“From my own knowledge of these things, physics is not something that girls tend to fancy. They don’t want to do it … There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do,” Katharine Birbalsingh, chair of the UK government’s Social Mobility Commission and a secondary school head teacher, told the Commons Science and Technology Committee on April 27 2022.
Comments like this are extremely disappointing. There are multiple reasons why girls don’t choose to study physics at A-level or for a degree – and “not wanting to do maths” is not one of them.
