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A record number of women enrolled in top MBA programs in 2021 after a year in which the pandemic forced hundreds of thousands of women out of the labor force and progress stalled toward achieving gender parity in business schools.
Women account for 41% of students in full-time MBA programs at the 56 member schools of the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s access to business education and released the new enrollment figures on Friday. That figure, an increase from 39% in 2020, is the highest female enrollment rate in the 20 years since Forté was founded.
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The uptick matters, advocates say, because graduating from such programs can propel women’s careers and lead to more leadership opportunities in the workforce.
“The reason that this particular pipeline is really important is because of where it leads, and how quickly and how much of an opportunity there is for women to be in those leadership roles,” says Forté Foundation CEO Elissa Sangster. “We want to make sure that those pathways are wide open for women.”
About two-thirds of the foundation’s member schools said there was an increase in the percentage of women who enrolled this year.
Read more: I Tried to Live Off Women-Owned Businesses. Turns Out Men Still Run Everything
And 10 of the schools reported women’s enrollment had reached 45% or more this year, including three — the George Washington School of Business, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School — that enrolled more than 50% women, according to the Forté Foundation. By comparison, no schools had 45% or more women enrolled 10 years ago, the foundation reported.
Sangster says the group is aiming to reach gender parity in MBA programs by 2030, but even if that happens, translating it to the working world remains a long way off. Women make up just 8.2% of Fortune 500 CEOs, and the pandemic forced many women out of the workforce, further…
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Source : time
