being a good girl hurts

(The title is a reference to a song by YENA: Being a Good Girl Hurts)

Women face unique obstacles in math contests. We know what it’s like being the only girl in the room, at contest after contest. It’s isolating and demotivating. And because of this, we’re missing out on the incredible opportunities offered by math contests.

I spent my six years of elementary school life in a girls’ school, and now I’m in my sixth year in a high school¹ where the girl to boy ratio is 1:4. (In my class, the ratio is 1:7.) Truthfully, I wish I had close female friends. But finding people I click with is hard enough on its own. When there are few girls in my immediate field of interaction and even fewer in my fields of interest², the electrostatic interactions are too weak for bond formation to be energetically favourable it feels like there’s an insurmountable energy barrier to forming close bonds with other girls.

One of my earliest experiences being the only girl was when I did well in a national science olympiad³ for fifth graders and was later selected for its international counterpart. This introduced me to shipping, which does exist but isn’t as prevalent in single-sex schools. By which I mean that I was (jokingly) shipped with a couple of people on the team. Even on the day of the olympiad exam, some of my teammates were laughing about a new ship. I experienced the same phenomenon during my first year in my current school, except at a much larger scale, because my class was crazy about shipping. I didn’t think much of it at first, since it’d happened before and it seemed to all be in good fun. Then it progressively became more annoying, due to the sheer number of ships (thanks to the 1:4 ratio) and people shoving these ships in my face. On some level it made me (and probably the other girls) feel kind of weird about being a girl – being singled out and paired around like vertices in Hall’s marriage theorem.

On that note, being singled out has never sat right with me. When I went for that olympiad in fifth grade, I and another girl (from the math team) were made to stand in the centre for the formation. I could use a dramatic metaphor here like we were rare biological specimens on display but I know it wasn’t that serious. Anyone looking would notice that we weren’t of the same biological sex from the others regardless of formation, and it probably looked more symmetrical to stand that way. I guess I mainly dislike that my gender makes me stand out for the wrong reasons. I’ve heard teachers say they remembered me because I was a girl, which makes sense, although I’d like to be remembered for something other than being a girl. Hopefully I’ve succeeded at that. Also, I notice when guys are cautious about what they say or do because I’m a girl, even though I’m every bit as unhinged as them. No, I’m not an alien from Mars (or maybe I am… for me to know and you to find out), you can talk to me like you do with any other human. I like putting on this ruse where I ask myself “Why can’t we treat girls and guys the same way? We’re all just people.” and pretend like I don’t know the answer. Unfortunately, societal norms have highlighted our differences, scrawled in a couple more where there aren’t any, and left in some blank spaces so we won’t be on the same page.

When I started with math olympiads, we truly weren’t on the same page. I was part of this small group of students (the people who were in the international team in fifth grade who came to my school) that had special training sessions, and everyone was probably on page 3 when I was on page 1. I hadn’t learnt much about math olympiads prior to that – I didn’t even know “basic” tricks like turning sums of fractions into telescoping sums.⁴ I felt out of place, without anyone to turn to or discuss (math and life) problems with. I think we feel a primal sense of belonging to our genders, as elephants to matriarchs, deer to bachelor groups; without it, we’re like fish out of water. Around two years ago, my teacher was telling me that there were no other girls in the school who were seriously pursuing math olympiads. (As to why that is the case, is a whole other topic for another time.) That year and the year prior, there were just four girls at our national math olympiad camp. I crave the feeling of belonging, but don’t know where I’m supposed to find it. Friends around me see me scribbling grids and triangles, together we joke about my obsession with geometry. They haven’t done any math olympiads themselves, all they know is what I’ve told them. You’re drawing circles again, they tease. Yet I still can’t find the circle I belong to, and this implacable sense of loneliness lingers on.

Since girls in math olympiads are so rare, there’s often some quota for the number of girls selected for training teams. There was this selection test for the Senior Team (which I took in 2022), which had a slightly lower cutoff for females according to my teacher. And when he told me that I’d gotten in, he mentioned that I got in not just because I was a girl. But how do you prove that to other people? What’s stopping them from saying, you got that award just because you’re a girl, or you’re training with us just because you’re a girl, or you get to go for that competition just because you’re a girl? Then there are people who pit us girls against each other, because as long as you beat the other girls, you get picked to fill the quota, so you just need to be better than them. They mentally exclude us from direct competition with the guys, and act like we’re here to grab easy accomplishments on the basis of gender.

That’s not why I’m here. And if you’re reading this, that’s probably not why you’re here either. We’re here because we love math: playing with puzzles, exploring unconventional ideas, analysing complex structures. Athemath has brought me a community of people who share some of my thoughts and experiences, even if many are more than 14340km away⁵. While it’s not the same as having friends who are going through the same math olympiads and training sessions as I am, it’s made the journey a little less lonely.