Only 1 of 86 Scientists Named in UK GCSE Science Content Is a Woman, Cambridge Finds

A teenager sitting a UK physics GCSE can learn the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, the chart that sorts stars by brightness and temperature, without ever meeting the name Annie Jump Cannon. Her classification work underpins it. Cambridge researchers say that kind of gap is the rule, not a quirk, in what England's exam boards put on the page.

The team counted every named scientist in the compulsory content of the UK's six main exam boards. At Key Stage 4, the years that end in GCSEs, they found 86 scientists. One was a woman: Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray crystallography led to the double helix, and she appeared in just one board's specification. At Key Stage 5 (A-level and equivalent) the count was 3 women out of 181 names. The paper is in the British Educational Research Journal, and the University of Cambridge published its findings on October 22.

Where the drop happens

Girls typically outscore boys in most STEM subjects at Key Stage 4, according to the Cambridge release. Then they leave. Physics, maths and further maths draw far more boys than girls at A-level, and the share of girls taking maths and further maths is now lower than it was in 2005.

The authors report a "compelling" correlation between how many women a student sees named at 16 and which STEM subjects girls pick at 17. Physics is the starkest case. Its compulsory material is saturated with male names, the team says, while biology and chemistry, which girls choose a little more often than boys, name fewer scientists of any gender.

“You can't tell one story without the other.”

What the count cannot show

This is a tally of names in documents, not a study of students. Nobody tracked a group of girls who learned about Marie Curie and a comparison group who did not. The authors themselves say women's under-representation in STEM has many causes, and they point to the move from GCSE to A-level only as a transition point that may be critical for retention. That is a hypothesis with a pattern behind it.

There are two other limits. I could not open the journal paper, which returns a block page to automated requests, so this piece rests on the Cambridge release for its numbers and quotes. The release also carries no response from any exam board, and it does not say how the team handled concepts named for a scientist, such as a law or a unit, when no individual is credited in the text.

Not the first count, and not fully independent

Earlier tallies point the same way. In 2020, Teach First found just two women named in double science GCSE across three major exam boards, against more than 40 men, according to a 2021 opinion piece by Lisa Clatworthy, editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Education in Chemistry. In Australia, SBS News reported in 2023 that a study led by Dr Kat Ross at Curtin University found about 150 male scientists across Year 11 and 12 science curricula and one woman. It was Franklin again.

The Cambridge team and the Australian group both worked with the IncludeHer movement, so the matching results are less like two labs converging by accident and more like one project run in several countries. The method is consistent, which helps. It is also one group's lens.

The proposed fix is small

The researchers say the repair would not need a rewrite. Franklin goes into every biology specification. Marie Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes, fits the unit on atomic structure and isotopes. Lise Meitner, who gave the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and was left out of the Nobel for it, suits physics. At A-level they suggest Dorothy Hodgkin, who used X-ray crystallography to work out the structure of insulin, for protein structure in biology.

Today that work falls to individual teachers, the release notes, because the names are not in the compulsory material. Dr Greg J Cooke, one of the paper's authors, asks why students are not taught how Susan Solomon helped save the ozone layer.

The test that would settle the question has not been run: add the names, then see whether more girls stay. The team's follow-up paper looks at how teachers already bring these stories into class, which will show what is happening in classrooms but will not measure who stays in physics.