In Kosovo this April, a team of four girls between the ages of 15 and 18 represented Ireland at the prestigious European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO). They achieved our second-best set of results since the competition was founded in 2012, including a bronze medal and a haul of 43 points. For context, Ireland has broken the 40-point barrier only once before.
“I think this is the beginning of a new era,” says Dr Myrto Manolaki, an assistant professor and maths lecturer at University College Dublin (UCD), who coached this year’s group. “The fact that Ireland has become more international also has a positive impact in education.
“There is higher competition; there are people who have been educated in different backgrounds. This brings up the level. The very first milestone is how to promote this type of competition and things like maths-enrichment classes for girls.”
A high-level, extracurricular maths competition for young female students, the EGMO exists separately to the International Mathematical Olympiad, another competition for gifted teenagers that has been running since 1959.
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The need for the EGMO is evidenced in the disparity in the number of boys and girls that compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad: this year, all six representatives of Ireland were boys. Before the EGMO was introduced, Manolaki says about 10 per cent of medals at the olympiad went to girls.
It is a trend that has commanded plenty of research over the last few decades. At the top level of maths in secondary education, boys tend to outperform girls. In Ireland, the problem is clear at Leaving Certificate level. Boys tend to get twice as many H1 grades as girls do in higher-level maths.
“We are aware that sometimes girls are intimidated when they compete with boys,” Manolaki says. “We created some training camps and then we did some focus groups. We’re asking the girls to submit their work, giving back feedback one by one. We also had a lot of personal interactions before we went to the competition.
“So, this year was the first year we applied a more intensive training for the girls, and I think this paid off.”
The UCD training camps gave the girls an opportunity to meet each other before the trip to Kosovo, and to solve exercises that featured in previous years of the competition.
“I approached the girls and we discussed the way they work,” Manolaki says. “As a personal experience, when I had common training camps, there were always some boys who were more confident. They would raise their hand; they would say the answer loudly. You could see some of the girls get intimidated by this. That’s a remark that I think is relevant.”
Just getting girls involved in these kinds of competitions can be a challenge. Culturally, Manolaki says there is a tendency to diminish a girl’s aptitude for maths. “When [boys] do well, they say he has a talent; when they don’t do well, they say there is a lack of effort,” she says. “For the girls, if they perform well, they say she has a good work ethic, but if she’s bad she lacks ability. The very first thing is [understanding] how to encourage girls to participate.”
Manolaki says girls-only teams such as the EGMO are vital for attracting female students. They create a “less intimidating” environment – one where girls don’t face boys who might intensify the competitive atmosphere or boast about finding questions “easy”. In this supportive setting, she says, girls build confidence and ultimately perform better in competitions.
Specifics of the Irish education system play their part too. Manolaki is originally from Greece, where it is very rare to have segregated schools. “They have uniform education in Greece; everyone is taught using the same book in every school,” she says. “You have to be examined on the same material, and [this] is the same in many countries. Here, there is this interesting distinction between schools.”
The gender disparity in Leaving Cert maths results is only really pronounced at the highest level. One area of the paper seems to significantly widen the gap – Section B’s problem-solving. This is the part of the Irish syllabus that was brought in as part of Project Maths reforms, initially in 2008 and fully by 2012.
There is an even breakdown of boys and girls sitting higher-level maths, but boys get twice as many H1 grades as girls do. The only time this changed was in 2020, when exams were cancelled and replaced by predicted grades. As Covid measures were unwound, the disparity returned.
Eoghan O’Leary, a maths teacher and member of the Irish Mathematics Teachers’ Association, explains that process.
“We were basing our predictions off the results students got in fifth year and the start of sixth year,” he says. “During that time period, what you’re testing is skills. It’s kind of similar to the old-fashioned Leaving Cert. It’s algebra skills, calculus skills, trigonometry – it’s after that time period of February and March that you practise the Section B questions which are what was introduced in 2012.”
O’Leary’s online grinds provider, The Tuition Centre, recently conducted a study on Leaving Cert maths performance with the Society of Actuaries in Ireland , who had been noticing a drop-off in the number of girls studying to become actuaries. They produced a mock exam for 500 students from 22 schools.
“Ireland is a bit of an outlier,” O’Leary says. “In other countries, there can be a gender gap in favour of boys in relation to maths and to problem-solving. But in Ireland, it’s just far more extreme at that level of this really important exam that’s the gateway to your college course.”
He says the reasons girls weren’t getting into actuary courses were twofold.
“One, if they didn’t get the H1, they mightn’t get the points to get in. But also, they didn’t think they were going to get a H1. If they didn’t think they were a H1 candidate, they didn’t think they were good enough to do [an actuary course] and they didn’t put it down,” he says.
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Girls were surveyed and self-rated themselves lower than boys in terms of confidence and enjoyment in maths, problem-solving ability and spatial awareness ability. Another factor was limited access to other subjects, in particular, applied maths.
“You have roughly 2,000 students every year doing this subject called applied maths,” O’Leary says. “Those students have a great advantage in regular maths, but the gender gap for students doing applied maths is two to one in favour of boys.
“Applied maths is on offer in lots of all-boys secondary schools, whereas it’s not on offer in the vast majority of all-girls secondary schools. You can basically count on your hands the all-girls secondary schools that offer applied maths on the timetable. That’s to do with our traditions of education in the country.”
In terms of access, there are regional disparities too. Schools in south county Dublin are more likely to offer applied maths than rural schools.
Encouragement needs to come from principals and teachers, but so too from parents. Too many people write maths off as something they, and their child, aren’t good at naturally, he says. As for the problem-solving section of the exam, there is scope for adjustment.
“Change is coming because the new Leaving Cert with the additional assessment components (AACs) – that is coming and will be worth up to 40 per cent,” O’Leary says. “That will be very different to what we’ve seen before. It’ll be a project of some kind. For the people involved in the development of the new syllabus, it is worth bearing in mind this gender gap that is there, and taking it into account.
“If I was to give a little bit of advice to schools, it’s to be conscious of this little bias that people have that the boys will do better at maths,” says O’Leary. It’s perhaps because the boys have had an advantage over the years rather than an actual difference in ability. I would think, with a bit of encouragement and extra focus on it, there could be certainly a change in outcome for the girls. They might be just about to take off and narrow this gap.”
