Which MBA?

Despite business schools’ best efforts, women are still woefully under-represented on MBA programmes 

WOMEN have outnumbered men on college campuses around the world for the past five years, according to Unesco’s latest Global Education Digest. In Europe and North America, there are a third more women than men enrolled in university, and in a number of countries, such as Hungary and Uruguay, there are at least two female graduates for every male. Women are gaining in Master’s degree programmes, too. In American medical schools, for instance, they represent half of all students; in law school it is 47%.

And yet they remain a distinct minority at business schools. Women represent under a third of students enrolled in the schools covered in The Economist’s ranking of full-time MBA programmes, a figure that has barely changed since our first ranking in 2002 (see chart).

It is a disparity that business schools have tried hard to rectify—from easing up on work-experience requirements and establishing special scholarships for women, to sponsoring conferences and admissions events targeted at them—with varying degrees of success.

But as the ranks of working women grow, and some countries push through laws forcing public companies to employ more women managers, business schools face pressure both to train women for leadership roles and prepare men for a world in which women represent half the professional workforce. 

Earlier this year, Deutsche Telekom introduced a quota system to ensure that women will hold 30% of its upper- and middle-management positions by 2015. At the moment, they hold just 13%. Since 2008, Norway has required that women hold at least 40% of directorships at publicly listed companies. Spain, the Netherlands and France have passed similar laws.

“Society as a whole would benefit by having a higher percentage of women with top-level responsibilities in companies,” says Professor Valter Lazzari, director of the MBA programme at SDA Bocconi in Milan. “They are more analytical, reflective, and more cautious. They are less prone to the problem of overconfidence. I am pretty sure if we had more women in change of banks, the financial crisis would not have happened in the same way.”

It is a viewpoint that is commonly advanced by business-school faculty. Women also, it is suggested, tend to have superior communication skills and are better at consensus building and multitasking. Male business students benefit from the experience of working side-by-side with women as colleagues in the classroom, and also gain insight into women as potential customers in the real world.

The main reason that business programmes have difficulty attracting women is that most MBA programmes require four to five years of professional experience—a prerequisite that creates a tricky timetable for a young woman planning to start a family. Other professional degrees, like law and medicine, do not require work experience and so many women enroll directly after university.

To overcome this, several leading schools have lowered that work requirement, and set their sights on recent college graduates and early career professionals with only a couple of lines of experience on their CVs. Some, like Pennsylvania (Wharton), have begun recruiting undergraduates, including at all-women schools.

In 2007, Harvard Business School launched a deferred MBA admissions programme for undergraduate students that guarantees college students a place in a future hbs class contingent upon their graduation and the completion of two years of approved work experience. Attracting more women to the school wasn’t explicitly the reason for the programme, but it has had that effect.

A second obstacle is the large financial investment an MBA programme involves. One of the attributes that apparently makes women distinctive managers—their risk aversion—also makes them less likely to take themselves out of the job market with an uncertain return, according to admissions officers.

“Pursuing an MBA can be expensive, and it is a considerable time commitment,” says Mary Miller, assistant dean of admissions at Columbia Business School in New York. “We’ve found that women in particular want to be sure they’re making the right decision.” 

Columbia, in common with several schools, has created special scholarships for women. And dozens more have partnered with the Forté Foundation, a consortium of corporations and schools that promote women in business, to offer fellowship opportunities to women pursuing MBAs.

A third impediment business schools face is the perception that MBA programmes cater to overly competitive, Type A personalities. Schools are responding by hosting networking events and special seminars to demonstrate to prospective female students that business school offers a supportive community, rather than a male-dominated, ruthless one. New York (Stern), for example, sponsors an annual conference featuring a female CEO as the keynote speaker with the goal of providing applicants with a positive role model; last year Andrea Jung, head of Avon, gave the address.

The final challenge is that high finance and management consulting, still the top career choices for newly minted MBAs, tend to appeal more to men. In a bid to woo more women, admissions staff have augmented their marketing techniques to highlight that the degree is useful in a variety of functions and industries, as well as in the non-profit sector. 

John Fernandes, president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, says that: “As business schools begin to round out their emphasis of teaching from profit-maximisation to one which addresses a broader social benefit and engagement, I think more women who are not interested in working on Wall Street might consider an MBA to further their careers.”

History suggests that we should not hold our breath.