Congratulations to all the A-Level and GCSE students who received their results in the last fortnight. If you got the results you wanted, great! If you didn’t get the results you wanted, don’t worry – there are a legion of the “good & the great” happy to tell you that there is much more fun to be had in the “University of Life”. Sadly, this is not entirely true. For girls, the option of whether to study further i.e. a degree, will determine not only your future pay packet, but the subject you choose will determine the “pay gap” between you and your male colleague. So choosing wisely at this stage is crucial. Little wonder that the Universities and Science Minister David Willetts spoke only the truth when he said that state schools frequently advised children wrongly about exams.
Choose the “soft” option if you wish, but here’s what I observed from the league tables:
– Firstly, the A-level results showed that girls had edged past boys to secure more A grades.
– At GCSE girls outperformed boys in EVERY subject except Maths & Economics.
– At GCSE, the top 31 state schools in the country are all former ‘Grammar’ schools, with the first Comprehensive appearing at No 32. So much for the “free” schools – this is evidence of the existing chasm in the state sector, never mind the widening gap between the independent and state sectors.
– There was a decrease in men and women taking computing A-level, with less than ten per cent of A-level computing entrants being female.
Employers are warning of a major shortage of people with skills in engineering and IT, according to the latest labour market outlook survey by KPMG and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) released on 26th August 2010.
Combine this information with the scramble for University places and I find it hard to fathom why more girls are not choosing Science and IT degrees.
Microsoft reveals top three degrees for career in technology
The answer became obvious when I read that Microsoft had revealed (25th August 2010) the top three degree subject areas for a successful career in IT. The company suggested courses in the field of Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, which will help to sift through mountains of information on the cloud. Secondly, Business or Competitive Intelligence which provide graduates with the skills to “make sense of data to a business audience”, and finally, they suggested a degree in Web Analytics and Statistics, which are traditional mathematics degrees that apply to an online world.
Sigh, now I know why so few girls choose an IT career path!
It reminded me of the last careers conference I attended where a sixth former interested in studying Computer Science asked me who IBM were. Hope she believed me when I told her.
References:
www.standard.co.uk/examresults
www.thetimes.co.uk/education
www.womenintechnology.co.uk