In GMAC’s First-Ever Global Report On Diversity, Some Surprising Discoveries

The Graduate Management Admission Council today (October 26) released its first-ever report on the gaps in race and gender in business schools across the world, and it uncovered more than a few surprises.

The special report, The Global Diversity of Talent – Attainment and Representation, is GMAC’s first reference guide on industry views about diversity in graduate management education. The full report offers a global overview of student access and equity in the pursuit of graduate business degrees; it also includes separate reports for 69 locations or countries, appendix data for 111 other countries, and reports on underrepresented groups’ participation in the United States as well as representation of women across the globe.

“Diversity, for a fair amount of time, has been a really important area of management education because the more diversity you have in a classroom, the more inputs you have from different points of view and the richer your experience,” Sangeet Chowfla, GMAC president and CEO, tells Poets&Quants.

“One of the things we thought that was missing in the conversation was benchmarking data on the state of the industry from a global perspective. We thought it was important to provide a benchmark about what diversity looks like. Because this is a global report, diversity is different depending on where you travel.”

To compile the report, GMAC leveraged the latest global data resources from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database, the World Bank, UNESCO, UNECE, and OECD. It focused on the student-aged population between the ages of 20 to 34 who have attained a master’s degree in the subject of business, administration, or law. The purpose was to provide a baseline for studying the state of diversity within graduate management education.

Some of the key findings of the report are discussed below. A full interview with Chowfla will be published later this week by Poets&Quants.

WOMEN CONTINUE TO STRUGGLE FOR REPRESENTATION, PARTICULARLY IN EUROPE

Despite gains women have made in enrollments in some U.S. B-schools, they continue to lag men, particularly at the graduate level, GMAC found. In the major regions examined, the lowest area for female participation in terms of ratio is in Europe.

“That was a little bit of a surprise to us because you would normally think of Europe as developed and as having a high level of gender equality in society,” Chowfla says. “We find that we’ve not really been able to make the case for business education to women in Europe. This is something that we know our European schools are very interested in.”

Women are interested in business education, just not as much at the graduate level, GMAC found. In fact, in the student-age population of 20 to 34, more women around the world earn bachelor-level degrees in business administration or law than their male counterparts (26.4% to 24.6%). But at the graduate level, women fall behind considerably: 29.4% of women compared to 33.7% of men.

In Europe, the number of women holding graduate business degrees (38.4%) is 6.4 percentage points lower than the worldwide average (44.8%) and 13.3 points lower than East Asia and the Pacific (51.7%). While European women are 0.9% more likely to have a bachelor’s in business admin and law than European men, they are 0.8% less likely to have a master’s degree in the field.

“When compared across all regions,” GMAC reports, “Europe has the largest share of those aged 30-34 in the GME pipeline at 41.8% but the smallest share of the GME pipeline aged 20-24 at only 19.8 %, suggesting that many women in Europe choose to return to business school later in life.”