I was asked recently what the gender split was for students taking part in I’m a Scientist. I replied that we’d never looked on the assumption that since teachers took their students online it would reflect the school population.

I’m never one to turn down the chance to crunch some numbers so I took a look. And was surprised. At registration we ask if the person registering is a Boy, Girl or A group of students (where more than one pupil is sharing a log-in). We have data going back to June 2012 and nearly 15,000 respondents to the question.

Surprisingly it wasn’t a straight 50:50 split. So I then decided to look at it by year group.

What we saw was that year 9 & 10 were significantly skewed towards girls. And that bias continued through to 6th form.

Is that common for science outreach events?