Schools should persuade girls to ditch studying psychology and switch to
"hard sciences", an education leader says.
Barnaby Lenon, who chairs the Independent Schools Council and was headmaster at Harrow, said too many girls were taking the subject when they were capable of getting good grades in physics and chemistry instead.
This is making it more difficult for them to gain places on sought-after university courses such as medicine and engineering, he said.
"Teachers should be saying, you'd be good at physics and it leads to more university degree options than psychology," he told the Times Educational Supplement. "It's in the interest of the country as a whole that more pupils should be doing hard sciences and that there should not be a gender imbalance within individual subjects.
"Girls who should be doing physics are doing psychology.