Chess has a similar problem. Girls may show promise in chess, but when they see that chess club is 3/4 male, or more, they tend to drop out, especially at older ages.
The local chess club is more than 80% male and almost 90% Asian, although there are more whites than Asians in the schools. It may well be that children prefer to associate with their own sex (at least before puberty) and race and choose activities accordingly. The same mechanism may partially explain similarly skewed demographics of school math teams. I don't see what can be done to make participation more representative. You can't turn away interested children, and the level of interest appears to vary by demographic group.
I do think there may be a bit of elementary-aged children preferring to socialize with their own gender (although I also think that tendency may in part be influenced by the adults and environment they grow up with/in). Whatever the reason, I think we could talk around it from different directions forever and never really know for sure.
My kids aren't into chess and math comps aren't big around here at the elementary level, but robotics is. It's another place where you tend to see more boys than girls participating - at first glance. When my ds was in elementary school and participating it was definitely skewed to boys participating in a big way. I think a large part of that was that in order to just get a club going you had to have a parent sponsoring it, and that parent was often a dad. A dad looking for something to do with his son. The kids they reached out to tended to be similar to their own kid - male. The ratios were a bit different for clubs that started from *within* a school - sponsored by a teacher. They still typically had more males, but there were also a number of girls participating. Then a local girls organization started sponsoring an all-girls team - and that team grew to be HUGE - larger than any of the other teams competing. There were SO many interested girls. What it took to get them involved was simply reaching out to them and letting them know there was an opportunity to join in and participate. I think it's quite possible that there are subtle signs all over the place that we just don't recognized that turn kids off for whatever reason from joining in. Our school's chess club, for instance, is primarily male. When it was first formed, a few girls, including my dd, tried it out. They didn't last - not because they weren't interested in the chess, but because they didn't like the way the club was run by the teacher sponsoring it. Something about his style worked better with the boys than the girls. Either that or the parents of the boys refused to say "no" when the boys also wanted to quit
Really I think there are all sorts of little tiny not-so-obvious ways that gender-bias still permeates our society here in the US
polarbear
