Girls on FIRST teams

[Kate00]

Originally Posted by Kelly

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.

I'm not sure that's what people mean. I have seen this sort of comment made to girls on my team, and how we've always taken it is as follows.

Girls and boys should have equal opportunities, however, they should not be treated the same. Girls and boys think differently, have different learning styles, and process information in entirely different ways. Being in a room with a mixture of male and female engineers, and our female students, you can tell that they approach problems differently. I went from a co-ed middle school to an all-girls high school, and there is a marked difference in the learning styles. Our brains are different. This being said, a huge part of what my team tries to do in inspiring girls with this program is to not only give them equal opportunity, but to bring the different thinking, the different processing into the open. We believe that boys and girls can create really cool things separately, however, it's when both processing styles, both brains come together that you can create something truly amazing. We take the comments such as "there just aren't enough women in math and science" as compliments, that we're needed, our brains are needed. I don't think it has anything to do with basing intelligence only on comparisons with your own gender, it's a positive assessment of your choices and how you're bettering society by bringing a female perspective to a male-dominated field.