Poets and Quants

Why More Women Go to Law or Med Schools

by John A. Byrne

“And when you say, ‘my child is a doctor, a lawyer, or a nurse,’ everyone knows what she does. It has status. When you are going against the odds to pursue a career in business, there may not be much support for it. People around you might not understand what consumer marketing is or what investment banking it. That’s a much bigger hurdle than going to law school.”

Another drawback to increasing female enrollment in B-school has to do with the typical work experience requirement, says Sangster. “A lot of kids go to law or med school because they can go straight through out of undergrad. It’s a choice that is easy if you’re not thinking you want to get a job or if you are a liberal arts major because so many people will tell you to get a law degree.”

FEMALE ENROLLMENT IN BUSINESS, LAW, MEDICINE AND EDUCATION AT UNIVERSITIES WITH TOP 25 B-SCHOOLS

School Businesss Law Medicine Education
1. Harvard 36.1% 48.0% 47.9% 73.1%
2. Stanford 36.3% 45.0% 48.0% 69.6%
3. Chicago 35.4% 44.3% 49.0% NA
4. Pennsylvania 39.7% 47.6% 49.3% 73.6%
5. Columbia 34.9% 48.5% 47.8% 76.9%
6. Dartmouth 33.7% NA 49.9% NA
7. Northwestern 29.8% 45.8% 47.3% 73.5%
8. MIT 36.1% NA NA NA
9. California-Berkeley 29.6% 52.9% NA 71.8%
10. Duke 33.7% 41.0% 48.8% NA
11. Virginia 29.0% 44.8% 43.4% 75.2%
12. New York 36.9% 42.6% 49.0% 76.8%
13. Michigan 31.4% 44.6% 49.9% 73.8%
14. Yale 35.5% 49.3% 50.8% NA
15. Cornell 32.2% 49.6% 48.9% 67.3%
16. Carnegie Mellon 26.7% NA NA NA
17. California-Los Angeles 32.9% 47.5% 47.0% 68.0%
18. North Carolina 27.7% 50.9% 51.1% 72.7%
19. Texas-Austin 29.4% 46.4% NA 69.3%
20. Emory 28.2% 46.0% 53.8% NA
21. Indiana 28.6% 41.0% NA 69.8%
22. Southern California 30.0% 47.9% 46.9% 73.7%
23. Georgetown 29.5% 47.7% 48.2% NA
24. Minnesota-Twin Cities 36.5% 41.9% 49.0% 71.2%
25. Notre Dame 24.9% 41.7% NA NA

NOTRE DAME HAS LOWEST PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN OF ANY TOP 25 B-SCHOOL

The top 25 business school with the lowest percentage of women? Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business where just 24.9% of the full-time MBA students are women. Also on the low end are Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business (26.7%), North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School (27.7%), Emory’s Goizueta School of Business (28.2%) and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (28.6%).

WHARTON HAS HIGHEST PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN OF ANY TOP 25 B-SCHOOL

The top 25 business schools that have done the best job of attracting more women? University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with 39.7%, followed by New York University’s Stern School of Business (36.9%), the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School (36.5%), Stanford Graduate School of Business (36.3%), and Harvard Business School (36.1%).

DON’T MISS: WHY MEN OUTPERFORM WOMEN AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL or MORE WOMEN GETTING MBAS BUT …….

 

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  • 1st year

    I’m noticing an interesting trend on PoetsandQuants. It seems like every week there’s a new article concerning women or minorities and business school. I’m not sure why these types of articles are chosen for the site so frequently. Surely there must be other news that can be discussed.

  • morgaine

    Perhaps they’re trying to convince women to consider business school.

  • none

    Look at those education %’s. I hope there’s a similar push (and associated resources) to get men to enroll in Education degrees. It would be fantastic to have more male role models in front of kids at an early age.

  • Hantum

    1st year,

    I think we will continue to see these types of articles during the MBA application off-season.

  • Arthur Featherstonehaugh Dullsworthy

    These quotes from Sangster seem equally applicable to both men and women in their late teens or early twenties:

    1) “For young women, there is a lot of confusion about what a career path in business really means…Often, we’re talking about a business career to an audience that doesn’t even know the terminology. For a liberal arts or engineering student, it may not even interest them.”

    2) “And when you say, ‘my child is a doctor, a lawyer, or a nurse,’ everyone knows what she does. It has status. When you are going against the odds to pursue a career in business, there may not be much support for it. People around you might not understand what consumer marketing is or what investment banking it. That’s a much bigger hurdle than going to law school.”

    3) “A lot of kids go to law or med school because they can go straight through out of undergrad. It’s a choice that is easy if you’re not thinking you want to get a job or if you are a liberal arts major because so many people will tell you to get a law degree.”

    Again, how is this more applicable to men than to women? My father was a doctor. I got an undergrad degree in philosophy and classics. Do you think I had a clue? I didn’t know what a business career meant. I was confused and ignorant of the terms. I didn’t know anything about marketing or investment banking. I still don’t believe in consulting as a meaningful activity. I chose to pursue the least time consuming form of “professional education” available. Law, although everyone was pushing it, was one year too many. How doesn’t all of this apply to me (and several of my friends of my undergrad friends) more than it does to the women Sangster’s talking about?

    I want to present an hypothesis. Women pursue further education to find spouses. The MRS degree. The med schools and law schools are considered happy hunting grounds where the women don’t feel their presence makes them less attractive to a potential mate (see the huge numbers of lawyers and doctors marrying each other in the weddings and engagements section of the Times). Women, for whatever reasons, don’t feel that they’d be as desirable with an MBA. Personally, I prefer hot trauma nurses to MBAs, lawyers, and doctors, but tastes may vary. And it is surely true that the world needs nurses more than it needs MBAs and lawyers. Probably more than it needs more doctors.

  • Johnnie Welker

    Honestly, these articles talking how women are not at the same level with men, are just bogus. It gets to a point where you must ask, what’s next?

    Women make up 60% of undergraduates
    Women graduate more people with advanced degrees.

    So, it is the world’s (particularly men) fault that they are not interested in B-School. Give it a break now…

    It is just sickening now

  • http://www.Thunderbird.edu Samantha

    Thunderbird’s student body is 46% female.

  • Clint

    I’ve always wondered how the nobel goal of “equal opportunity” morphed into a goal of “equal participation.”

    If the real goal is equal opportunity for all candidates, then there are more relevant metrics than simply showing percentage of a group out of a total population.

    I don’t believe its “bad” to want equal participation in b-school, or any other profession for that matter, but once the barriers are broken down, why the social engineering push? and why is it one-directional?

    Where are the articles indicating we need more men in education? More caucasians in nursing school?

    At some point the “we need more (group)” argument begins to come off as a “we need less (group)” argument. The fact that these two arguments are logically equivalent, but not morally equivalent should give us pause.

  • http://poetsandquants.com/members/msshona/ Rishona Campbell

    Wow, these comments sound pretty jaded if you ask me! But anyway, I do agree that a big part of the problem is with the MBA degree itself; the fact that it is not really well-defined. The program and the degree are very ego-driven; at least that is what the stereotype is. I personally feel that you don’t need to be a Type ‘A’ personality to benefit from MBA studies. But since the degree is not closely aligned to any one profession (or even any one type of profession), those who are Type ‘A’ personalities seem to get more bang for the buck for their MBAs.

  • Johnnie Welker

    @ Rishonda, you know what you just said apply to both men and women indistinctly. Even though I don’t agree with essence with what you said, both men and women find themselves in the same conundrum concerning the MBA.

    It is not a gender thing, and that’s my problem with all these articles. It has nothing to do with it.

  • Meowmeowmeowmix

    If women don’t want to do business or math or science, why should we care, it’s their personal decision. Feminists and women’s lobbying ground should shut up and get loss, I’m so sick of hearing about them.

  • Paramia

    interestingly, most (if not all) the admission directors at the top b schools are women!! I wish I can switch my gender to be a female when applying then after admitted I can back to the default status :) ))

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