An MBA-Like Program Solely For Women

An MBA-Like Program Solely for Female Students

One of the biggest problems facing female MBAs is the lack of an equal playing field with men. On average, women earn less than male counterparts when graduating with MBAs. A woman in India is determined to change this reality.

Anuradha Das Mathur has created The Vedica Scholars Programme for Women—an 18-month residential alternative to a traditional MBA program based in New Delhi solely for women. The program, according to Forbes, is backed by a governing council that includes former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and McKinsey & Company director emeritus Joanna Barsh.

“It was clear that traditional management schools are not making the path for women any easier,” Mathur tells Forbes. “The education system doesn’t prepare women by not acknowledging that the working world is different, they’re not equipping them.”

Mathur holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Cambridge. She formerly ran India’s BusinessWorld magazine and was selected to be a part of the Fortune and U.S. State Department Emerging Women Leaders program.

The program’s website states that Vedica’s mission is to “prepare women with potential to achieve fulfilling careers.”

According to data by Transparent Career, an online MBA job reporting platform founded by an MBA team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, men averagely make $180,000 in total compensation in their first jobs after graduating with an MBA. Women, on average, make $166,000.

Vedica is looking to change that. Launched in July 2015, the program is now on its third intake of students.

The Vedica curriculum consists of four main tracks that define the program’s mission:

1.) Mastering Management Practice

2.) Thinking and Communicating for Impact

3.) Learning from the Liberal Arts

4.) Taking Charge of Personal Growth

Mathur tells Forbes that the curriculum emphasizes how women’s strengths can play to the work environment. The program invites both male and female speakers from a variety of business backgrounds to speak to students who also spend one month shadowing a female CEO mentor.

Mathur’s biggest hope is that Vedica students will become equipped intellectually and emotionally to climb the ladder of financial independence in the workplace.

“If we wait for mindsets to change, we’ll be waiting for an eternity,” Mathur tells Forbes. “Things will change only because young women are thinking differently.”

Sources: Forbes, Poets & Quants