A Problem Unique to Business

Despite more than a decade of work to increase the number of women in MBA programs, women continue to make up less than one-third of the student body at most top business schools.

The dearth of female representation is a problem other professional programs do not currently face. Women are well represented in law school, where the percentage of female students has grown from less than 10% in the 1970s to roughly 49% in 2001, according to the American Bar Association. In American medical schools, women make up about half the enrolled student body.

Bringing more women into management education and business leadership roles remains of paramount importance to business schools and companies around the world.

“Every [school] wants to have more women, but it’s not an easy thing to attain,” said David Standen, associate director of admissions at Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid, Spain.

The reasons why there remains a lack of women in management education are numerous and complex.

A Host of Hurdles

The lack of female role models in upper management may be partly to blame. Women make up roughly half the U.S. work force but represented fewer than 16% of U.S. corporate officers in 2003, according to figures from the nonprofit Catalyst organization. A study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) found that in 1999, women’s representation in the executive management of the 500 largest firms in the United States was only 5.1%, despite having doubled since 1996. In roughly 70 other countries studied by the ILO, women’s representation in upper management was even lower than in the United States.