For C.A. Webb, attending Boston’s Simmons College for her MBA made sense. Simmons College’s program, though open to men, is specifically designed for women. As an undergraduate student, Webb attended the women’s Wellesley College and quickly realized the benefits of an educational atmosphere focused on females.

“I understand how powerful it is to look up and see the president and the deans that are women,” she says. “You internalize that when you see women every day running things, leading, and making things happen. You assume that you are capable of that too and you live that out.”

But not all women have had similar experiences. In 2000, more than 850 female MBAs were surveyed to inform the report, Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity. Of those, 40 percent of the graduates said they had not had enough opportunity to work with female professors.

The study, co-sponsored by the University of Michigan and Catalyst, a nonprofit organization devoted to expanding business opportunities for women, brought to light other barriers that females face when striving for an MBA, such as low confidence in math skills, fear that a business career will not provide a good work/life balance, and lack of encouragement by their employers.

 Though women have accounted for between 45 and 50 percent of students in law and medical schools nationwide, the percentage of women enrolled in MBA programs in recent years has hovered right around 30 percent, according a 2006 Graduate Management Admission Council report, Motivations and Barriers for Women in the Pursuit of an MBA Degree. In response to this gender disparity in MBA programs, institutions across the country have begun increasing recruitment efforts and altering their curricula to draw more women into the fold.

Creating Change

During her three years at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions, has watched the number of women in the MBA program rise from 27 to 34 percent.

In order to attract more women, Martinelli has provided female students with women alumni mentors, increased the school’s outreach efforts to undergraduate women, augmented women’s fellowships, and even created a place where female students can breastfeed in privacy.

Martinelli is happy with the program’s growth, but says schools across the country are facing enormous hurdles when it comes to increasing the number of women undertaking MBA degrees. “We are making progress, but we just need to stay at it, be vigilant, provide more financial aid, and more mentoring to see [more women with MBA’s] as a real possibility,” Martinelli says.

Ankita Agarwal, a second-year MBA student at The McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, said her fellowship as a Forté Foundation Scholar showed her how much the school wanted to promote their female MBA students. “This school was willing to do something more,” she says. “Others just offered admission, but here I was given financial assistance, and also recognition that I was one of two people in the school to get that scholarship.”

More colleges and universities are certainly stepping up their efforts. For the 2007-2008 school year, 56 percent of full-time MBA programs geared recruiting specifically toward women, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council report. The study also found that these schools received an average of three times more applications from women than those without special outreach programs. 

Reaching out
“There wasn’t even a conversation going on about [women in MBA programs] before,” says Elissa Sangster, executive director of the Austin, TX-based Forté Foundation, a consortium of corporations and business schools that work to put talented women in business leadership roles. “We weren’t being recruited as a group of women. Our issues weren’t being addressed. Just the fact that this is on everybody’s radar screen is a huge difference.”

Many institutions are reaching out to women to educate them on the flexibility and broad applicability of an MBA. They are marketing with women in mind by hosting weekend and special events for women only, advertising in women’s magazines, and placing women’s pictures in prominent places on their school’s Web sites.

“If your MBA brochure talks about finance, investing, and consulting, and women are looking for marketing and corporate social responsibility, you have missed an opportunity to tell them a story,” Sangster says.

Many schools are also reaching out to women earlier than they once did. Some MBA programs require four to five years of work experience for admission. Understanding that this time frame might not work for everyone, such as young women starting families, some schools are now recruiting undergraduates.

“We try to get the idea out there that you should apply when the time is right for you - in part for women trying to balance their career, having a family, or taking time out of the workforce,” says Lisa Giannangeli, director of marketing for MBA admissions at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

In the classroom
Yet other schools are making internal changes to adjust to the desires and needs of women. One way is by ensuring women have a prominent role in the classroom.

Only about 27 percent of the professors and 15 percent of the top hierarchy in business schools today are female, says Debra Merrill-Sands, dean of the Simmons School of Management. She believes this mirrors what is seen in the business world and plays a large role in whether women feel they will be successful in an MBA program and in their career. “A lot of us come from industries where there aren’t many senior women role models,” says Roshni Jain, a first-year MBA student at Stanford. “It makes it easier to envision what your career might be like when you have those role models who have started down the path.”

Schools are also considering the needs of women as they revise curricula and are including more women in case studies. For example, at Simmons, research on the needs of women in business is used to tailor the curriculum. Because there are high numbers of women entrepreneurs, the school offers courses in successful entrepreneurship. They also emphasize topics such as corporate social responsibility, governance, gender dynamics in business, and ethical decision making. “These issues align with women’s values and leadership aspirations,” Merrill-Sands says. “Schools that emphasize those topics will be more attractive to women who are looking at MBAs than those schools that don’t.”

Studies have shown that there are definitive qualities that attract women to MBA programs, but every individual is different. And what helps them choose or reject a program may be more elusive than seeing a female face on a brochure. “I think there’s nothing tangible, but women are more touchy and feely type individuals - I was so sold on the people after visiting,” says Agarwal, who assists in the McCombs’ admissions department fielding questions from prospective female students.

“I receive a lot of queries from women asking how to balance family and school,” she notes. “I tell them McCombs is extremely supportive of having a family and will do everything in their power to help you out.”