On some campuses, the better question is, why would they want to? At Harvard Business School this fall, many women (and some men) were infuriated by materials for a first-year course on negotiation. The readings included a memo suggesting that women and blacks were low-risk takers. The offending document was a summary of a 1975 book, one that had been rejected by department chairman John Kotter. He wasn’t shocked by the angry response. “If everything were fine,” says Kotter, “you wouldn’t have gotten the reaction we got. It was like a match on gasoline.”
Other business-school administrators say the problem is corporate America, where few women have shattered the glass ceiling. An M.B.A. is expensive$20,000 or more a year at an elite school. But because they generally don’t earn as much as men and are less likely to end up in a corner office, lots of women say the sacrifice just isn’t worth it. “You have to work a very long time to establish the benefit,” says Susan Moore, 23, a second-year M.B.A. student at the University of Chicago. There are other, cheaper routes to the same expertise. Arthur Andersen, for example, hires most of its new recruits–about 40 percent of them women–straight out of college and trains them while paying a salary. Malisa Everson, 28, signed up last spring instead of going to business school. “They offered a lot that I was looking for in an M.B.A.,” says Everson.
The timing of many M.B.A. programs also works against women. Most schools prefer candidates in their late 20s or early 30s, with a half-dozen years of work experience. Women that age are up against their biological clocks and for many, the choice comes down to B-school or babies. The “family issue” troubles Elizabeth Hawke, 32, an environmental consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who is filling out M.B.A. applications. She’ll be 35 when she graduates, and she expects to be a working mother. After years of struggling to get the degree, she says, “I’m not going to have a child and stop working.”
Some women say the recession keeps them in the office even when they’d rather be back in school. That’s one reason why flex-time M.B.A. plans are doing well. The University of Southern California’s executive program, which schedules classes around students’ full-time jobs, has kept its female enrollment steady while the percentage of women in the regular M.B.A. program has slipped. Joy Fletcher, 27, kept her job as an account manager while getting her degree from USC. It’s a killer schedule, she says, but one that will allow her to “pick and choose my jobs” in a few years.
Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston takes an even more radical approach. The nation’s only business school just for women was founded in 1974 by two Harvard Business School faculty members, Anne Jardim and Margaret Hennig, coauthors of “The Managerial Woman,” a best seller in the 1970s. They argue that traditional business-school teaching methods are male-oriented. Professors pit student against student, encouraging confrontation and argument. “There is no Socratic method in business schools,” says Jardim. “There’s the Mike Tyson method.” At Simmons, all the case studies used in class feature women. Organizational-behavior classes focus specifically on explaining male behavior to women. It may be unorthodox, but it is appealing: applications are steadily rising. And the new grads are being hired by local blue-chip companies.
By some measures, women are not faltering in business schools. The proportion taking the Graduate Management Admissions Tests has remained constant for a decade at roughly 40 percent. And some deans report that the big increase in foreign students at business schools–most of them men–may be skewing the enrollment trends.
Nonetheless, the B-schools have turned to marketing. This fall, 10 top schools–including Harvard, Stanford and MIT–are holding receptions for women applicants in Boston and Los Angeles. Columbia is running focus groups to find ways to appeal to women. “To ignore women I think is foolish,” says Mary Banks, assistant director of admissions at Columbia. “Business needs women.” So do business schools.
