The Irish Mathematical Olympiad, with a close-up view on female participation

Round 1 of the Irish Mathematical Olympiad, held in September 2024 in secondary schools across the country, allowed teachers to identify promising students to participate in Mathematics Enrichment classes in 6 university centres, and compete in the final round on 25th January 2025.

Jean O'Brien, teacher at Castleknock Community College, is a very special member of the IMT. As a secondary school student, she represented Ireland at the European Girls Mathematical Olympiad 2017 in Switzerland, where she earned an honourable mention and contributed to team Ireland's best result ever. After graduating from TCD with a Masters in Mathematics Education, she has recently returned to teach at her old school. In addition to running round 1 of the IrMO in her school, she also helped set the paper for the Junior Irish Mathematics Olympiad. Below is her informal report:

"My professional observations from running round 1 of the Irish Maths Olympiad as a secondary school teacher in a public mixed school:

We held the IrMO round 1 as well as the JIrMO in September 2024 and there were 91 students who wanted to sit the competitions (picture included above). Of these 91 students who signed up, 45 were girls. But I had to actively encourage the girls to sign up, I had to identify girls in the school who may benefit and individually invite them to come, whereas boys were much quicker to sign up.

Out of all the students that sat the competition, 20 students achieved a total of five or six marks in their competition. Of these 20 highest scorers, 10 were girls, so again very equal. I think the real issue is a lack of confidence in girls. As I mentioned previously, the girls in the school had to be actively encouraged by me and their maths teacher to sign up. There were five of the ten top scoring girls who I believe would not have turned up if they had not been pushed by me to give it a go, they had to be handed invitations to sit the competition and encouraged to go.

A more in depth look at female participation in maths competitions – why are girls being left behind?

The noticeable gender gap in maths has had a presence and impact throughout my life, particularly in my teenage years. The low proportion of girls compared to boys in my secondary school physics and applied maths classes was evident from a glance and I have often noticed that boys have been encouraged more in maths than myself and wondered why this is, and could it be related to gender? I may have given up on maths myself was it not for the existence of programmes aimed at increasing female maths participation, for example the European Girls Maths Olympiad which helped to improve my confidence in my maths ability and made me realise that I, and women more generally, belong in maths.

In my previous paragraph I mentioned my own confidence in my mathematical ability, and in truth, I believe confidence is the key to understanding this issue. Why are girls being left behind? Due to societies lack of confidence in female mathematical ability. Research has shown that confidence in maths correlates strongly with achievement, with a tendency for more confident students to perform better (Stankov, 2013). Women tend to be less confident in maths than men, a difference that begins to emerge in early primary school and widens throughout development (Huang, Zhang, & Hudson, 2019; Levine & Pantoja, 2021).

Why are women less confident in maths? To answer this question, we need to look to the past, to historical gender stereotypes. The maths gender stereotype is the belief that males are naturally better at maths than females (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012). Looking back a hundred years or more the maths gender stereotype was clearly present, along with other gender stereotypes and a general sense of male superiority. Mathematics has been an important field of study for millennia but the history of women in maths is much shorter. The first woman to earn a degree in mathematics was not until the late nineteenth century (Cadinu, Maass, Rosabianca, & Kiesner, 2005). Many early female mathematicians had to fight to study and be recognised in the field. Some of the top universities, such as Cambridge, did not allow women to earn degrees until quite recently, within the last 100 years. Women were actively discouraged from pursuing mathematics, and some had to study in secret due to society’s disapproval. Emmy Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century worked for many years in the field without pay as she was unable to secure a university position due to her gender (Case & Leggett, 2016).

Given the recent history of women in mathematics it is unquestionable that the maths gender stereotype was widespread throughout society within living memory. Today, it is not as obvious and most people explicitly reject the stereotype, however, recent research has shown that many adults still hold the belief that boys are naturally better at maths than girls, at least implicitly (Hildebrand, Posid, Moss‐Racusin, Hymes, & Cordes, 2022; McCoy, Byrne, & O’Connor, 2022). Even when girls perform well in maths their parents and teachers still underestimate their ability and rate similar boys more highly, meaning girls have to work harder and achieve at a higher level for the same recognition which can understandably lead girls to choose a more female stereotyped field, where their work will be more appreciated (Hildebrand et al., 2022; Huang et al., 2019; McCoy et al., 2022).

Parents, teachers and wider society value maths more for boys and believe boys are better at maths, leading them to hold lower expectations for girls in maths (McCoy et al., 2022). These lower expectations for girls can actually lead to lower performance by way of a self-fulfilling, prophecy where achievement matches expectations due to the influence of the expectations. If society holds lower expectations for girls and those expectations are met by way of self-fulfilling prophecy, then this provides evidence that the expectations were indeed correct, giving them a certain amount of validity and therefore perpetuating the maths gender stereotype. In this way, maths gender stereotypes are passed on from generation to generation (Hildebrand et al., 2022; Levine & Pantoja, 2021).

A parent’s beliefs about their child’s mathematical ability can have an immense impact on the child and their future as they strongly predict the child’s maths attitudes and in turn their achievement. There is evidence that parents of boys believe that their child has more natural talent and ability in maths than parents of girls and they expect boys to do better (Gunderson, Ramirez, Levine, & Beilock, 2012; McCoy et al., 2022). A recent study of Irish mothers and teachers provides an enlightening insight into this phenomenon. Mothers and teachers were asked to rate their child’s performance in maths compared to other children of that age and a key finding of this research was that these adults tend to overestimate boys’ ability in maths and underestimate girls’ ability. Perhaps even more worrying though, is that this finding was the most prevalent amongst high achieving students. High achieving girls were far less likely to be rated as excellent than high achieving boys (McCoy et al., 2022).

The gender difference in parents’ and teachers’ praise and criticism in relation to mathematics is particularly provocative. Teachers and parents tend to explain mathematical achievement differently in boys and girls. They relate high performance in boys to talent and low performance to lack of effort (process criticism) and they attribute high performance in girls to a good work ethic and low performance to lack of natural ability (person criticism), clearly showing the gendered nature of mathematics attitudes (Levine & Pantoja, 2021). It has been suggested that holding on to this idea is attractive to the patriarchal society as it explains girls’ higher academic achievement due to hard work, while still maintaining male superiority, as boys can still be seen as “naturally more intelligent’” due to an innate maths ability (McCoy et al., 2022).

The gender gap in mathematics is the most obvious at the highest levels, the International Mathematics Olympiad, IMO, a maths competition for secondary school students, provides a good example of this. The ratio of boys to girls in the competition has been a cause of concern for many years with up to ten times as many boys taking part. I believe the issue with gender disparity in the IMO is starting in school and that is where our efforts should be concentrated to try to improve the situation. Maths enrichment and problem solving needs to be promoted across all schools and female students in particular should be encouraged to get involved. In my professional experience, it is very clear from teaching in a mixed school that the boys have more confidence in their maths ability and the girls have very low confidence, even when their ability is equal. They have spent their lives receiving subtle messages relating maths to boys and implying boys are better at maths. This has chipped away at their confidence over the years making them less likely to push themselves in maths, less likely to believe in themselves and less likely to participate in mathematics and problem solving at a higher level. I believe that all of us - teachers, parents, mentors - have an important role in reshaping the way in which girls approach mathematics from a young age.

“Girls should never be afraid to be smart.” Emma Watson

Cadinu, M., Maass, A., Rosabianca, A., & Kiesner, J. (2005). Why do women underperform under stereotype threat? Evidence for the role of negative thinking. Psychological Science, 16(7), 572–578.

Case, B. A., & Leggett, A. M. (2016). Complexities: Women in mathematics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Good, C., Rattan, A., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women's representation in mathematics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 700.

Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., Levine, S. C., & Beilock, S. L. (2012). The role of parents and teachers in the development of gender-related math attitudes. Sex Roles, 66, 153–166.

Hildebrand, L., Posid, T., Moss‐Racusin, C. A., Hymes, L., & Cordes, S. (2022). Does my daughter like math? Relations between parent and child math attitudes and beliefs. Developmental Science, e13243.

Huang, X., Zhang, J., & Hudson, L. (2019). Impact of math self-efficacy, math anxiety, and growth mindset on math and science career interest for middle school students: The gender moderating effect. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 34(3), 621–640.

Levine, S. C., & Pantoja, N. (2021). Development of children’s math attitudes: Gender differences, key socializers, and intervention approaches. Developmental Review, 62, 100997.

McCoy, S., Byrne, D., & O’Connor, P. (2022). Gender stereotyping in mothers’ and teachers’ perceptions of boys’ and girls’ mathematics performance in Ireland. Oxford Review of Education, 48(3), 341–363.

Stankov, L. (2013). Noncognitive predictors of intelligence and academic achievement: An important role of confidence. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(7), 727–732.