pic: We left the boys at home

[Mikell Taylor]

Originally Posted by whytheheckme

Quote:
Originally Posted by falconmaster View Post

One side note to all this, as a mentor I saw how teams and people treated us differently between being co-ed to all girls.....

Perhaps you can elaborate.

Jacob, I can elaborate. I was on an all-girls' team in high school (team 677). We were at an all-girls' school. You're treated very differently. We had scouts coming trying to ask our (male) mentors questions instead of us; even when our mentors pushed the scouts to us, they kept going back to the men. My teammate and I were both drivers in 2001, and thus responsible for fixing the robot in between matches; while sitting in the pit replacing the entire drivetrain, we had some scouts come up and ask us if they could ask questions. When we said yes, they looked uncomfortable, then said "well, can we talk to someone who knows what they're doing?" In 2002 at our regional, we had scouts ask us, and I am not making this up, "How'd you guys build a robot without any guys on the team?"

The team I mentored in college, though the most involved, most committed members on the team were actually three girls, still had a problem with scouts coming up and asking the couple of guys in the pit questions. They never went to the girls first. Never. Why?

Several other things happened, too, which I won't go in to here right now, but I can explain further over PM.

At any rate, the sexism is there, and I congratulate you (and others in this thread) on your enlightenment when it comes to "affirmative action" and reverse discrimination in FIRST and the rest of the world. I tend to agree. It shouldn't be that way. But it often is necessary, because the world can suck, and I struggle with this daily as a female engineer in the working world. We haven't, as a society, found the balance yet between the way it is (white males tend to have the advantage) and the way it should be (a balance of all genders, races, backgrounds, etc).

So what I'm worried about is that we are faulting the women in that picture for the fact that society hasn't figured itself out yet. Girls, good for you! I'm glad you got a chance to go experience a FIRST regional as an all-girls' team. It's a very valuable and very eye-opening experience, and I hope you'll share these experiences with your other teammates and mentors... I have the feeling the ones who didn't attend the regional will be getting just as much out of it as you did.