Number of girls in England taking computing GCSE plummets, study finds

The number of girls in England studying for a GCSE in computing has more than halved in less than a decade, prompting warnings about the "dominance of men in shaping the modern world". The sharp decline in female participation follows government qualification changes that led to the scrapping of the old information communication technology (ICT) GCSE and its replacement with a new computer science GCSE. While the government's reforms were aimed at creating "more academically challenging and knowledge-based" qualifications, the introduction of the new syllabus has had the unintended consequence of driving female entries down, according to new research by King's College London. In 2015 43% of candidates for ICT GCSE were female, compared with just 21% of those who took GCSE computer science in 2023. In numerical terms, 40,000 female students took ICT GCSE in 2015, with a further 5,000 taking computer science.