Efforts that aim to attract more women to computer science have been on the increase in recent years. This is because the share of women in IT is low and has been decreasing in the past decades. According to the Czech Statistical Office, 36 percent of IT experts in 1993 were women, but by 2012 it was only about 10 percent. The Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University has also been trying to improve the gender balance.
And these efforts have already brought results. While only 10.3 percent of the new students enrolled in bachelor’s studies in 2011 were women, this share increased to 17.1 percent (or 86 female students) last year. The faculty also registered a similar increase in master’s studies. Compared to other universities, these figures are above-average.
“We would welcome more female students, as their presence is undoubtedly a benefit. Besides having absolutely comparable study results, women improve the overall environment at the faculty,” says Petr Sojka, vice-dean of the Faculty of Informatics for quality, public relations and lifelong learning.
A week-long summer course is one of the activities that the Faculty of Informatics organises to attract more female students. “We have also started working with Czechitas, a growing community of women interested in IT, and together we are now preparing a Programming for Android course for students in secondary schools that will be offered in the spring semester and also at a summer school,” says Sojka. He adds that they have already selected twenty students out of the sixty who applied and half of them are girls.
Women are interested especially in various fields within applied informatics such as graphic design, which is taught at the Studio of Graphic Design and Multimedia. There are more female lecturers in these disciplines as well. The share of female academic staff is altogether higher at the Faculty of Informatics compared to IT departments at other universities – approximately 12 percent.