Abstract:

The total share of women in IT professions in the Czech Republic has long been between 10-11%. In order to increase the number of women in corporate informatics, it is necessary to increase the number of female graduates of informatics study programs. To find out the trend in the number of female students and graduates of informatics study programs at the Prague University of Economics and Business, we formulated the following three research questions:
- RQ1: Is the share of women in bachelor's and master's studies growing over time?
- RQ2: Is there a higher share of women in IT master's studies than in information management studies?
- RQ3: Is the completion rate of women higher than that of men?

To find out the situation, we analyzed the 2010-2021 time series concerning students of informatics study programs at the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics. In total, we had 10,791 records about students and their study results. The records included the following information: the year of enrollment, study field and program, gender, the semester of studies completion and the success rate of studies completion – successful or failed. We first divided the student data by the year of enrollment and then calculated required characteristics. We arranged the measured values into a time series, the trend of which we analyzed using the least squares method. Based on information about studies completion, we then calculated the completion rate of men and women in informatics study programs.
We performed our analysis using the functions of the MS Excel application. Some outputs were programmed in R and Python programming languages.

Our research provided the following answers to our research questions:
RQ1: Both bachelor's and master's studies show an increase in the number of women. In the case of bachelor's studies from 25% to 41% and in the case of master's studies from 19% to 40%.
RQ2: There is a significant difference in the representation of women between the information management program and the information technology program. While the share of women in the management program ranges from 39% to 90%, their share in the information technology program is significantly lower – between 13% and 34%.
RQ3: The overall completion rate is higher in men than in women. The completion rate of men is around 50%, the completion rate of women ranges between 30% and 40%. A very high completion rate was recorded in the Covid year 2020 – about 75% both in men and women.

Keywords:

Gender, information studies, information technology.