Indian women are learning online at higher rates compared to the pre-Covid-19 pandemic. There are 44 per cent, new learners, in 2021, up from 37 per cent in 2019. The data provided by Coursera in its ‘The Women and Skills Report’, compares pre-pandemic enrolment and performance data since the onset of the pandemic through June 2021.
India ranks second worldwide for the highest number of registered women learners on Coursera with 4.8 million registered women learners.
“Our research suggests that gender gaps in online learning narrowed during the pandemic, even as gender employment gaps widened,” said Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO. “We are encouraged by how women are embracing online learning to develop new skills that can help accelerate their return to work and promote economic mobility,” he added.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021 indicates that the pandemic has unequally impacted Indian women, with the country ranking 28 ranks lower than in 2020. The reason behind this expanding gender gap include women’s inadequate representation in leadership and technology, a decrease in women labour force participation rate to 22.3 per cent and a lagging female to male literacy ratio.
However, during the pandemic, women increased learning new skills on Coursera. Women are preferring online education at higher rates than pre-pandemic. In India, 38 per cent of total learners are women, up from 24 per cent in 2016. The share of course enrolments from women raised from 26 per cent in 2019 to 36 per cent in 2021. For STEM courses, the gender gap became narrower from 23 per cent in 2019 to 32 per cent in 2021. Women’s enrolment in entry-level professional certificates has risen from 22 per cent in 2019 to 30 per cent in 2021.
The top skills among Indian women are STEM skills, like computer programming, machine learning, probability and statistics and theoretical computer science. Top courses teach job-relevant skills like Programming for Everybody from the University of Michigan, Machine Learning from Stanford University, English for Career Development from the University of Pennsylvania and Financial Markets from Yale University.
Sixty-two per cent of women learners in India access Coursera on mobile devices. Other factors for increase in enrolment include listing most common mistakes for peer-reviewed assignments, adding practice quizzes before challenging assessments and distributing assessments throughout a course.
