African Americans on drive teams

FIRST General Forum
#42

I would respectfully suggest that knowingly lowering your standards of data for the purposes of forming personal opinions is not the best epistemic hygiene. You might think that you know more than you did before, but while it’s true that more information should never hurt the decision-making of a perfect rational agent, humans are not perfect (or even particularly good!) rational agents.

You can’t honestly or realistically expect me to go around physically polling teams which is why I created this thread.

The problem is that by creating a thread with a poll that you have no reason to believe will be accurate, you are likely doing little more than fooling yourself. Suspending judgment when faced with an issue about which one has little/no accurate data is an important skill to develop, even if it’s really hard.

#43

Hm. Title sounded innocent enough. Are we not free to fool ourselves here on CD? Seems like any other poll to me. I’ll shoot. One of our drivers is African American and the other is American African.

#44

Of course we are, but I think we’re also free to comment on it being unwise.

(I happen to think spreading rationality is an extremely important part of FIRST, as well.)

#45

Interesting viewpoint. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hop on my airship powered by steam generated from yellow balls, hauling 400+ lbs of robot and try to make it home in time to catch FUN Recap!

#46

I responded to that because that was the only argument that was presented.

I just want to point out that there are no “privileged” students on the team because they don’t give them that opportunity. I don’t honestly see how inviting boys to join the team would limit access for girls in any way, especially considering how much easier it is for girls to join this team. By only having girls on the team, they don’t expose girls to “people of varying backgrounds” and they don’t give the boys access to the experiences that they would have if they were on a robotics team.

Ok, sure, I can’t tell them how to run their team. However, this entire thread is about debating how teams should be run. By posting here, I think you volunteer for people to challenge your practices. That’s the whole point of a forum, to discuss and hear opposing opinions.

#47

Iron Kings: Two white boys, one white girl, one white man (me) as coach.

However, this more or less jives with the demographics of Cass County, Indiana. We have a long way to go to even out the gender distribution (that girl is the only one on the team), but we had our hands full steadying the boat this off-season after a lot of student and mentor turnover. Now that we’ve got a better grip on everything, that’s one of the next things I’ll be pushing on.

#48

I would just like to add that my drive team is usually all white males, though sometimes we have a white person who is not gender-binary.

#49

This is a question I’ve never really thought about. My team happens to be situated in one of the most diverse schools in an already diverse school district. “Minorities” are actually a majority according to the school demographics information sheets.

The team itself has people of all shapes and colors. We don’t discriminate in any way, meaning that we don’t really push to recruit one racial group over another. We have open acceptance and there are no applications or any prerequisites to join the team. I feel as if this open selection process does a good job of representing our school demographics.

Now getting to your original question, our drive team is all male with 3 white students and one Hispanic student. We select drive team based off of a team vote- the main factor taken into consideration being skill. We are approaching gender parity within our team, but none of the females were interested in being drivers this year.

#50

Awesome to see that zero FRC teams suffer from any of the societal scourges of racial or gender inequality, based on the responses to the OP. That explains why I always see about 55% of drive teams are white, 20% Latina/o, 15% African American, and 50% female.

*Edit: I’m being facetious. Regardless of how we all view our own teams in terms of providing equal opportunity, the results show that a heavy majority of drivers in all competitions are white and male. Maybe our selection processes are color-and gender- blind, but either before or during the times when 14-18 year olds become FRC drivers, things happen that lead away from real equality. And that sucks. *

#51

Are you saying it’s invalid? We can discuss that.

I just want to point out that there are no “privileged” students on the team because they don’t give them that opportunity.** I don’t honestly see how inviting boys to join the team would limit access for girls in any way, **especially considering how much easier it is for girls to join this team. By only having girls on the team, they don’t expose girls to “people of varying backgrounds” and they don’t give the boys access to the experiences that they would have if they were on a robotics team.

Let me ask you this: on the vast majority of teams, what is the approximate visible percentage of guys on the pit crew? Ditto for scouting and “marketing”. What I mean by this is, when you see the team members (we’ll exclude mentors if they’re obviously mentors) in the pits or other similar places around the event, do you see more guys or gals, and by how much?*

Now you need to be asking why those numbers are the way they are. You see, when I walk around the pits, I’d put the numbers at easily 60% of pit crew members being male. Maybe more. And that’s factoring in the all-female teams. So why is that? (FWIW, I’d go 50-50 on the scouting, and marketing-type being the reverse of pit.)

I would posit–based partially on 842’s reports of their experience, partly on what I’ve seen in the real world–that the guys are crowding out the gals. I don’t think they do it intentionally. But it can happen. It takes a strong-willed girl, or group of them, (or a mentor who sees and intervenes) to stand up to that and push back.

If a current all-girls team opted to allow guys to join, I would be hoping that the current students and mentors have that push-back ready, or the guys will likely try to take over much of the technical side, intentionally or not. And I would bet that BECAUSE of the chance to develop that push-back and some knowledge of what they’re doing without having to focus on getting the chance to learn it, particularly due to dealing with other teams at competition, they’re a lot more ready than, say, a rookie member of a stereotypical co-ed team.

In a perfect world, yes, all teams would be co-ed, equal representation, etc. Last I checked, this world isn’t perfect. So sometimes, you have to choose what your goal is and what the best way to get there is.

*I admit, it’s a weak metric. Unfortunately, it’s the best most of us have, those 2-3 days at an event–unless, of course, you talk to the team.

#52

Although I agree that a large amount of teams aren’t active on Chief Delphi to give their team data, my original purpose wasn’t for me to attempt a full scale demographic study of the full percentage of minorities on drive teams, It was created for me to look at more relaxed percentage of the data (those who decided to respond). What i’m starting to get from you is that you believe that FRC team members on CD aren’t being truthful and wont give 100% honest answers. I believe this because of your persistent attempts at discrediting the purpose of this topic/thread. If not, what makes you believe that the data i’m receiving otherwise isn’t accurate? Again, I respectfully disagree that i’m “fooling myself”. This poll was created for those FRC teams/members who use or are somewhat active on Chief Delphi and those who simply choose to respond. I’m not attempting to create an FRC-wide demographic study.** Those who respond (more than a few) provide enough information to satisfy what I was looking for.**

#53

I would add that the composition of drive teams for teams who go on CD is reasonably interesting itself. It doesn’t generalize very well, but we have a pretty decent idea of what kinds of teams those are, so there’s useful information there. I think most reasonable people would agree that this poll is a good survey of that data.

#54

Our team recently applied for a grant which asked us to talk about how we help girls on the team and in our community. In the video, our girls largely describe how welcomed and encouraged they feel as part of our team. While we were putting together the video, I rather naively asked our female mentors a question: in this day and age, do girls still feel all these stereotypes? After all, we’d just sifted through tons of footage of our kids saying they felt fairly treated, I have never seen that kind of gender discrimination on our team, and a thread like this one seems to suggest that many FRC teams are doing the same thing as us. So, is it really still a big deal?

Oh boy.

Every one of our female mentors said, yes, they still felt it, whether at school, in the workplace, or having had or seen experiences on other teams. One mentor described walking into the fabrication room as a student on another team to see if they needed help and having the reaction vary from a shocked “what are you doing in here?” to “I didn’t know the business team was meeting tonight”.

Threads like this are insightful to me because they help affirm that, yes, these issues are being tackled, yes, things are improving, but as a whole we still have a long way to go.

#55

I really hate this line of thought. Are you making the assumption that men will naturally attempt to dominate women? Are you making the assumption that women are so incompetent they would allow men to walk all over them?

You saying “intentional or not” makes it sound like you assume that all men and boys in FRC are out to prevent women from getting a STEM education. Let me tell you this, children of all kinds want to learn. You applying your own sexist prejudices to men does nothing to help the situation.

Instead, why don’t we stop assuming men are naturally sexist and instead work to ensure an open environment in which NO individual can discriminate against another?

#56

What do you mean by “naturally” here?

#57

I’ll mostly let Eric answer you, since it is his post you’re responding to. But I do want you to consider two questions before you continue commenting on this subject. Firstly, why do you think so many STEM-related fields are far more populated by men than women? And secondly, why do you seem so offended by someone else’s efforts to promote STEM amongst an underrepresented demographic?

#58

You bring up some good points, and some that don’t make a lot of sense to me. The one thing that this thread has shown me is that threads like this don’t produce a lot of productive discussion. The fact is that FIRST Robotics is not a monolith. Every team has its own culture and its own approach to social issues.

A month or two ago, I remember there was a thread that asked the question “do FIRST robotics teams give equal opportunities to both men and women?” The fact is that every team has a different answer to that question. For Jon’s team, the answer is flatly no. For mine, I think it’s at least very close to yes. Regardless, many leaders of single-sex teams are convinced that their system is the best one, and I am convinced that ours is. No one’s opinion is likely to change, and the debates quickly turn adversarial and just foster resentment in the community. In my (relatively brief) time in CD, I have seen countless variations of this thread, and they all turn into the same old debate. No one changes sides, and everyone leaves a little bit angrier. Don’t believe me? This thread was asking about African-Americans, and we still ended up discussing women in STEM.

In no way to I mean to imply that it isn’t important to reconsider our opinions on social issues. In fact, I’m saying the opposite. If people are going to keep making the same posts and rehashing the same threads, they need to first ask themselves whether they are open to reconsidering their own stance. When I was reading your post, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t really done that. With some careful thought and some review of this and the other dozens (hundreds?) of threads on the same topic, I came to the conclusion that no one is going to convince me that a single-gender robotics team is a better or more productive organization than a co-ed team. With this in mind, I realized that the whole discussion is fruitless.

I hope that 2177, at some point, decides to invite boys and give them equal opportunities as the girls. That said, if they choose not to, I can’t change your opinion, and Jon probably can’t change mine. I would like to respectfully request that the Chief Delphi community seriously rethink whether these threads are a productive use of your time or anyone else’s.

#59

In this scenario, it is in fact common that literally no individual discriminates against another. Do not confuse this with an absence of discrimination.

You have found what is often a point confusion in discussions of discrimination. The majority definition typically centers on individuals’ perpetration of behaviors, which understandably returns an “I’m not [rac/sex]ist” from truthful and well-meaning majority individuals. In contrast, the minority definition considers the entire structure of the majority system. Each group develops its definition based on what’s important for them: either their own behaviors or the system that affects them.

Because of this difference, minorities regularly experience discrimination in many instances where majority members don’t execute it. Neither is wrong. The majority stakeholders say “I’m not [rac/sex-]ist, Name just didn’t abide by the (majority’s!) norm of behavior.” The minority stakeholders say “what Name did was objectively appropriate. S/he just didn’t demonstrate it in the way you wanted–and the fact that s/he is “wrong” in that and you’re “right” is part of the problem.” A common example is girls not asserting themselves along male norms.

To answer your question, there is no active assumption of domination or sexism or walking on, and certainly no incompetence. There doesn’t need to be, and there often isn’t in practice. (Separately, the conflation of incompetence with being walked on by the majority is in itself problematic.) There is certainly an argument that minorities need to learn to deal with majority norms at some point, and there’s also an argument that that point doesn’t need to be now–that it should occur after X experience/learning/etc. That’s a poor horse we’ve killed many of on CD. But regardless, don’t assume that having good people results itself in a good system, or that someone saying the system would be negative is casting aspersions on its people.

#60

Please don’t confuse my team with Jon’s team. We’re a couple thousand miles apart geographically, for one thing, and for another I want to say the breakdown on my team is 50% ±10% on gender, and about the same for white/non-white. This renders the last quarter or so of your post invalid. I can’t say for sure that I know the driveteam breakdown, though.

And for Drake: I’m simply reporting what I see, not necessarily from any one team. Seriously. I really don’t think men (or whites or Asians or X or Y or whatever) *intend to *shoulder anyone out of the way. Maybe in the case of “here, I got it” cropping up from one type of individual more often than not, but again, I see that as that type is ready to pull at least their weight if not more. Siri put it better than I could.

#61

Apologies. It definitely wasn’t clear who I was addressing in that post and I’ve edited it to provide some extra clarity. That said, I think the points I made are still valid despite the miscommunication, yes?