Top Business Schools Are Enrolling More Women Than Men
Women now make up at least half of full-time M.B.A. students at five top business schools, the most to reach that milestone in a given year, new data show. The rising share of female M.B.A.
candidates reflects business schools’ concerted efforts to recruit more women in recent years. Full-time M.B.A. programs at Penn State University and the University of Oxford hit parity for the first time this academic year.
They join those at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania, according to the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit focused on advancing women into leadership roles via access to business education. Overall, women represent 42% of full-time M.B.A. students at the foundation’s partner schools, which include more than 50 of the top schools in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
That is up from 33% a decade ago. Women have earned the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. since the early 1980s.
Female representation in M.B.A. programs has lagged behind, though, even as women made up bigger numbers in other graduate disciplines including medicine and law. The first of Forté’s partner business schools to enroll more women than men in a full-time M.B.A.
program was the University of Southern California in 2018, according to the foundation. Three years later, Wharton became the first elite school to reach that benchmark. Business schools have worked deliberately for years to bolster their pipelines of female applicants, said Elissa Sangster, the foundation’s chief executive.
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