Girls on FIRST teams

With our team I am the only girl whos been trying for now 3 years to get girls to join the team.I tried to explain it to them that u dont have to work with the tools if u dont want to.also tried to tell them theres other things to do like tshirt designs and pins and website designing. Its not easy to get girls to join.Tried pictures and they ended up in little pieces in the trash and me getting laughed at it wasnt fun.next time everythings going to be laminated so it cant be ripped up.
Krista

[Liz Smith]

Originally Posted by kathimm1

With our team I am the only girl whos been trying for now 3 years to get girls to join the team.I tried to explain it to them that u dont have to work with the tools if u dont want to.also tried to tell them theres other things to do like tshirt designs and pins and website designing. Its not easy to get girls to join.Tried pictures and they ended up in little pieces in the trash and me getting laughed at it wasnt fun.next time everythings going to be laminated so it cant be ripped up.
Krista

While its always nice to have other girls on the team, sometimes it's worse to have people who don't want to be there. For awhile, on my team I was the only girl who showed up consistantly to every meeting. My senior year as captain, I made sure everyone knew when meetings were and tried to keep the group (boys and girls) on the same page. There was another girl who organized a smaller group of girls to compete at a lego competition. That was great, I got to connect with some of the girls and encourage them to stick it out for the FRC build season. Interest was sparked, but still on 2/4 of the trips I was the only girl to travel. Its hard, and it makes you want to go and force other girls to come and share this great experience you've been having... but other people have other priorities. The year after I graduated, our high school started an all-girls FRC team, which sort of evolved out of the all girls Lego team. Though the forming of the team had some controversy, the team is still competing 3 years later. I go back and help them, and just basically be friends with them, and tell them about college. I let one come visit me this past fall during their college search. I'm happy that they're into this competition and are liking it. I've had parents tell me I'm a great role model for their daughters, because I was a female leader. It's a great feeling to hear something that. I recently looked on facebook, because a lot of the girls I have mentored graduated this year... almost all of them are going to school as engineering and technology majors. I'm thrilled.

Krista, my advice to you is to not get hung up on these girls who don't respect you and rip up your pictures. Enjoy what you are doing, and maybe some girls will see what a great time your having, and the great things you are doing and will want to join the team.

[robostangs548]

Last year we had our first girl on the team in 3 years. At first everyone was really kind of unsure of how it would play out, but after the first week, she was showing us up for gosh sakes. She proved that she could definitely be a very strong addition to our team, and seeing that she was only a freshman, it really was amazing that she knew so much When we finally gave the whole "girl" scene a chance, it really paid off, and now everyone on the team is much more open to the female crowd, and having other female teammates. (Oh, BTW there are going to be around 10 MORE girls on the team for the 2008 season, but if they are like the girl we have now, they should fit right in with no problem.)

[FourPenguins]

I think there is definitely a stigma on our team about girls, but it's getting better. A girl I know spent three years on the multimedia team (often where girls get pushed) and then her fourth as a machinist/safety captain. She had a pretty strong personality, and I think that other girls haven't had the guts to just stand up and say, "I want to do this!"
Bottom line: girls shouldn't have to work any harder to do what they want. That one's a fault of the guys and the attitudes. A lot of them are unintentional and subconscious. It is harder to accept a girl as "just one of the guys," so to speak.
On the other hand, there's a stigma amongst girls too. I really don't want to believe that girls are "naturally" disinclined toward science, technology, machining, or robots. However, I think if you did a survey, many more girls would call this kind of thing boring, stupid, uninteresting, or (in the case of manual work) dirty. Why is this? Society, women included, has decided that women don't like this kind of thing.
Until we stop talking about "woman engineers" they will always be a novelty. By that I mean that they can't be a spectacle, a statistic, or a quota. They need to do this because they want to, and we (as a whole, women and men) need to accept them because of their skills and enthusiasm, not their gender.