Gender and employability patterns amongst UK ICT graduates: Investigating the leaky pipeline

This chapter explores the employment patterns of male and female Computer Science graduates in the UK. It is shown that women Computer Science graduates fare less well than men on a variety of measures of employment success, despite being more likely to leave university with a better degree. Their performance is compared to that of women from a comparable scientific and male-dominated discipline: engineering. The results show that women graduates from Computer Science degrees enjoy less success in securing graduate-level work than that experienced by other groups of women, including those graduating from engineering. Most notably, women computer science graduates are less likely to secure graduate-level work within the work sphere that their degree has prepared them for: ICT. The utility of explanations focusing on individual preferences, versus those focusing on extra-individual, demand-side factors, is discussed in the context of the findings.