I was looking through the tools and resources I’ve uploaded so far and it struck me that most of the themes, styles and project ideas would appeal more to the stereotypical boy than the stereotypical girl. I don’t want to reinforce or play to unhelpful stereotypes by pretending that if we tweak the colour scheme of our resources and choose some girly topics for our projects we can magically make Computer Science for girls more appealing but the fact that some of my GCSE classes are exclusively male means there’s a much deeper problem that I need to start properly addressing.
How can we reduce the gender gap in Computer Science participation?
This post looks some of the mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’m trying to learn in order to recruit, engage and motivate more students of all genders.
Anyway, this led me to some research about how wide the gender gap currently is in the UK at GCSE, A-level and degree level. The findings were pretty shocking:
