Gcse Essay

The focus of this research project is to find out how girls can be encouraged to choose Computing for GCSE. The importance of encouraging girls to take GCSE Computing is due to the lack of women in the technology industry. There is a high demand for women in the technology industry “because women may think, act, or approach problems differently. Women tend to be more emo-tionally sensitive and more empathic. Women are also more design-focused on average” (Forbes, 2012). Furthermore, according to the National Skills Forum, “the limited number of women entering science, engineering and technology (SET) exacerbates skills shortage in these sectors. This is lead-ing to the reducing productivity of SET organisations and making it harder for them

RHC is an 11 – 18 multicultural, inclu-sive, comprehensive College specialising in Business and Enterprise. The head of the Computing department at RHC mentioned that there is usually at least 10 girls who choose Computing as an option in year 9 for Key Stage 3 (KS3), but only a few remain in year 11. Several members of the department claim that the reason for this drastic lack of girls choosing GCSE Computing at RHC may be due to; girls finding the subject challenging, clashes with another subject option and one of the GCSE Computing classes is during twilight (after school) at this time of day most students just switch off. In addition to the departments assumption of why there is a lack of girls choosing GCSE Computing there may be other reasons such as, the nature of teaching Computing lesson and the content being taught. In RHC, there are only female teachers within the Computing department. This characteristic of the department could also possibly be a factor impacting girls choosing Com-puting. I could be understood that having female teachers within a department can be seen as role models for the girls, but this may not be the case for the girls at