Introduction of new syllabus may be reason number of girls taking subject more than halved in eight years, academics say

The number of girls in England studying for a GCSE in computing has more than halved in less than a decade, prompting warnings about the “dominance of men in shaping the modern world”.

The sharp decline in female participation follows government qualification changes that led to the scrapping of the old information communication technology (ICT) GCSE and its replacement with a new computer science GCSE.