Why are there so many boys and so few girls in Middle school competitions?

[Killboe]

It's literally completely random.

[UTF-8 U+6211 U+662F]

It's literally completely random.

Not necessarily, that's something that would be difficult to prove (especially if some regional/state competitions have many more of one gender)

[knottingpurple]

It's literally completely random.

Not necessarily, that's something that would be difficult to prove (especially if some regional/state competitions have many more of one gender)

I went through a solid 5 years of try out data from my school and I can confirm that while girls and guys are accepted at similar rates, across both Science Olympiad and Science Bowl at most competition levels, the average proportion of girls both trying out is 22% (with a standard deviation of 6%) and being accepted is 18% (standard deviation of 8%). There are definitely teams where this is not the case, but for our school, having this occur across so many years I'm sure makes it not random chance. I can't find full try out data from before that in our team Google account, but looking at the list of officers since 2011 on our website, there have been 7 instances ever of girls holding positions (5 distinct female officers, because 2 held positions for 2 years) out of 38 positions elected within that time. A lot of schools do seem to have random gender ratios but we do not, and if there are other schools like us, we should definitely try to address it.

[StarlightSonata]

My school's div C scioly team had 11 boys and 4 girls (including me). On average, the girls didn't perform any worse *cough cough* than the boys, but I noticed while trying out that there were just proportionally less girls who tried to make the team to begin with. There are 50% girl captains, I haven't been treated badly on the team or anything (quite the contrary, since I'm also the youngest haha), and I'm not sure this is really directly related to scioly itself. Probably still some old stereotypes about girls in STEM as well, since I've seen a lot of girls around me in MUN

[pumptato-cat]

Hmm, this is interesting. My Div B team had a maximum of 3 girls in all the years I competed(me being one of them). Div C is different, with a rough 1:1 ratio of girls to boys in the past two years. I'm quitting my current school's team but I expect there to be more girls than boys next year.

[Mathlete13]

So true. Last year I was one of only 6 girls on the team (a team of 15.) It seems to have gotten worse in high school, too. I am on Varsity and am one of four girls. Our JV1 and JV2 teams are slightly better (6 and 7 girls) but still...

[Unome]

This is an old post revival so it's already somewhat covered, but I thought I'd mention that the national marketing material has typically indicated that the gender ratio of participation in SO nationwide is approximately even.

[ScientificMouse1492]

I also noticed this on my team.

[CSLA]

There are only four girls and eleven boys on my team I don't know why though. I guess that guys are typically more interested in science than girls.

[sc95837]

I'd imagine that it'd depend on the specifics of the program.
Someone sent me this dissertation about the topic that points out some possible factors. It's examining a single team in detail, so I'd imagine that there might be some things that can't be extrapolated, but there's a lot of cool stuff in there.

It's about a high school though. I don't know how middle school SO differs. I'd imagine that it does in significant ways though.

https://repository.usfca.edu/diss/664/