Girls on FIRST teams

[Kelly]

This thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=56504 touched on, but didn't answer a lot of questions regarding the role of girls on FIRST teams. I'd like to start a new thread where teams can share their stories about how they handle having girls without needing to focus on 842 or listen to boys whine about hypothetically being discriminated against. (Boys are welcome to share their insights, or describe actual discrimination, but please stay away from "well, if that happened on my team...")
I'll start:
I am one of two girls on team 1418. However, as a result of almost entirely female efforts the robot was programmed, the drive train was designed, the grabber was built and the underclassmen were corralled. We did this without anyone feeling the need to "give us a special opportunity" or "let us work without having the boys in our way" (when we were the only ones in the shop it was because we were the only ones who dragged ourselves out of bed at 10 AM on a Sunday, not because the boys were stepping back to give us a turn).
I, quite frankly, find it patronizing when people congratulate me for pursuing engineering because "there just aren't enough women in math and science." It makes me feel like they think my abilities are only noteworthy in the context of my gender, while I would like to think that I would be considered smart no matter who I was.
This is an issue I'm interested in, and I'm curious to hear insights from girls on other teams.