In a move that could potentially help more women, a number of colleges and universities have been opening up online degrees programs.
In the last several years, there have been some notable successes in making information technology programs more accessible.
The Associated Press reviewed data from the U.S. Department of Education and the U of T to find out how many women and men completed an online degree in the field of information technology.
The data found that from 2014 to 2016, more than 60 percent of the women who applied to U ofT’s Information Technology program and 40 percent of women who sought admission to the UofT’s Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (BSIT) program received an offer.
And, according to the data, nearly half of all bachelor’s and masters degrees in information systems were awarded to women, compared to 31 percent in the general population.
It also found that the majority of bachelor’s degrees awarded to females in the same program were awarded by a women-only institution, compared with just 6 percent of bachelor degrees awarded by an institution that was majority-male.
In some cases, it is unclear how much the women in the programs benefited from their offers.
According to the Data Science Centre at the University of Toronto, the number of bachelor and master degrees awarded in the IT field was in decline between 2010 and 2017.
While women’s participation in the education and workforce has grown over the past five decades, their participation has remained flat since the mid-1990s, according the Data Sciences Centre.
So, in many ways, the data shows the success of open online programs, the Data Scientists said.
“If we can get more women in STEM fields and make it easier for them to get into those fields, that’s going to increase their participation,” said John B. Biederman, a professor at the Uonts Information Technology Program.
Biederman said that the data showed that there are more opportunities in the STEM fields, such as in the fields of technology and mathematics, than in the other areas of education.
More than half of bachelor students in the UTS’ Information Technology department also earned a master’s degree in that area, Biedermans research showed.