A Long Way From Gender Parity

Change is often sparked by insurgents…not incumbents. That’s what business history teaches. Alas, cases are filled with examples of insurgents who lose steam thanks to a lack of resources, expertise, and funding – and then watch their innovations adopted by a market leader.

The same phenomenon happens in education. Experiential learning may have been launched at Minnesota Carlson, but it quickly spread to the masses from MIT Sloan and Michigan Ross. Hopefully, the same dynamic will play out with gender parity, but expect a long, erratic slog before that is ever realized at top business schools.

Take female faculty. Just four of the FT 100 boast female representation at 40% or above: U.C.-Irvine, Warwick Business School, IE Business School, and the Macquarie Graduate School of Management. Warwick ranks the highest at 43rd. At another 35 schools, women account for 30%-39% of the faculty. In this range, the highest-ranking schools included #24 ESADE (37%) and #19 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (30%).

How do the top schools fare? Technically, Harvard Business School – one of the world’s largest business schools – earns plaudits for scale. FT reports the number at 29%, with HBS showing 70 of 206 women on the roster (34%) when additional teaching and research appointments are factored into the equation. CEIBS and the London Business School report a 27% share, followed by Wharton, Northwestern Kellogg, and Dartmouth Tuck at 25% and MIT Sloan and Duke Fuqua at 24%. Stanford and UC-Berkeley Haas stand at 23% and 22% respectively, while Columbia Business School (21%) and INSEAD (20%) trail behind. At 18%, Chicago Booth ranks from sixth from the bottom.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress. In 2011, women made up just 22% of the Harvard Business School faculty. That number was 19% at Wharton and Stanford and 15% for Chicago Booth. Still, these numbers are incremental improvements at best. Even more, they seriously lag behind the progress made in business schools’ boards. A dozen schools feature boards where 50% or more are comprised of women. At Washington University, for example, women make up 69% of the members. It is a 50-50 split at ‘name’ programs like IE Business School and Cambridge University. At Harvard Business School, women hold 49% of the seats. In total, women account for 40% or more of board representation at 20 business schools in the 2020 Financial Times rankings (or 21 if you add the University of Oxford at 39%).

Compare that to 2011, when just six schools boasted board with 40% or more women. Like female faculty, the top-ranked ‘name’ schools lag behind in board membership. Just four Top 20 programs (HBS, London Business School, Northwestern Kellogg, and HEC Paris) maintain boards with 40% or more women. INSEAD comes close at 38%, with Stanford GSB closing in at 31%. Beyond that, the shares are nearly as dreadful as female faculty: 21% (MIT Sloan and Wharton), 17% (Columbia Business School), and 15% (Chicago Booth).

That’s not to say these numbers don’t represent an improvement. That’s particularly true at INSEAD (38% vs. 17%) and Stanford GSB (31% vs. 17%). Surprisingly, HBS board parity has remained relatively stable (49% vs 48%).

The greatest progress? That can be seen among female students themselves. Among the FT 100, there are 11 schools where women comprise the majority (and two others with a 51%-to-49% split). Overall, women take up 40% or more of the seats in 39 MBA programs, a giant step over 2011 when there were just five schools that had reached this level. France’s Essec Business School reports the largest percentage of women at 68%, with Chinese business schools accounting for three of the five highest percentages of women. Just one American program – Northeastern University – enrolled more women than men.

Another U.S. School On A Roll? Washington University’s Olin Business School

Another important beneficiary of the new FT ranking is Washington University’s Olin Business School. Olin jumped ten places as well to rank 44th best in the world. In the past five years, the school has climbed 28 positions after finishing 72nd in 2015. The FT ranked Olin 80th in 2016 when the school recruited Mark Taylor, then the dean of Warwick Business School, to become its new leader. He championed a new global MBA curriculum that won Olin Best MBA Program of the Year honors from Poets&Quants and is a major reason for the school’s ten-place advance this year.

At the heart of the new program is a required global immersion that takes the entire class of newly arrived students on a 38-day, round-the-world learning experience in Washington, D.C., Barcelona, Spain, and Shanghai, China. To pull it off, the school required some faculty and all the students to show up for the program a semester early in late June. What’s more, Olin did not increase its MBA tuition to pay for the immersion or the extra semester. Instead, the school ate all the costs, flying students to the three locales, putting them up in hotels, feeding them, and arranging meaningful coursework, assignments, and projects in each location.

There were two immediate outcomes from the immersions: The advanced development of the students and the deep relationships forged among the students. “We anticipated the bonding but that was something the students were particularly enthusiastic about and the faculty and staff also bonded with the students,” says Olin Dean Taylor. “So building that sense of community was really important.”

Students consistently reinforce that view. “In a traditional campus setting,” says MBA student Zach Frantz, “you see your classmates a couple of times a day for a class or your cross paths on a project or in a club,” he says. “But it would take a much longer time to develop meaningful relationships. But creating those relationships was a byproduct of the fact that you eat three meals a day with the same people, you go to class all day, you are on ten-hour plane rides together, and you spend all of your time together over six weeks. People get tight really quick. That was probably the best aspect of the trip. We started our core classes on campus with six weeks of memories together that none of us will forget.”

DON’T MISS: TEN BUSINESS SCHOOLS TO WATCH IN 2020 or OUR FULL ANALYSIS OF THE FINANCIAL TIMES 2020 GLOBAL MBA RANKING