Irreducible characters of even degree and normal Sylow 2-subgroups

Abstract The classical Itô-Michler theorem on character degrees of finite groups asserts that if the degree of every complex irreducible character of a finite group G is coprime to a given prime p, then G has a normal Sylow p-subgroup. We propose a new direction to generalize this theorem by introducing an invariant concerning character degrees. We show that if the average degree of linear and even-degree irreducible characters of G is less than 4/3 then G has a normal Sylow 2-subgroup, as well as corresponding analogues for real-valued characters and strongly real characters. These results improve on several earlier results concerning the Itô-Michler theorem.