It's also that time of the year in Ghana where the annual National Science and Math Quiz (NSMQ) excitement begins to build across the country. A look at the winner's list indicates that no girls school has ever won the competition in its 25 year history. A mixed-sex school has won twice in 1998 and 2004; all other winners have been all boys schools.
Girls tend to lag behind boys in science, globally and not just in Ghana. Females lag behind males in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields - both in school and in the labour force. Females are more likely to enrolled in STEM educational programmes or working in STEM jobs.
Data from Ghana's Educational Management Information System (EMIS) shows that in this decade, the enrollment for girls in General Science lags significantly behind that of boys. The number of girls enrolled is a little over half of the number of boys enrolled in General Science for Senior High School (SHS).
Is the difference in General Science enrollment just a reflection of overall enrollment differences by gender? To answer that we can look the percent female enrolled over in the most recent academic shown here and compare it across the different programmes. We see that girls made up almost half of total SHS enrollment but are underrepresented in all programmes except Home Economics and General Arts.
We also look at pass rates in the core subjects for the 2016/2017 academic year to see if females performed as well as boys in science and math and find that they did. 45% of females passed Integrated Science compared to 52% of males while 29% of females passed math compared to 37% of males.
