By Nicole Chestang, GMAC Chief Client Officer

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women earned more than 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2004-05 (and earned roughly half of all bachelor’s degrees in business). Logic would suggest that increasing numbers of women are in the pipeline that would lead them to pursue an MBA. Yet most business schools struggle to enroll much more than 30 percent women.

Recent GMAC research shows that on average in the 2007-2008 application cycle, traditional full-time MBA programs attracted only 27 percent female applicants. Part-time MBA programs had the largest proportion of female applicants (37%), and EMBA programs had the smallest (22%). In contrast, the American Bar Association reports that in 2006-2007 women constituted 46.2 percent of first-year enrollments in law schools. And according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 49.3 percent of applicants to medical school in 2006-2007 were women.

The challenges, therefore, are clear. One of the lessons that I take from these data is that we need to do even more than we are currently doing to encourage women to enroll in MBA programs, and to make them feel welcome, as women, once they have enrolled. That means we need to do more than just pay lip service to understanding and responding to the needs of women. We must instead redouble our efforts to genuinely understand the unique and complex factors that affect a woman’s decision to pursue an MBA, and act accordingly.

For example, I think we as a sector could do a better job of portraying the variety of ways that women succeed in business. I am thinking here, for example, of the many ways by which women are making strides in the workplace that don’t necessarily carry them to the top, but that nonetheless lead to very fulfilling careers. We could do more to help women see how an MBA can help them achieve dreams that might focus more on Main Street than on Wall Street.

Part of the issue here is that I am not convinced that we are doing as much as we should do to understand—truly understand—what’s different about what motivates and interests women. We need to better understand how women think about their careers. We need to better understand their needs in terms of the balance between work and life. Fundamentally, we need to better understand women’s aspirations and motivations. Once we have mastered an understanding of  all these complex factors, we must translate that understanding into programmatic changes.

There are notable examples in the field of schools that “get” this: Schools that are making some really significant commitments to attracting women by doing special outreach that targets them. Schools that are developing program delivery mechanisms that meet the needs of women to balance their work lives with their home lives. Schools that are perhaps offering classes in the morning, for moms who want to be home to meet their kids in the afternoon. Schools that have appointed a director of diversity recruiting whose portfolio includes outreach to women. Or schools who understand that a part-time MBA might need to mean something more than evening courses. But more schools need to be doing more of these things.

I think we need also to carefully assess the environments that we create. As a woman looks around her MBA program, will she see a critical mass of women students? Will she see women faculty? Are the program’s staff and, particularly, its administrators, a representative mix of men and women? Are programs scheduled to accommodate an equitable work-life balance? Is the overall environment welcoming and enriching? In this regard, business schools might take a cue from some of the more enlightened corporations that are proactively creating work environments that meet women’s needs. Eager to recruit women MBAs, these employers are finding innovative ways to offer flexible work schedules, job sharing, improved options for child care and other women-friendly benefits.

We could also do more, I believe, to increase the visibility of women deans and faculty members, and to make sure that women are adequately represented on advisory schools, as speakers, and in other campus forums where students interact. We could probably do a lot more to engage women alumni in the life of our MBA programs.

In short, I think that we would do well to examine the whole of what our MBA programs deliver from the perspective of the women we want to attract. I wouldn’t expect us to turn the entire curriculum and methodology upside down, but there may be important incremental changes that we could consider—adding flexibility and latitude, for example, that would make management education more accessible to women, given their unique needs and interests. (That’s particularly true if we want to reach out to the many women who serve as caretakers of families and as single heads of households.)

MBA programs could also take a stronger role in helping women take a longer-term view of the investment they can make in themselves to create and define successful futures. We can do more to educate women about the kind of personal tool kit they can and should develop for success in business. We can do more to help women understand the value of the MBA—help women look beyond popular stereotypes to understand what graduate management education is and how it can be leveraged to help them get the jobs they want and accomplish their goals. We could also do more to show women how executive MBA programs and non-degree programs offer rich opportunities for growth and development.

GMAC is strongly committed to expanding the pipeline that brings students to graduate management education. In partnership with the Forté Foundation, for example, we are avidly involved in efforts to reach out to women and provide them resource materials, research, and information. We are planning significant investments to target populations that have not heretofore considered management education, and we expect to find many women in these groups. And we continue to add to the understanding of women and the MBA through our research. Through these efforts and those of others that help women, I am convinced that we will be successful in guiding more women to MBA programs. The key for MBA programs is to make sure that they are ready to serve women well.

Too often, I think, our default thinking is to gloss over the realities of life for women in MBA programs. If we are truly serious about increasing the percentage of women MBAs, I would argue that we need to fully understand those realities—and have the courage and flexibility to adapt our programs to accommodate those realities.