Gender and Achievement: Introduction and key issues

Gender and subject choice

While girls are now achieving better academic results than boys at age 16, relatively few young women are choosing science or science-related subjects for further study.
Boys dominate in maths, science and technology at A Level and far more men than women study these subjects in higher education. This has significant implications for men's and women's career choices and future earnings: 60 per cent of working women are clustered in only 10 per cent of occupations; and men are also under-represented in a number of occupations.
Pupils' subject and course choices are influenced by a range of factors: their own views and expectations, those of their peers, parents and teachers, and the media.

Some words of warning:

Most single-sex girls schools are in the independent sector; this makes for difficult comparisons with a national picture, as it is likely that any differences are artefacts of the independent/maintained split rather than the gender difference.
Although the list of subjects above attempts to classify what are traditionally 'feminine' areas of the curriculum, in today's world, such stereotyping is difficult to pin down – is, for example, medicine a 'traditionally' masculine career choice? 30 years ago, this might have been true, but it could be argued that it is no longer the case.
There is a problem over deciding what is 'choice' in terms of a school system (i.e. the choices pupils make for subjects studied). At GCSE there is still some restriction (both in terms of curriculum requirement and what the school opts for en bloc or by being a specialist school), and it could be argued that only in a post-16 environment is there a true measure of 'choice'.

WISE