I recently attended a math competition that my sons were in.  It’s called Math Counts, and here’s the blurb from their website:

"MATHCOUNTS® is a national math enrichment, coaching & competition program that promotes middle school mathematics achievement in every U.S. state & territory. With over 23 years experience, MATHCOUNTS is one of the most successful education partnerships involving volunteers, educators, industry sponsors & students." 

It was my first time attending the regional competition and awards ceremony. This is my older son’s third time competing and his third time scoring well enough to go to the state competition. 

While my motherly pride kicked in when the top finishers were announced, the woman engineer in me was curious and dismayed. Four teams advance to the state competion, each team consisting of four middle-schoolers. Out of 16 kids, only 2 were girls.  Ten individuals from the regional competition go to the state competition.  None were girls. And yet nearly 90% of the coaches for these teams were women. What’s going on here?

Colleagues have sounded the warning on this trend that I was seeing at the middle school level.  The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), based in Boulder is a center co-founded by a former Avaya executive, Lucy Sanders. I’ve blogged about NCWIT before. Two other friends are now involved in working with NCWIT. One is a professor of computer science and the other is a software engineer.  Both are passionate about making a difference in the number of women involved in information technology.

Two NCWIT staffers blogged last week on:  "IT Startups: Where Are the Women?"  If girls don’t show up with excellence in math in middle school, they never make their mark in the work world in IT or any other math-based discipline. There’s a great quote from Lucy that makes the point:

"We’ll never know what we’re missing without more women participating in information technology. We can’t measure absence."

We’ll find the women in IT when we find the girl math whizzes in middle school.