Team 2834, 469, 33 and 68 are working together to bring a new offseason event to Michigan.
This event aims to help recruit girls to *FIRST *Robotics and encourage them to take on technical roles on the team. In this competition, robot driver/operator, human player and pit crew must be high school aged girls. Male team members can be in the pit but only in support/advisory role. They cannot perform maintenance and repair on the robot.
Your cause is good, but I think you may have went a bit too far with it. Not allowing the guys to do anything would discourage them, so they might not help preparing for the event as much as they should. Also, you would be putting a whole lot of stress on the girls at the event, because most teams don’t have that many girls, usually around a quarter of the team, so you’re basically having 25% of the team do the work of the whole team.
Girls-only drive team is good, but you should allow guys to do some pit work (maybe restrict to one guy at a time, or only allow them to do what the girls tell them to do), that way the guys would have something to do and won’t be bored and probably a bit negative, and the girls have a bit less stress on them, while still maintaining the purpose of the event.
I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem, but when I click on the flyer it just takes me to a blank Google Documents page. Just wanted to bring that to your attention in case it’s not just me.
It works for us in Washington too, after our team participated in the Girl’s Generation event held by the Flaming Chickens we co-opted the idea and held our own version last year and we will be holding one again this year.
At both of the events a lot of the boys on the teams do help with preparations and do attend the event.
However the fact is that in many teams pit and drive crews are often dominated by males, not necessarily males only but often mainly males.
These girls only events encourage them to take on those roles w/o the worry of “not being as good at it as the boys” and not feeling that they have to “fight” to get the right to participate in those area.
Many of the guys on our teams really enjoy the girls events. For one thing it is nice to just watch an event w/o worrying about the robot. Plus we usually buy some of the cheapest Halloween wigs we can find for all the male mentors and students, put them on and get out there and cheer for our team.
You should try and get the author of this Seattle Times Op-Ed to Girls Gen. Events like this are also a great opportunity to try and recruit female mentors as well, because getting more women in engineering is often something women in engineering feel quite strongly about. If they go to an event and see so many girls excited about engineering, they may be hard pressed to turn down the opportunity to mentor them…
I guess it is because drive team and pit crew are student positions but drive coach is 50/50. About half of the teams have student drive coach and half of the teams have adult mentors as drive coach. We are trying to encourage female students to participate in FIRST. We are not encouraging or discouraging adult participation.
We certainly would encourage a female mentor or student as drive coach but we don’t want to make it too difficult for some teams to participate. We plan to have a female engineering mentor as drive coach for our team that day.
Also you already have inexperienced drivers most likely, so you want someone that is experienced like my suggestion would be the drive coach or one of the main drivers that can guide them and make them feel more comfortable.
Relevance? In my mind both types of events are equally sexist. If you are telling someone they can’t participate based on some criteria they were born with it is disgusting to me. What’s next? Only students of Asian heritage are allowed to compete at an event?
As opposed to in the real world where they will have to “fight” to get the right to participate in those areas. We’re not doing anyone favors setting up little playgrounds where everyone gets to feel special.
