said he was sorry. What more do you want out of him? Look there are two possibilities as to how it was said
1) He was kidding
2) He was serious and isn't going to believe different until he sees a girl's team beat his.

Either scenario does not include any form of improvement by having people yell at him after he says sorry. I don't believe anybody understands FIRST anyway until they have seen a competition...

I find this question really interesting. I mentor an all girls team that is suppose to be city-wide. Every school in the city except for two already have a team. I mentor 1725 not because of it is all girls but because I asked for a team to mentor and I was told this team needed a mentor. I however come from a co-ed highschool team so I have seen a little bit of both perspectives.

From a logistics perspective it is much easier to mentor teams that are not co-ed. (Between FRC and FLL I've done both) It is far less socially awkward and it keeps parents calmer. On my highschool team sometimes the boys would take a part home and sleep in shifts so somebody was working all night on it. Explaining to my parents that I was going to a boy's house, that I would be the only girl, and that I was staying over just did not fly. I am very sure if I had been going to a girl's house with no boys there my parents would have permitted me.

Perhaps if more girls had been going to work on the electronics board overnight my parents would have permitted me. The problem was they did not doubt that I was going to really work on an electronics board all night, they just thought it wasn't the proper thing for me to do. I have not heard of parents telling their son that. I do think there is a correlation between parents with rules about what their daughter should or should not do (in the "properness" context of things) and daughters who are more use to a stereotypical definition of female roles in society. Those girls are the ones who will gain the most out of a FIRST experience. Those particular girls will gain a great deal from an all-girls team.

However I'm fully willing to admit: the idea is a sexist from the perspective of a girl ready to work with the boys who has parents who will let her. It also is a terrible approximation of life in the work force.

Also for the record

Originally Posted by lukevanoort
I think that there are also more women in engineering schools, although I might be wrong on that.

No way. Not within the engineering programs themselves. This shows the number of girls at WPI in various majors along with national averages data. http://www.wpi.edu/Admin/Women/Students/

Only a few schools can sport 50/50 numbers and places like MIT have to fiddle with some numbers to pull it off (8% of men who apply get accepted to MIT. That number is closer to 19% for women).