An Analysis of the participation of women in Information and Communication Technology courses at State University of Maringá (UEM)

This paper presents an analysis about the number of incoming and graduate students, considering women and men, at the Department of Informatics (DIN) at State University of Maringá (UEM), in Brazil. The data were collected considering three graduate courses, Data Processing Technology (extinct in 1997), Computer Science and Informatics. The results show that the number of women is dropping drastically from the late 1990s. In Computer Science, from 1994 to 2016, of the 622 graduate students, 127 were women. In Informatics, from 2000 to 2016, only 38 women had graduated, of the 275 students. In 2017, there were 211 students enrolled in Computer Science, and 208 in Informatics. On average, 8.11% were women (34), being 8.65% in Informatics (18), and 7.58% in Computer Science (16). These percentages are lower than the national one in Brazil, which is 14.19%.