UCL in the News: Technology no longer a no-go area

"We do have a problem attracting women on to our undergraduate degree," says Christopher Clack, the director of financial computing at UCL Computer Science.

"There's a little bit of the self-fulfilling prophesy about all of this, that if you don't have many women on a technology course at university then it is very difficult to attract women."

Give women a second chance, however, and as UCL's new MSc course in financial computing shows, the numbers are very different. The one-year masters is open to graduates from less technical disciplines. Here, 45 per cent of students on the course are women.

"Women who I meet, especially the women on the [conversion] masters programmes... actually do enjoy the technology and they really appreciate this idea of a conversion [course] because early on in their lives they thought it wasn't open to them.

"IT is no longer a purely male domain. What I see from my view of industry is that women who are in technology don't tend to stay down at the programming level, although they may start there and [if] they enjoy it, they tend to move up into management positions very quickly." …

Clare Dight, 'The Times'