By now, virtually every stakeholder in the world of graduate management education (GME) is well aware of the overall decline in the number of applications to MBA programs in recent years, and the even sharper drop in international applicants to American programs.
On the bright side from a diversity perspective, the number of women in GME classrooms is actually on the rise. But even that silver lining is clouded, as women are still not experiencing a fair share of the benefits they deserve in the nation’s boardrooms.
According to the Forté Foundation, which represents 54 leading GME programs in the United States, Europe and Canada, the number of women enrolling in MBA programs at Forté-affiliated schools is increasing. Women now account for 39 percent of the full-time MBA student population in the U.S. and 36 percent outside of the U.S.
Although none of the Forté member schools have achieved gender parity, some are tantalizingly close: 49 percent of the students enrolled at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis are women, as are 47 percent of those at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and 45 percent at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
Yet those gains are not being matched in the workforce in the form of equal opportunity and equal reward. And it’s not just women who are being denied the chance to benefit from the skills they possess: Society as a whole suffers when inequity is allowed to persist.
Consider this: Only 5.2 percent of S&P 500 CEOs are women. (The S&P 500 is a price index representing the value of 500 of the largest companies traded on U.S. stock exchanges.) In other words, among the 500 people running some of the economy’s most important companies, only 26 are women. The other 474 are men.
That’s outrageous. It’s even more disturbing when you consider the message it sends to all of the young women who are still in high school or college today, pondering whether they should make a significant financial investment to study business management at a graduate level.
