Girls on Teams

[justbobdanish]

Last year we had two girls on our team, and they did PR stuff. This year we have like five girls on the team (1 in auxilary,1 in drive and 3 PR).

[ArmoredFairy698]

Well lets see. Just to start, I am a girl. This is my second year on the HHS Robotics Team #698, and I've been told I'm one of the top kids in the class/club. Last year, I was the secretary, and this year I am the press correspondant (I did run for President though).

I think alot of girls that join robotics teams are looked down on, but that seems to end once they prove themselves. Sometimes it just takes a year to fall into it and get adjusted. Last year's AZ Regional was my shining moment. I really started to learn how everything worked, did work, and now I'm having a blast. I am a member of our Drive Train Team, and I spend all my time in the shop machining, building, wiring, you name it. They even call me the "Robo Chick."

I do believe that some girls are in the sport for the wrong reasons, but sometimes it takes time for them to realize that it's not for them. Instead of looking down on them, give them something to do! If they really don't want to do it, then they will leave, otherwise, you may just end up with another amazing team member full of talent. I've made a ton of friends that I will keep for life, and I've learned so much along the way. Every day I wake up the first thing that pops into my mind is "How long until I get to robotics class?!" It might sound corny, but by far, this is the most fun I've ever had and I love to get my hands greasy and get cut up. I'm a tom-boy, yes, but this is what I love to do. I am accepted by the both the boys and the girls on the team alike, and I love what I do.

We have about 20 kids in our robotics class, and an additional 10 or so in the club, but about 20 of us are hard core and show up everyday to build and work. Out of these 30 members, we only have 5 or 6 girls on the team, myself included. Most of them are hard working, and I know one of them is very into the animation and she wants to make a career out of it. She contributes to us greatly in that way. Another is on the Drive Team with me, and two of them work with our pneumatics systems. The other girls work on various projects, but both do a great deal of building and construction. Overall, most of the girls that join and discover that they are not interested leave within the first couple months of the school year. So by the time build season rolls around, anyone that doesn't really want to work won't show up again or has quit a long time before. The same goes for the boys.

In the end, we all seem to look at each other and regard each other the same. If you work and hold up your position, then you are a great asset to the team, otherwise, maybe it's not your thing and you need to find something else to do. Robotics isn't a cheerleader's club, but cheerleaders are welcome to join. On our team, it is everyone's individual responsibility to check their egos at the door, come in with a positive attitude, and be willing to work.

Girls are tough, we can do what the boys can do, and don't ever expect us to just sit in the corner and sweep.

By the way? How is your robot coming along? It's the end of week two. Our robot's base and drive system is fully assembled and it runs under power. It is complete except for additional programming and the arm. Good luck to you all!

[KORN_lover_2007]

I am not exactly sure how many girls there are on our team, but there are a lot. And they do just as much of the important jobs as the guys do.

[Hieb]

5 of our 15 members are girls. 3 are involved with the business end -- PR, Web design, fundraising, etc. The other 2 are responsible for about 95% of the structural build of our robot. We could also probably be further along than we are if not for those two having to spend almost a full day correcting mistakes by the guys on the electrical subteam who were "helping" after the girls left one day. And from a mentor/teacher standpoint, the best part of all is that they are freshmen.

[Daniela B]

We have six girls on our team of 35 people and all of them work on the robot. I'm one of the three team welders.

[cavegirl47]

I didn't read every single reply to your post on here, but I bet there are some other teams that are like mine. Our team has approximately 15-20 student members on it (depending on how you determine membership) and only one of those students is a girl: ME.

I don't know exactly how I became the only female on the team; last year we had probably 7 girls on a 25-member team, but apparently, when we lost some of our members, we lost ALL (or almost all) the girls at once. Anyway, it doesn't bother me that much, being the only girl there.

I am the marketing manager for GRR, as you can see from my signature, so I do most of the PR work, along with help from mainly my family. Unfortunately, we don't have many boys interested in anything other than the actual building of the robot (electronics, mechanics, computer design, etc.), so I am pretty much alone in the PR team. I worry that nobody will pay any attention to our need of money until it's too late and we find out we spent $6,000 for our kit of parts and first competition just to find out we didn't raise enough money to pay for transportation and a hotel.

On top of that, I am one of the 2 team captains, while the other is another senior boy, and, according to our school's last pep rally and this boy's constant reminders, we are the Team King and Queen (don't ask). I've been at the shop almost every day, excluding Sundays when the team rests and yesterday to do a band audition and go to my winter formal. I've been involved in all the decision-making about our robot's design, and I plan to do anything I can in the shop (electronics, mechanics, computer design, etc.) that they need me to do, despite the fact that I have almost no experience in machining or doing programming.

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, since I have the added responsibility of getting our PR packets and presentations out to businesses, in my own spare time, on top of doing all the robotics work at the shop each day. But I still love it, and I can't wait to see how our robot turns out. After all, this is what I want to do with my life - I want to work for NASA in the future, possibly on robotic missions at the Jet Propulsions Laboratory, in Pasedena, CA.

Well, that's about it. I'm going to go do homework now so I can continue my never-ending education. Good luck to all of you! I hope to see some of you at the Sacramento Regional, if we can ever get the money to go there!

[nkauj_ntxoo16]

There is 17/34 girls on my team. We also have two CADET (Classmates Aspiring to Develop Engineering and Technology) girls on our team too! All of the girls are divided into different subteams and has different jobs or roles for the team. To emphasize, one of the girls is working on our team website, 2+ girls are the photographers along w/ other guys, 6 girls on the spirit team, and there are plenty of other jobs that my team has enrolled for everyone.

The good thing is that one or maybe even two girls will be on the drive team for this year's competitions!!

[fefie]

There are about 20 people on our team, Nobotics (1304). I am please to inform you that about half of the people on our team are females, and half of those females are active in the construction of the robot, including me. Thre are a few more males than females working on the robot, but nobody is forced to do a certain job.

[roboticsnerd698]

Originally Posted by phrontist

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. If your motivation for doing something is "to break stereotypes" you are defining your actions in the context of a broken system and playing into the hands of the "adversary", be it the male patriarchy, the vast right-wing conspiracy, or the RIAA.

Feminists often get a bad rap for this, modeling their lives around the inverse of stereotypes, which is a very low form of protest, as they are still allowing themselves to be controlled by the stereotype. Had the stereotype been otherwise, they would be acting differently, and thus are not thinking for themselves at all, but rather acting on a knee-jerk contrarian sentiment. Are you rebelling for the sake of rebelling? Is this really rebellion at all?

I'm sorry that you misunderstood my intention completely. This has nothing to do with rebellion or "breaking the stereotypes" as the DRIVING FORCE. At our school, I have been called a disgrace to girls mearly because I was in robotics/programming--hence my comment for "breaking the stereotypes". If it comes off as COMPLETELY trying to rebel or demolish the former idea, I apologize. If you need clarification, read the comment posted by my dear friend ArmoredFairy698. Since the original post was that the all-girls team was hearing of girls as cheerleaders and non-relavant positions to robotics--hence the word STEREOTYPE--I was slightly taken-a-back at the statement. I am sorry that my message was not clear enough, offended you, gave you a misudnerstanding or played off your pet-peeve. That was not my intention. Again, I urge you to read ArmoredFairy698's post. It may be clearer for you--since it is worded differently. I, again, apologize.

[phrontist]

Originally Posted by roboticsnerd698

I'm sorry that you misunderstood my intention completely. This has nothing to do with rebellion or "breaking the stereotypes" as the DRIVING FORCE. At our school, I have been called a disgrace to girls mearly because I was in robotics/programming--hence my comment for "breaking the stereotypes". If it comes off as COMPLETELY trying to rebel or demolish the former idea, I apologize. If you need clarification, read the comment posted by my dear friend ArmoredFairy698. Since the original post was that the all-girls team was hearing of girls as cheerleaders and non-relavant positions to robotics--hence the word STEREOTYPE--I was slightly taken-a-back at the statement. I am sorry that my message was not clear enough, offended you, gave you a misudnerstanding or played off your pet-peeve. That was not my intention. Again, I urge you to read ArmoredFairy698's post. It may be clearer for you--since it is worded differently. I, again, apologize.

No need to apologize at all. Really. It was a simple miscommunication on both our parts.

[xFlashbacksx]

Well on our team of 18...5 of us are girls. I a girl am the club's president and this just happens to be my second year on the team Flashbacks..I agree though that many girls are looked down upon that join robotics because its usually not viewed as something a woman would do....All of the girls on the team do many things from writing the chairman's award essay to fundraising to mechanics or electronics. We dont really have role discrimination in our team everyone kind of does everything. Its pretty fun lol . And I think it really cool how you are an all girls team. What regionals you guys going to??? Maybe we will see each other. We team #168 will be at the orlando regionals and the georgia nationals hope to see you

[sanddrag]

This year 696 has one female student who is doing electronics/machining/programming and a female engineer who is focused mainly on electronics/sensors/programming. This is a big improvement over 0 females last year.

[RY-GUY]

HILOW we are team 1566 and well being a rookie team we only have three girls on our team, out of twenty-five of us, and they do anything from programming to html codeing on our webpage. I hope this is helpful.

Ryan

[HPA_Robotics_13]

HPA Robotics currently has 4 female team members, if you count the student that is our videographer. Of the 3 students on our team who are currently doing their 3rd or 4th year of FIRST, 2 are girls (I am the third). One of the two is both our lead electrical engineer and software engineer, the other dabbles in a bit of everything, seems to prefer mechanical work, and is potentially next year's replacement for my position as team captain. The 4th female team member is a junior new to our school this year, who was on a FIRST robotics team as a sophomore. She is on our programming team and also helps out a lot with both electrical and mechanical.

Our team essentially has 5 or 6 students who have the experience and maturity to actually make decisions and solve the hard problems, the rest of the team is new to FIRST. They still need to learn, and want to be told what to do. Of those 5-6 lead students, 3 are female.

I haven't read any of this thread (it's too long!), but from my team's point of view, FIRST is definitely not male-dominated. In fact, I'd say in that in the high school world, FIRST is one of the few places that sexual equality is easily proven.

[Erin Rapacki]

I have a unique perspective on this; much of it is due to my personal experience:

I am female (duh ). During high school I was one of 5 females on a team of 20 students. I entered the team without any technological knowledge, so I sought information and education on how to machine, prototype, and design. I had mild success but I found a greater passion: the PR, the awards, being interviewed with judges, and event organization. Next to that stuff I still machined parts in the shop and enjoyed it, could I do both?

I went to school to study Mechanical Engineering because robots are cool and I was a FIRST female who wanted to break the stereotype. After two years in college I realized that I was trying to be somebody I'm not. I'm not a designer, I'm not a person absolutely enjoys taking things apart & putting them back together again, and I'm not a person who enjoys talking about gear boxes all throughout a FIRST gathering after a regional. All I was doing was breaking a stereotype, but in order to be true to Who I Am I decided that life isn't about being who you want to be, but being who you are.

I'm a person who can make ideas happen. I can dream up a FIRST off-season competition, ask people for a tens of thousands of dollars, and organize the event. I enjoy making my ideas turn into reality. I feel like more of an entrepreneur. Oh great, another FIRST female going into business - Not Really. I'm now studying Industrial Engineering and I'm loving it! However, I do want to get a high-tech MBA afterwords.

Basically, I want to be a person who creates jobs for engineers. Not one of those engineers who fill a position.

I want to learn how to weld, machine better, and I enjoy working on FIRST robots with teams who need the help (not teams with 7 engineers who've been working together for ten years and are set in their ways). But this is only a hobby. I'm not tech-minded, I wasn't raised to be, and what I'm good at/enjoy can make me a lot of money in the future.

Girls, if you are techy, great! If you're not, don't worry about it. We're all good at something and FIRST can show you what that is. Just remember, be true to WHO YOU ARE.


erin