<p>There is one big STEM/female issue in our school system, but this isn’t it–I don’t believe the Olympiad difficulties were sex-related. Many of the kids on the team event were boys. It’s more a matter of school priorities. I cannot conceive that any athlete (or participant in a more popular extracurricular activity) who qualified for a state or national event would get so little support from the school. Yet I had no idea some of these apparently big-deal Olympiad and other contests even existed until I saw mention of them on this site in the past few weeks. And our school actually is reasonably good with STEM education, better than most public schools, I think. If the OP is in a much worse situation, it may just be extremely difficult to get these things off the ground. How many schools will authorize forming a club and paying registration fees, and paying a teacher to supervise, and ordering in tests, and setting a time to give them, if there’s only one student who is interested? I don’t mean to discourage the OP from trying, but I think for the many people on this site coming from higher powered schools, it is difficult to imagine that for some kids, it’s not as simple as just showing up.</p>