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Unread 22-04-2009, 12:41
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mhaake mhaake is offline
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FRC #2177 (The Robettes)
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Re: Why is it that not many girls are into robotics?

I joined FRC my senior year of high school (the second year of our team) and noticed something odd. I was on an all-girls team and we were very proud of where we had come in the year. We got to a younger competition and teams told us they were surprised to see an all girls team with a nice looking robot. They said straight to our faces they didn't know how well we would do tho, simply for the fact that we were all girls. After the first day of competition, we had teams coming up to us telling us it was simply luck that we were so good. As the driver of the team, I put up with countless drive teams telling me they were going to get the ball even tho they knew their robot was was less capable than ours. I listened for awhile, until I decided it was time to put the boys in their place. Saturday afternoon, we were second pick. By this time, we had teams coming up to us telling us how surprised they were that an all girls team could be so good. By the second or third match with our alliance, they knew we were the dominating robot and began to do the "Robette kiss" with us when their team was introduced (blow a wave at the camera/MC). We had all male drive teams blowing kisses.

This year I decided to be a college mentor and noticed little change. THis was noticed even after at the kickoff this year, team 2169's mentor made a speech about the season and made out team stand and told all the teams there to not underestimate the power of girls. Props to King TeC!

I think there has been some improvement on team's behalves of supporting girls; however, people will always have their stereotypes. When our team is faced with these boys, we stick it to them in the competition. However, we do it as a team. I would find it very intimidating to try to stick it to these same boys that underestimate our team if they were on my team and there were only 5 or so girls to be on my side (and im not an intimidated person - I have an older brother ....) On a slightly other note besides some boys not thinking girls can do what boys do, I've noticed some times boys think that girls are there only to flirt with. Our team gets hit on like no other when we show up at competitions and, although flirting can sometimes be a 2 way street, robotics simply isn't the place for it. Girls can feel pressured to flirt back simply to be nice to guys and I'm saying competition isn't right for that (but for more on that there is another thread about PDA that went on in Atlanta...)

One last side note that may not be 100% relevant. Our team applied for the Chairmans Award this year. We did not win and we understand why the other team that won was simply more involved. Do not get me wrong : I am not complaining that we did not win. The other team deserved it at the time more than we did. On our feedback, we were told we need more diversity and to bring more less priviledged people in the engineering world onto our team. We have 3 of 18 students that are of color on the team. Our school simply is all white (all girls Catholic school...). We were astonished to see that on our sheet since we bring 18 girls into the engineering world and if another team has 10 of the 40 girls they get extra points for having lots of girls . . . Just a side note that I thought was interesting that an all girls team was told that we were not bringing enough minorities into the engineering world (when most other groups aren't told that if they have girls on their teams.)
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