Even/Odd permutation

[buran]

Could it be done better?

yes. it works, but is heavily influenced by your experience with other languages.
for example we don't use indexes to iterate over elements in a sequence. We reference the elements. And use enumerate if the index is needed too. So something more pythonic would be

def is_even(sequence):
    my_count = 0
    for i, num in enumerate(sequence, start=1):
        my_count += sum(num>num2 for num2 in sequence[i:]) 
    return not my_count % 2