How MBAs, and scholarships for women, won’t help improve gender diversity in the boardroom
Having more women enrol on MBA programmes and offering gender-sensitive scholarships may help to send a larger number of women into the workforce, but it does little to improve the gender balance in the boardroom. Lack of women representation at the top is mainly due to existing gender biases that permeate through the field post-graduation, rather than because of any bias in their education and training. Even within business schools, where the percentage of female students is steadily increasing, the percentage of women as senior professors and advisory board members remains dismal. A case in point is the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge where a paltry 12% of faculty members are female, the second lowest figure among the FT’s top 100 business schools. Only 17% of women are on the Judge School of Management’s advisory board. Another discouraging figure indicating the challenges faced by women in rising to the top can be found in the ratio of male/female-led spin-off companies within university environment. At the University of Oxford, where the combined value of 70 spin-off companies is well over £2 billion, the number of these companies that have women at the helm is negligible.
Undoubtedly, the percentage of women in the boardroom is on the rise in the UK, where women now account for 20.7% of board positions in the FTSE100, up from 12.5% in 2011 and 17.3% in April 2013. This rise, however, fails to take into account the obstacles, biases and stereotypes women frequently face in the workplace. And there’s no reason why we should stop at scrutinising board representation; working our way down the ladder we can see the woeful number of women leaders in regions, departments, and so on. The critical data here comes not from number of females that enter the workforce but rather from the number of women that occupy the top slots across all managerial, hierarchical levels. The issue is not in the number of women enrolling in and graduating from MBA programmes, but rather how inversely proportionate this figure is, when compared to the small number of women in the country.
