Math and family keep women out

Female students account for just one quarter of MBA enrolment

Sept 20, 2007
TINA GLADSTONE
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

On Thursday afternoons, Mansi Kothari, a 26-year-old MBA student at Queen's School of Business in Kingston, is in a study room with two classmates – both men.

The three of them are trying to get their New Ventures Club off the ground. But things aren't moving along quickly enough for Kothari. She draws up a list of action items and assigns them to the guys. The older of the two, a 45-year-old father of two, interrupts her mid-sentence.

"Mansi, you're such an alpha male," he teases her.

"How does that make me an alpha male?" she asks.

"You think like a man. You really get things done."

Kothari looks at her teammate, shakes her head and replies, "I'll take that as a compliment."

"They were intimidated at the control I was taking," she explains later. "They felt like I wanted everything to be my way. But I thought I'm not going to feel bad here. I'm the one making this club happen."

For Kothari – an admittedly driven, confident woman – most days at school aren't like that. She says it's hard being one of just 18 women in her 72-person class.

For Kothari – an admittedly driven, confident woman – most days at school aren't like that. She says it's hard being one of just 18 women in her 72-person class.

While the usefulness of MBA programs has been questioned in recent years by the likes of Henry Mintzberg, McGill professor and author of the book Managers, Not MBAs, they remain one of the major suppliers of talent for Canada's top companies.

According to Michael Gates, vice-president and partner at Mandrake Management Consultants, if you were to gather a sample of business cards from "C-level" executives – chief executive officers, chief financial officers, chief information officers – you'd see that most have an MBA designation.

The banking sector is particularly partial, Gates says. "Banks will hire a 28-year-old MBA grad and put them on fast track where they could see three to five promotions in as many years. But a new hire without an MBA will be put on a slower track, typically starting out in a local branch. It could take them 20 years to get to the same place."

That is not good news for women without an MBA but there's more at stake than personal success. Elspeth Murray, CEO of the Queen's Centre for Business Venturing, says the lack of women in MBA programs is hurting Canadian companies.

"How can any organization be its best when it's missing half the pool of talent? It's like leaving half of anything out. It's bad for business."

The writing is on the wall: Business schools need to pull in more women. But first, they need to understand why women are staying away.

A few years ago, Catalyst, an international research organization, along with the University of Michigan Business School, did a comprehensive study of why women shy away from MBA programs.

They discovered that women feel conflicted between their professional and personal lives. Most MBA programs require several years of work experience, so MBA students are typically older than their law or med school counterparts. By the time they're ready to apply, these women are in their late 20s, prime time for marriage and children.

What follows graduation is often as daunting. Recent grads, either on the entrepreneur or executive track, must be willing to give their life over to work, something that's difficult to do while starting a family.

And there's the math problem. Forty-five per cent of the women surveyed said they lack confidence in their math skills – skills crucial to any MBA program. Only 18 per cent of men felt the same way.

In the past few years, MBA schools have begun to work hard to appeal to women. They need to. The programs are expensive, some costing close to $100,000, and top students are in demand.

When the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario shortened its full-time MBA to 12 months, it did it with women in mind and the assumption that the shortened period would be less disruptive to families.

Gloria Saccon, a director with Queen's School of Business, talks about the "triad of support." First comes family. A woman's partner, she says, needs to willingly accept that mom is going to miss a few soccer games. Next is support from Queen's, which makes sure students have access to a program manager, who can answer questions and set up extra tutorials, and their professors. Finally, employers need to understand that – for part-time students with as much as 20 hours of school each week – something at work has to give.

Efforts are starting to pay off. Women now make up 35 per cent of Ivey students. At Queen's, the proportion of women jumped from 20 to 30 per cent in the past year.

Kothari is optimistic about the direction in which things are going. "Companies are looking for diversity in their senior teams. I think being a woman will be my golden ticket."