Fixing the gender imbalance

To say there are few women at the head of major British companies is to be guilty of quite an understatement. "Few" actually means only two per cent of executive directors in the FTSE top 100 firms, which is to say 10 or 11 in total. Only one chief executive, the American-born Dame Marjorie Scardino at the Pearson group, is a woman.

With this in mind, you might have thought that the MBA was an obvious tool to help redress the balance – certificated proof of the knowledge, expertise and serious intent that successful corporate players need. Qualities which male executives have been known to claim aspiring women lack.

So, while the shortage of females among the shiny pates and tables of the boardroom is well documented, it is quite a surprise that there is also a shortage of women lining up at management school for a masters in business administration.

Certainly, the businesswomen who do take the degrees are confident about their value. Gill Hall, for example, used her MBA at Lancaster to change career. Before the course she taught on a foundation course at the London University's School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Now she is a marketing executive for IBM.

"It helped first of all in giving me a complete theoretical overview of the economics of a business. You cover marketing, accounting, strategy, finance – all the different functions of a business. I also think in a male-orientated workplace where women may perhaps have to fight, or work, a bit harder, anything that can make you stand out is a good thing."

Overall, the number of women entering business continues to rise and, in some well regarded professions such as accountancy and law, they now make up 50 per cent of the junior intake. Yet across the western world, the proportion of women taking MBAs remains at an obdurate 30 per cent, according to Susan Vinnicombe, professor of organisational behaviour and diversity management at Cranfield. The UK figure may be even lower. While the management school at the University of Bath manages a creditable 43 per cent female intake, Cranfield struggles with only 20 per cent. MBA teaching staff are also pretty male dominated: women account for only 7 per cent of the teachers at the prestigious London Business School.

This is despite significant efforts on the part of many institutions, including Cranfield which offers special bursaries, to attract female applicants. Lancaster University Management School is actually headed by a woman. Its students have access to childcare in a crèche. And until recently it offered special scholarships for women. Yet sheer lack of interest has pushed it into dropping the bursaries and, despite its efforts, the proportion of female students on the course has been falling, leaving the school puzzled as to how it should respond.

It is not a straightforward matter. In the first place, as Peter Calladine from AMBA (the MBA accreditation body) points out, a good 30 per cent of masters students come with some form of engineering background, the sort of subject that women drop at school and university.

And Lancaster's Professor Rick Crawley suggests this may be compounded by the type of psychometric test, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), that major business schools use to select candidates, because it rewards an easy familiarity with maths and logical deduction.

"The reality in the West, and certainly in the UK, is that women drop the quantitative parts of education," says Professor Crawley." Given that GMAT is measuring attainment as against potential, it is in a sense discriminating against women."

A sharp rise in costs in recent years may also have deterred female applicants, he says, with some courses increasing in price by around a fifth in the past two or three years.

Professor Crawley's views are endorsed by Professor Vinnicombe, a leading analyst of women's involvement in business. She identifies a number of additional factors that appear to be keeping them away.

The first, she says, is the age at which MBAs are normally taken: late Twenties and early Thirties. Most major schools require at least four years' business experience. Yet this is a sensitive time for women and often the point at which they take a career break for children rather than plough additional time and effort into their career.

The second she says, is undoubtedly an element of male bias. When quizzed on the scarcity of females at the top, male executives frequently blame a lack of management experience, a charge which appears to owe more to stereotyping reality.

She makes a third, telling point. The degree is sold on a "bangs-for-bucks" basis, which is to say a "bucks, bucks and more bucks" basis. Which is not a whole lot of use if you fancy an alternative to corporate life.

"MBAs don't appeal sufficiently to women," she says. "Often, when schools advertise, they promote themselves by saying what big jobs the graduates can get in big corporations. Many women, however, say they want to work in the voluntary sector or maybe in the public sector. In fact, management schools promote themselves on the basis of the differential in earnings they can produce." And Professor Vinnicombe concludes that schools may be quite reluctant to take on people heading for a worthwhile but low-income jobs.