Welcome to INTEGIRLS Chicago!

Our Mission:

INTEGIRLS is a teen-led organization that seeks to promote girls and non-binary students comfortable being grouped with girls interested in math and STEM by holding math competitions and puzzle hunts. We know that it can often be daunting to be one of only a handful of a member of an underrepresented gender in an engineering class, math team, or science club. Our team seeks to ensure that feeling isolated is never a barrier of entry for a student interested in math or STEM. Our goal is to foster a community for this promising group by inviting students affected by [trans]misogyny in the greater Chicago area who love math to join us in our team-based math contests and puzzle hunts. Through our competitions, we hope to inspire students passionate about math and encourage them to pursue their interests with the backing of a supportive community. 

Why is our mission important?

Through this organization, we aim to encourage girls and nonbinary students comfortable being grouped with girls to try out math. Although people don’t directly say, “Hey, I think you’re bad at math,” there unfortunately exists a cultural bias towards cis-males in math. For many, the bias is unconscious. But whether it’s because it's daunting to speak up in a majority male class or a teacher consistently underestimating some of their students, some will find math unapproachable and leave what could have been a life-long interest. That’s just on the individual level. 

On a larger scale, nurturing an interest in math for more groups of people can help combat stereotypes and break barriers. Maybe when they see more people like them in math, young children will take those cultural cues and be more likely to develop an interest. Or maybe the more prominent evidence about the equality of math skills will lessen biases for the educators and employers that do unconsciously hold them.

Finally, math and math-adjacent fields lose out on some great minds when people aren’t encouraged to try it out. Promoting math to someone isn’t just for that one person or a subset of people they identify with, it’s beneficial to everyone.

 Check out some women in STEM stats below!