Women on rise in MBA slots at U.S. schools
Once-macho business programs finally approaching gender parity
More than half a century after top universities began admitting women to their MBA programs, business schools are finally catching up to law and medical schools in gender parity.
Women now comprise 40 per cent or more of MBA students at Harvard, Wharton, Yale, Northwestern’s Kellogg, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, MIT’s Sloan, Rochester’s Simon, as well as other schools, according to a new study by the Forte Foundation, which promotes business education for women.
The significance goes far beyond changing the once-macho culture of B-schools. As women approach half of all seats in business programs, they also get closer to receiving half the awards, half the internships and half the top jobs upon graduation. Ultimately, the trend sets the table for more women in corner offices as these students graduate and advance in their careers.
“This should go a long way in building the senior leadership pipeline at companies and on boards,” says Forte executive director Elissa Sangster.
Women’s enrolment in full-time MBA programs climbed to about 36 per cent of students from 32 per cent four years ago, New Yorkbased Forte found.
The increase has already changed the nature of a business school education. Women are influencing the debate over work flexibility and pay discrimination, and men are generally becoming more attuned to what women are looking for in the workplace.
At Harvard Business School, more than 200 of the 548 men in the class of 2017 are members of the Manbassador group, formed two years ago by male students who wanted to support the Women’s Student Association on campus. Manbassadors hold Lean In groups for men who want to discuss their own work and life experiences and goals.
At a lunch earlier this month with some of her students, Robin Ely, a Harvard Business School professor and senior associate dean for culture and community, was struck that the conversation “was all about gender” and workplace flexibility, she says.
“All the men said they’d love at a certain point in their careers to work an 80 per cent schedule but didn’t think that as men they could ask for that,” she says. When she first started teaching at Harvard in 2000, “that conversation never happened.”
The scene is similar at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, which saw a seven per cent rise in applications from women last year. Lane McVey was one of those applicants and is now part of an incoming class that is 42 per cent women. That’s a 10 per cent jump over the prior year and a sea change at the once predominantly male Tuck.
The handful of women who first earned MBAs there in the 1970s were confined to all-female study groups because male classmates chose to be in teams with other men. McVey’s six-person group has an equal number of women and men, half of them international and each with different work experience.