Queen's School of Business recently commissioned a poll of 400 Canadian business leaders. The study found a distinctive disconnect between the way female executives and their male counterparts perceive access to MBA programs. Of women in senior level positions, 56 percent believe there are multiple barriers to female MBA enrollment. Among men of similar rank, just 30 percent feel the same way.
Women polled cited a familiar list of obstacles to a graduate management degree, including family responsibilities (36 percent), lack of financial resources (18 percent), and lack of female role models (6 percent).
In another study, Erika James, an associate professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and Peggy Lee, who teaches at Arizona State University, researched what happened to a company’s stock price after a CEO was announced. They found that “investor reactions to the announcements of female CEOs are significantly more negative than those of their male counterparts.”
Moreover, the study found, “articles about the appointment of a female CEO tend to emphasize gender, gender-related, and other job or organizational considerations.”
But on the admissions side of the house, Elissa Ellis-Sangster, the executive director of the Forté Foundation, has better news to report. A strategic partner with GMAC, Forté works to increase the number of women in MBA programs and business.
“We continue to see pretty significant growth” in enrollment of women, Ellis-Sangster noted. In fact, there have been reports of schools topping 40 percent women. “We are even seeing growth in Europe,” she says—reporting, for example, that INSEAD now enrolls 27% women, up from 19% two years ago.
Consequently, Ellis-Sangster says, “I feel like we’re really making steady improvement.”
There are many reasons for this positive trend, including more outreach to women by business schools. Recent research from GMAC shows that outreach does appear to be working. According to the Council’s 2007 Application Trends Survey, those schools that had special outreach programs for women had triple the number of applications from women as schools that did not.
There is also more interest in women in business mentoring younger women to follow in their footsteps. Ellis Sangster says that “having a roadmap or a plan in front of women is critical to them staying on the path and completing the task, because they learn so much from other women who have done it before them. They want to see that there has been success.”
But one of the most notable positive factors, Ellis-Sangster says, is growth in the pipeline of women considering graduate management education. That’s due in large part, she says, to increased outreach to students at the undergraduate level. “A lot of schools had abandoned the undergraduate pipeline because of the jobs/work experience requirement,” Ellis-Sangster says. “It’s definitely the new thing to start working early on to prepare these students to think about it.”
Campus programs like the ones the Forté Foundation sponsors help to educate young women about business careers, Ellis-Sangster says, showing them that “even if they are an English or engineering major that there are all kinds of opportunities for them in business,” and helping them learn how to find those careers.
“I think there are always upticks and downticks as far as individual schools go,” Ellis-Sangster says, but overall she sees a lot to be positive about. “We see more women enrolling,” she says. “We see women on undergraduate campuses showing up in greater numbers to learn more about business.” She also sees evidence that corporations are recruiting women more avidly, and she notes that they are starting to participate in programs to educate undergraduate students about business.
Writing in the May edition of University Business magazine, Linda Livingstone, dean of the Graziadio School of Business and Management at California’s Pepperdine University, suggested that the under-representation of women in graduate schools of business was both “a failure of the system” and “a call to action.” If the statistics in the Queen’s survey and Darden School research suggest that the system is still failing women in significant ways, the good news from the Forté Foundation shows that while true parity has yet to be achieved, there are many reasons to be hopeful.
For Further Reading
Motivations and Barriers for Women in the Pursuit of an MBA Degree, a GMAC Research Report by Janet Marks and Rachel Edgington published last year, looks in depth at these issues. “The expectation of facing a glass ceiling,” the authors found, “surely affects women’s assessment of the potential return on their investment and the ability of the MBA to help them meet their career objectives.” The paper offered several suggestions for what business schools can do to attract more women.
