Not Just Men in Gray Flannel Suits as More Women Attend MBA Programs

This article is sponsored Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM).  

Learn more about the RSM MBA.

On the surface, 2013 seemed noteworthy for businesswomen. Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg's, book Lean In was a best seller while Yahoo's president and chief executive officer, Marissa Mayer, was the first women to rank number one in Fortune magazine's list of the top 40 business leaders under 40. Unfortunately, the same year Harvard Business School celebrated over 50 years as a coed MBA program, fewer than two-dozen women were chief executives for Fortune 500 companies. Beginning with the first eight women who attended Harvard business school in 1963, female students have faced hostile environments both inside the classroom and at the workplace. At one school, however, women are not just inspired to scale metaphorical mountains. Women MBAs at Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University are given a chance to climb the real thing.

In some ways, women in business school are making clear strides. This July, QS TopMBA published a survey’s surprising results. Drawing upon questionnaires given to some 5,000 MBA applicants, The QS TopMBA.com Applicant Survey revealed that for the first time women MBA applicants outnumbered men in the US and Canada.

Despite this is noteworthy statistic, men still make up the majority of admitted students. At most select schools, men make up around two-thirds of the MBA cohort. Also, according to the survey, MBA programs in Western Europe continue to have far more male applicants than female.

“The fact that only about 35% of most top-tiered MBA programs is female doesn't detract from the overall impact and involvement that women have upon their programs,” argued MBA candidate Sarah Feagles in a recent Huffington Post article “...most schools don't need to emphasize gender-neutrality in their marketing strategy because their cultures value mutual respect and inclusion, no matter if you're an international student, a female, or a minority.”

Climbing Kilimanjaro

At Rotterdam School of Management, MBA students join diverse teams where 97% of the class comes from outside of the Netherlands. Besides this commitment to international students, one school brochure explains how the RSM Kilimanjaro Leadership Project and Women Empowerment at RSM, “aims to address the gender issues in business and the underrepresentation of female leaders in the boardroom, by encouraging women to empower women.”          

Most MBA projects ask students to work as a team. Not many conclude with the expectation they will be climbing Kilimanjaro – Africa’s tallest mountain.

Every fall, the Kilimanjaro Leadership Project offers women attending Business School and women with their MBAs the chance to work as a team scaling the nearly 20,000 foot Tanzanian mountain. As the school’s site explains, “We challenged a team of MBA women to stretch themselves beyond their leadership perceptions and reach new heights.” Climbing Kilimanjaro was designed “to be a transformative experience where participants master key leadership competencies, including understanding and using power, team building and communication”.

A recent participant says climbing Kilimanjaro is one reason her gender has not held her back. Katharina Holch earned her MBA from RSM in 2010. Six weeks before her climb, she wrote in a 2012 blog posting that, “One thing I learned during the MBA is that we can learn a lot from role models. I also like inspirational quotes, and one I’ve kept close at heart is the following by Sir Edmund Hillary: ‘It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.’”

Career Options

Following graduation, Holch explored her career options. “I wanted to change industries to a more dynamic work environment, which included changing companies...The MBA degree allowed me to combine my theoretical and practical knowledge and look for a different job in a different company – but moreover, really opened me up to personal development and cross-cultural teamwork.”

She began working for GE Healthcare through the 2-year Experienced Commercial Leadership Program, which is specifically designed for MBA graduates. She now works as a customer relations manager for GE Healthcare Germany.

She is familiar with complaints about case studies with few female protagonists, but at Rotterdam School of Management she says, “I did not have the feeling that women were underrepresented in our case study work. More important for me was to push the overall topic of helping women to advance their career (at RSM I did this through the ‘Women in Management’ Club which I co-led during the MBA). In terms of case studies, I always felt the topic was more important than who the main actors were.”

Perhaps even more significant is what women with MBAs are doing 10 years after earning their degree. A decade after graduation, a 2010 study by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation determined that MBAs have left the labor force in greater numbers than women in other profession such as law or medicine. Amongst elite institutions, the numbers of women leaving is even higher. This is why writer Laura Hemphill suggested in a September article in The New Yorker magazine that women should forgo the degree entirely.

“Consider other uses of those two years,” Hemphill writes. “Instead of relying on an MBA to boost her skillset, a woman could teach herself a hard skill like programming or Chinese, or she could start her own business.”

Holch can’t imagine spending a year learning Chinese, a ‘hard skill’ she might be hard pressed to remember. “I could have spent a year learning Chinese, but would have forgotten it all by now as I would not have had a chance to use it. The experience and network I took out of the MBA and the personal development I gained from it will be with me all my life.”

She agrees that all potential MBA students, not just women, should examine how necessary the degree is for their career options. Yet Holch is quick to add that, “…we have to ask why the MBA ladies choose to leave work. Is it family considerations – and can they afford to do so because they already have made a career because of the MBA? Do they plan to return to work, and does the MBA make that easier? What are the reasons?” To her, MBAs enjoy not only increased earning potential but also increased flexibility which clearly improves their career options.

This article is sponsored Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM).