With more women entering the workforce every passing year, B-school campuses across the world are working hard to adapt their admission criteria to reflect the changing gender realities of the corporate boardroom of tomorrow. large and small corporations have recognised the advantages that gender diversity brings in, including varied skill-sets and different perspectives that often help in carving out innovative solutions to a given problem situation.
Research has consistently pointed out the benefits of more diverse boardrooms to profitability and shareholder value. The realisation that a gender balanced board room makes a lot of business sense is leading top MBA programmes, globally, to go all out to attract women candidates. Big names like Wharton, Harvard, Stanford strive hard to increase their women representation to the magic 50% mark.
As a pipeline of future business leaders, B-school campuses are trying to ensure they keep up with the demands of global businesses, outbidding one another with scholarship offers targeted at female candidates. Given this background, you may well ask — What better time for a woman to think of an MBAIJ In spite of the earnest efforts being made, the actual numbers on the ground tell a different story. The average female representation in top 100 schools globally still revolves around the 34-35% figure, in essence one-third of the class size, and has not shown any significant change in the last six-seven years. Worryingly, in India, the figures are lower, with women representation in the IIMs actually witnessing a downward trend for three successive years- rom 32% then to 28% in 2014, 27% in 2015 and around 26% this year. Trying to make sense of these numbers, one is forced to turn to the usual reasons — from entrance exams that are too focused on quantitative aptitude hence only favoring candidates with an engineering background, to societal conditioning which expects women to take on family responsibilities at an age when their careers are in take-off stage thereby nullifying the MBA advantage.
Any attempt to reverse this worrying trend will have to factor in the above realities and try and find solutions that accommodate them. luckily, a beginning has already been made with the increasing popularity and acceptance of the one year MBA programme. Not only do these programmes have more flexible selection processes, with quality of work experience, future goals and a holistic personality being more important determinants of success than the GMAT score, they also offer female candidates the advantage of re-entering the workforce at a later stage in life where they don’t have to worry about mid-career disruptions (one year MBA programmes typically have an experience criteria of five-six years plus, as opposed to two-year MBAs which mostly attract freshers). The one-year MBA is a good beginning, one that will hopefully allow a larger pool of women to pursue their career goals without having to worry about some of the traditional constraining factors of the past.
The writer is Varun Sinha, principal consultant, Stellar Search