The number of girls choosing to take computing at GCSE level is rising steadily, with 2024 seeing the third consecutive year of growth.
This year, 21,020 female students across the UK took the GCSE computing exam, a rise from 19,061 in 2023. However, with 74,821 male students also sitting the exam, girls are still heavily outnumbered.
Mairead O’Connor, practice operations director at Node4, said: “It is great to see that more girls are studying computing and engineering at GCSE than last year, marking a positive upward trend over the past three years.
“But despite this year-on-year growth, the pool of female students remains small. The stereotype of computing and engineering being boys’ clubs remains, which can be off-putting to girls. It is hard to be the only female in the room in adult life, let alone in your bashful teenage years.”
As highlighted by O’Connor, there are many reasons girls don’t choose computing subjects or careers, including a lack of understanding about what computing careers involve and how studying it as a subject could be helpful to their future, as well as a lack of visible and accessible role models already in computing demonstrating the various paths into the industry.
But O’Connor also stated some students aren’t able to choose computing because tight budgets have left many schools unable to offer the subject, especially those in areas with a less privileged socioeconomic background.
In the schools offering GCSE computing, there was a rise in overall students studying the subject this year, from 90,558 in 2023 to 95,841 in 2024.
Performance was also higher this year than last, with 28.3% of students in the UK taking the GCSE computing exam achieving at least an A/7 grade, compared with around a quarter of students last year.
Though girls are in limited number, their grades are higher overall than their male counterparts – in 2024, 35% of girls achieved at least an A/7 grade, compared with 26.4% of boys, and 75.5% of girls achieved at least a C/4 grade compared with 66.3% of boys.
It’s difficult to compare the past five years of computing grades, due to the pandemic causing anomalies in the way grades were allocated. With children not being able to attend exams during lockdowns, grades were provided using a combination of data from mock exam results, coursework grades, teacher predictions, centre assessment grades and statistical standardisation models, but despite the effort to give a true reflection of student performance, grades in 2020 and 2021 turned out much higher than in previous years.
Rachel Phillips, UK and Ireland vice-president at Okta, provided a timely reminder to those getting their results today that the subjects you take at GCSE, and the grades you are awarded, do not necessarily dictate your possible future career.
“This year, my son will be receiving his results. With so much pressure on today’s youth, I will be reminding him that his and his peers’ career paths can take many forms and do not necessarily require a stream of accreditations. For example, I took an access course after A-levels to study engineering, and believe this was one of the best decisions I made.”
Girls don’t always carry on studying science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects, though the number of girls taking computing at A-level in the UK this year also rose, hopefully painting a positive picture for gender equality in tech in the future.