Looking For Ms. MBA

The Ratio Of Women To Men In Graduate Business Programs Lags Behind

(U.S. News & World Report)  It has been well over two decades since women started outnumbering men among American undergraduates. And at the nation's medical and law schools, nearly half of incoming students are now female. Yet the story is different at business schools. Women remain nearly as scarce in M.B.A. programs as in engineering and computer science: The proportion of female students enrolled in B-school hovers around just 35 percent. And in top programs, women account for fewer than 1 in 3 students — a proportion that hasn't budged since the mid-1990s.

That paradox has not escaped the notice of America's business schools. Eager to mirror the student population of other professional fields — and to meet hiring demands from corporate recruiters — admissions officers have made boosting the number of women on campus a top priority. Yet a variety of factors, from the typical timing of the degree to a continuing dearth of female role models in the business world, have made M.B.A.'s a hard sell for female college grads: Far fewer women than men even apply in the first place. "We all want to increase our percentages of women," says Liz Riley, director of admissions at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. "But it is incredibly tough."

For starters, education experts say, more women than men doubt the social value of working in business. Carolyn Sy, for instance, who attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business as an undergraduate, decided to pursue a career in medicine rather than an M.B.A. after a few years of working in marketing at a large food and beverage corporation. "It started not to make sense anymore," says Sy. "I didn't really understand why I would go home stressed about what color a T-shirt should be."

Numbers Game

M.B.A. students also have the reputation of being "quant jocks" who excel at math-intensive subjects such as finance and accounting. This stereotype often keeps women, especially those uneasy over their quantitative abilities, from applying. In a 2000 study by research organization Catalyst and the University of Michigan Business School, 45 percent of women (and just 19 percent of men) said a lack of confidence in math abilities deterred them from pursuing an M.B.A.

Yet biology may be the biggest hurdle of all. Pursuing an M.B.A. often coincides with the period when marriage and children start to enter the picture for women. Unlike medical and law schools, to which applicants may apply straight out of college, B-schools typically require anywhere from three to five years of work experience before matriculation. "You're looking at women who are between 25 and 28 and who are saying: 'I know I would like to get married and have a family. Is this worth the investment?'" says Wendy Huber, associate admissions director at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business. (Male applicants, other admissions directors note, tend either to marry later or to receive more support from a spouse.)

To address these concerns, many schools are changing the way they pitch the M.B.A. to women. The University of Denver's Daniels College of Business, for instance, is exploring female-friendly additions to its curriculum such as a math boot camp and negotiation course. The program also plans to make female alumni and prominent faculty more visible and accessible to prospective students. A similar effort last year at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business helped bump female enrollment from 25 to 31 percent for the class of 2007. Many leading programs are working with the Forte Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to boosting the number of women in business.

Some schools are quietly testing the idea of reducing the work experience requirement for talented female applicants — by giving more consideration to internships held throughout college, for instance. And others are looking at ways to reach talented women at an earlier age. The University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business recently introduced Jump Start, a new program that offers women (as well as blacks and Latinos) the chance to apply to the school at the end of their senior year of college. Selected students can then defer admission for a few years, secure in their future plans, while gaining work experience for companies like Frito-Lay and Deloitte.

For now, the lopsided male-female ratio in the typical M.B.A. program doesn't seem to bother most women, who report high satisfaction with their programs in student surveys. Kathleen Poe, a member of the class of 2007 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, found that the B-school environment mirrored her previous work experiences, where she was one of few women. She says that the lack of women is especially noticeable in small-group projects but adds that she had no difficulty fitting in to the program. "I would prefer if there were an even balance of men and women," says Poe. "But it doesn't put me off, and it never put me off."