In honor of last Wednesday’s International Women’s Day, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) today released a new report entitled “What Women Want: A Blueprint for Change in Business Education.” For readers who may be too young to remember the 2000 romantic comedy also called “What Women Want,” it starred Mel Gibson as a chauvinistic advertising executive who suffers a blow to the head that renders him suddenly able to hear everything women around him are thinking. Though first instinct would be to assume that the two—Gibson’s rom-com and GMAC’s research—have nothing at all to do with one another, that’s not entirely true.
In fact, the aim of this latest GMAC report was precisely to get inside the heads of women—and men—to better understand their different motivations for pursuing a graduate management education. Specifically, GMAC set out to solve the confounding puzzle of why, despite now making up a greater share of the applicant pool than men in many business master’s programs, women are still underrepresented in MBA programs around the world.
According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), in 2015-16 women across all world regions earned 38 percent of MBA degrees, compared to an average of 64 percent for men. In the same year, women earned degrees from non-MBA business master’s programs at essentially equal rates as men—receiving an average of 51 percent of total non-MBA degrees. Not only that, these rates have been stubbornly static for the past five years. To address this seeming plateau, according to GMAC, MBA programs need to better understand what motivates women to pursue an MBA so that they can recruit, admit and design student experiences that attract more women.
And so GMAC set about doing what it does best—digging into the extensive data it gathers as part of its global motivations-based segmentation study, its GMAT exam data and other research findings. In so doing, the folks at GMAC were looking specifically to reveal underlying factors that help explain why, even amid equal participation of women in specialized business master’s programs, gender parity still proves elusive when it comes to the MBA.
Financial Concerns Loom Large for Women
Parsing the data revealed that financial concerns are more top of mind for women than for men when it comes to committing to an MBA program. Of female respondents surveyed from around the world, 29 percent cited financial concerns as the key reason they had not yet accepted their admissions offer to business school. In contrast, the key reason men delayed—cited by 33 percent—was because they were waiting for offers from additional schools.
The difference between genders on this issue was greatest in the United States, where more than a third (38 percent) of female survey respondents cited financial concerns as the reason for delay, compared with 20 percent of male respondents. Related, 30 percent of female U.S. applicants cited obtaining funding as their biggest challenge, as compared to just 9 percent of male applicants.
“The financing thing was what popped the most for me,” says Betty Su, GMAC chief marketing officer, who led GMAC’s Global Graduate Management Education Candidate Segmentation Study, on which this most recent analysis was largely based. It included responses from 5,900 men and women across 15 countries who had applied to a graduate business program between January 2014 and April 2016.
“What struck me most was the fact that even when female applicants had actually been granted admission into a university or business school program, the number one reason globally why those female applicants did not accept their offer of admission was financing—significantly higher than for men,” Su continues. “Men, especially in the United States and Europe, were significantly more likely to agree with the statement, ‘I am willing to pay whatever it takes to go to one of the top-ranked graduate schools.’ That stark difference was really compelling to me in terms thinking about how we can assist women in general to have more opportunities to finance their education, whether through tuition assistance, need-based scholarships, or simply making information more readily available in terms of what financing options exist.”
Study’s Co-Author Views Research Findings Through Lens of Personal Experience
One of the study’s co-authors, GMAC Strategy Analyst Shelby Colby, had the unique experience of actually applying to business school—full-time, two-year MBA programs at Harvard Business School (HBS) and MIT Sloan School of Management—while examining closely what motivates women around the world to apply to business school. “It was really funny to me just how much what we were learning really resonated with my own experience,” Colby says. “So often I would turn to my co-author, Paula Bruggeman, and say ‘This is exactly what I’m feeling.’”
This was definitely true around the financing portion. “The week that we were spending the most time drafting the paper was actually the week I had to submit my financial aid forms for HBS,” she recalls. “I was really overwhelmed with the weight of how much of a financial investment this would be, and it was comforting to see that a lot of other women are wrestling with this.” Indeed, Colby says her concerns about whether or not she would get in were immediately supplanted by “Oh my gosh, how am I going to pay for this?!”
Interestingly, Colby’s husband will be pursuing a law degree at Harvard while she pursues her MBA, and yet her concerns about financing her degree outweighed his. “For him, it was like, ‘I want to go to law school, so we will figure out how to pay for it.’ And yet once I got into business school I questioned it because of the cost. I found myself thinking, ‘I don’t know if this is worthwhile for me.’” Ultimately, a more generous financial aid offer was one of the reasons she chose HBS over MIT Sloan. “Financial aid made a huge difference,” she says.
Women Are Curious and Feel It’s Never Too Late to Return to School
One of the defining characteristics setting women applying to graduate business programs apart from their male counterparts is curiosity. GMAC found that overall, women are significantly more likely than men to agree with the statement, “I am a curious person and I like to continuously discover new things” and the statement, “I love to learn new things.” Women were also more likely than men to feel that it’s never too late to return to school.
Women Are Planners When It Comes to Their Careers
Another research finding that was borne out by Colby’s personal experience was that women plan the next step in their careers earlier than men. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Colby seriously considered pursuing UVA’s one-year master’s degree in commerce straight out of school. She ended up taking a job at consulting giant Bain & Company instead, but the graduate management education seed had taken root, four years before she would ultimately attend. Her husband, meanwhile, only decided a year before applying that he was interested in law school. “My husband is a little bit less ‘planful,’” she says. “The arc of his thinking about going to law school was much shorter.”
Of course, business and law school are two different things, but the GMAC research revealed similar differences between genders when both were targeting business school. Women in China, Europe and the United States are more likely than men to first start considering an MBA or business master’s degree while in college. This difference is most pronounced among U.S. students, where 27 percent of women start thinking about it as undergraduates, as compared to just 17 percent of men.
Women are also more likely to apply when the timing proves convenient, the research suggests. Here again, Colby’s personal experience tracked closely. “Because my husband is starting law school next year, it was sort of a convenient time for me to be thinking about business school myself,” she says. “It was funny to see that in the data and for that to resonate with my own experience.”
To Colby, both of these findings suggest that deferred admissions programs—such as HBS’s 2+2 Program, the Future Year Admissions Program at UVA’s Darden School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business’s MBA Future Leaders program)—have the right idea. “You don’t see many MBA programs offering deferred admissions policies or touting that as an option, but the more flexibility given to women around timelines, the more likely they may be to pursue an MBA.”
Women Are Pragmatists When It Comes to Business School
GMAC also found that women are more likely than men to apply to a specific school because it offers flexible program formats—part-time, hybrid or online, for example—and because its graduates get better job offers. And especially in Western countries, where more women fall into the segments of “Balanced Careerist” and “Socioeconomic Climber,” they are more likely than men to be motivated by the desire to advance more quickly and earn more money.
“At first that was really striking to me,” says Su. “But it all made sense when you started adding all the little pieces together in terms of the need for convenience and flexibility, the practicalities around ‘Can I actually invest this much money in my education?’ and ‘Can I afford to take this much time out of my career?’ and the heightened focus on outcomes,” she continues. “It all comes back to the idea that women are a lot more pragmatic in their approach—and it also explains why the two-year MBA program doesn’t necessarily address all of their needs.”
Indeed, taken together, it becomes much clearer why more women would be drawn to specialized business master’s degree programs, which typically cost less, require less time out of the workforce, offer greater flexibility and fit more conveniently in with other things in women’s lives.
But that is not to say that women don’t see the MBA as relevant and valuable. Quite the contrary, in fact. The data show that women are more likely than men to hold the MBA degree in high regard and see it as opening doors to wider career advancement.
Next Steps for Business Schools
“It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking of women as a monolithic block and to view their lack of parity in MBA classrooms as a failure on the part of business schools,” GMAC President and CEO Sangeet Chowfla says. “The insights in this white paper clearly reveal that women are distinct from men in what they are seeking from their business education experience, and their behaviors differ between countries and behavior types.”
To approach gender parity in MBA classrooms, business schools need to clearly communicate to women how the MBA is a viable investment. But a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work, since what motivates women varies by region and behavior type. “Especially for women in Western countries, emphasize that earning an MBA is a way to advance more quickly in their careers, increase their earning potential and achieve their specific goals,” was the guidance the report offered. “For women in India, stress the academic reputation of the school and the job opportunities and global recognition that will come from a degree from the school.”
It’s also important for MBA programs to really consider how they can provide and promote flexible options for women, says Su. “The fact of the matter is that women are more pragmatic—so the question needs to be ‘How do we help promote those MBA formats that allow more flexibility and allow women to balance their careers with the other demands they are juggling?’” Business schools also need to think about how they can provide funding assistance that can overcome what is clearly a top barrier for women, she adds.
As true to her own life as Colby found much of the research—including how pragmatic and outcomes-focused women tend to be relative to men—she’s hoping to draw on, rather than be defined by, the insights during her time at HBS. “I want to approach business school with an open mind. I’m going in with the intention of working in the education sector after I graduate, but I don’t want to be holding so fast to that plan or that desire that I miss out on other opportunities that might arise.”
As for what she hopes business schools will take away, one is just how strong women’s curiosity and excitement to learn is. “You don’t see business schools talking much about all that you’ll get to learn as part of the MBA,” she says. “I think there’s a real opportunity for them to promote—especially to women—just how exciting it is to think about all the things you’re going to learn.” She also really believes financial aid and scholarships will increasingly move the needle for more women. “That was definitely true in my experience.”
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.