‘B-schools in US have fewer female students’

Girls are still under-represented in management schools in the US, said a professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley.

“Less number of women is not only restricted to the business schools, but it is visible in the kind of jobs that the management students later do,” said Catherine Wolfram, Acting Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Haas School of Business. She added that the school is focusing on increasing the number of female students.

Currently, the percentage of women in the business school at the masters’ level is about 45 per cent. “The number was 25 per cent about 10 years ago,” said Wolfram.

“I did a little bit of research on that and have come up with a hypothesis that the kind of jobs that MBA prepares you for are not super-comparable with the work-life balance. The employers are trying to change this but they still have a long way to go,” she added.

There are 2,300 students, including 800 part-time students, in different MBA programmes that the school runs. There are about 530 full-time MBAs and at the undergraduate level, the number is 750. The remaining are in Ph D as well as Executive MBA programmes.

“Another differentiator between the Haas and the other business schools is that here we are also trying to create a social impact. It’s doesn’t have to be social enterprise but one can do a business in a way that also helps the world as well,” she said.

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