How do interdisciplinary pathways shape gender diversity in ICT? Evidence from a quantitative study

Despite the growing demand for skilled Information and Communication Technology (ICT) professionals and the many initiatives aimed at broadening participation, women remain markedly underrepresented in computer science and related areas. Identifying and assessing educational interventions, including those implemented in higher education, can inform targeted actions to reduce this barrier. By observing the significant impact and extensive intersection of computer science with many other disciplines, in the last few years academic institutions have been expanding their offerings to include a variety of interdisciplinary programs and courses. Recognizing this trend, this paper aims to explore the interest of female students in interdisciplinary topics. Our fundamental question is whether novel programs that cross the boundaries of different disciplines have the potential to attract to ICT more women with respect to traditional programs. To shed light on this issue, we perform a thorough quantitative analysis on extensive data related to students’ enrollment in the whole set of Italian academic programs, both at the bachelor and master level, over many academic years. Our analysis reveals that interdisciplinary programs, such as those blending computer science with domains such as economics, management, finance, and governance, exhibit a substantially higher enrollment of female students (plus 16% on average) than traditional programs. Some specific fields, including artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, benefit even more from interdisciplinarity, with an uplift exceeding 25 percentage points. As a by-product of our study, we also characterize interdisciplinary programs in Italy and quantify students’ propensity across computer-science subdomains, assessing their appeal through a gender lens.