Welcome to INTEGIRLS Chicago!

We are the Chicago chapter of INTEGIRLS aiming to reinvent competitive problem solving for girls and non-binary students affected by [trans]misogyny.

Recent News + Upcoming Events

🦃🍂 Our 2024 Fall Competition happened at Oakton College on Sunday, November 17th. (overview, winners, and pictures found here!) 

We gave out $620 total in cash prizes awarded to the top 5 individuals and top 3 teams in both the middle school and high school division. We also hosted a WolframOne subscription (worth $1660) raffle for the first time. 😁Thank you to all competitors, parents, Oakton College, and sponsors who made this event possible!

Stay tuned: Our 2025 Spring Competition will be happening around mid-March. We will send out emails and release more information when available.  

Stay updated with INTEGIRLS Chicago

Join us in the next math competition with lots of problem-solving and community-building fun!

We'll send out emails to keep you updated when our competitions are coming up or when we have exciting opportunities for you: sign up below 👇👇

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! 

While 46% of people with math occupations in 2016 were women, these charts from Pew Research Center show that women are significantly underrepresented in the other more math-related STEM jobs, like physical science, computers, and engineering. 

This chart from the National Science Foundation shows women as a percentage of people earning degrees in math and statistics, as well as the number of women. In 2016, the percentage of women earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math and statistics was around 42% of the total, but women made up only 28.5% earning doctorates in these areas. 

The statistics for the takers of select tests in 2019, obtained directly from the College Board, are to the left. The depicted courses are the most math related ones offered and most math-related subjects have significantly more boys taking the test than girls. Why is this?

This bar chart from the National Library of Medicine shows the percentage of LGBTQ+ students who intended to major in STEM upon entering college and graduated with a STEM degree. Transgender and Gender non-conforming students were shown to seek stem degrees  14% less than their cisgender peers.