Several top schools are taking steps to boost female enrollment in their Executive MBA programs, including creating personal networks to recruit women, offering additional scholarship money, and designing more family-friendly program formats, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
Currently, women represent less than 20 percent of most EMBA classes, and at a number of top programs that percentage is closer to 5 percent, the Journal reports. This is compared to 30 percent of the class at top full-time MBA programs and more than 40 percent in part-time programs.
According to the Journal report, obstacles preventing more women from pursuing an EMBA include formats that interfere with raising a family (many EMBA programs require two years of two long weekends on campus each month), trouble securing company sponsorship for the degree and uncertainty around whether the EMBA will actually help them break through the glass ceiling and advance in their careers. Furthermore, until recently, most schools have aimed their female recruitment efforts toward candidates for their full-time programs.
Efforts to address these obstacles and boost female EMBA enrollment range from school to school, the Journal reports. At Columbia Business School, the school and its alumni have started to reach out directly to potential female applicants through personal phone calls and networking events. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a faculty member devotes more than half of her time to increasing diversity and female enrollment at Wharton’s San Francisco–based EMBA program. And at London Business School and IESE in Madrid, the administrations have increased scholarship aid to women who meet greater resistance within their companies to fund the executive programs.
Still other schools have begun to offer program formats that are more appealing to women, the Journal reports. Emory University in 2002 introduced a new modular EMBA program that meets for nine residency periods over 21 months, as opposed to every other weekend. The program has 33 percent women in its current class, compared with 20 percent in its traditional EMBA program, according to the Journal. “For women with young children, weekends tend to be time they spend at home,” Joan Coonrod, director of admissions, told the Journal.
The increased focus on attracting women to EMBA programs has met with praise from organizations that focus on promoting women in business, who argue that greater gender equality will not only benefit women but will make the programs better overall. “The optimal balance for teams to perform strongly is 50 percent women and we have that aspiration,” Linden Selby, a senior admissions manager at London Business School, told the Journal. Selby cited research conducted by London Business School’s Centre for Women to support her assertion that mixed teams are stronger.
To read the full Journal article, click here.
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