A strong woman knows she has strength enough for the journey, but a woman of strength knows it is in the journey where she will become strong
Dipti wasn’t planning to apply to an MBA program this spring. But when the coronavirus pandemic caused most top business schools to extend deadlines and suspend testing requisites, Malone, a product manager in the San Francisco Bay Area, found herself in a “Why not now?” frame of mind.
“I was planning on applying in the fall, but ended up speeding up my timeline, given the extended deadlines happening this year,” she says. “I talked with one of my mentors, who had been telling me since the day I met her that I should go back and do an MBA. And she was saying, ‘Why are you waiting? What is there to gain by waiting until next year to start?’ And I said, ‘It’s the first week of Feb are you serious? I can’t do this right now, you’re crazy.’ She went, ‘Well, why not?’ And I went through my list of, ‘Well, there’s only a month. I haven’t even started my essays. I don’t know where I want to apply. I haven’t even taken the GMAT. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And she went, ‘These are all terrible excuses. Can you give me better excuses? I’ll listen to you, but other than that, I’m going to keep bugging you to apply.’ And I stopped for a minute and I said, ‘You know what? You’re right. These are bad excuses.’”
Dipti applied to four elite B-schools in Feb and March — “It was a hell of a stressful month,” she says. But the work and stress were worth it. She was admitted to 2 of her target schools. She chose the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Women At The Top MBA Programs In The U.S.
Way back in 2018, USC Marshall achieved the long-sought holy grail of gender parity, with 52% women in its incoming class. Last year Stanford and Wharton led the way, each with 47%; and in 2020 the crown goes to Dartmouth Tuck, which stands on the precipice of parity with 49% women in its MBA.
After Dartmouth Tuck, the biggest two-year gains were at UCLA Anderson School of Management and NYU Stern School of Business, which both gained 6 points to 40% and 43%, respectively.
| Rank & School | 2020 % Women | 2019 % Women | 2018 % Women | 2017 % Women | 2016 % Women | 2-Year Change | 5-Year Change |
| 1. Stanford GSB | 47% | 47% | 41% | 40% | 41% | Even | 6 |
| 2. Chicago (Booth) | 38% | 40% | 42% | 40% | 42% | -2 | -4 |
| 3. Harvard Business School | 44% | 43% | 41% | 42% | 43% | 1 | 1 |
| 4. Penn (Wharton) | 41% | 47% | 43% | 44% | 44% | -6 | -3 |
| 5. Northwestern (Kellogg) | 40% | 43% | 46% | 42% | 41% | -3 | -1 |
| 6. MIT (Sloan) | 38% | 41% | 42% | 42% | 40% | -3 | -2 |
| 7. Columbia | 40% | 38% | 39% | 41% | 38% | 2 | 2 |
| 8. UC-Berkeley (Haas) | 39% | 37% | 43% | 40% | 38% | 2 | 1 |
| 9. Dartmouth (Tuck) | 49% | 42% | 45% | 44% | 44% | 7 | 5 |
| 10. Yale SOM | 39% | 42% | 43% | 43% | 43% | -3 | -4 |
| 11. Virginia (Darden) | 40% | 40% | 38% | 39% | 39% | Even | 1 |
| 12. Michigan (Ross) | 43% | 45% | 43% | 43% | 40% | -2 | 3 |
| 13. Cornell (Johnson) | 31% | 35% | 33% | 27% | 31% | -4 | Even |
| 14. Duke (Fuqua) | 46% | 43% | 42% | 34% | 35% | 3 | 11 |
| 15. UCLA (Anderson) | 40% | 34% | 35% | 38% | 32% | 6 | 8 |
| 16. NYU (Stern) | 43% | 37% | 35% | 38% | 35% | 6 | 8 |
| 17. CMU (Tepper) | 25% | 33% | 28% | 27% | 28% | -8 | -3 |
| 18. Texas-Austin (McCombs) | 40% | 40% | 38% | 40% | 37% | Even | 3 |
| 19. USC (Marshall) | 40% | 42% | 52% | 32% | 32% | -2 | 8 |
| 19. UNC (Kenan-Flagler) | 31% | 29% | 28% | 30% | 30% | 2 | 1 |
| 21. Washington (Foster) | 37% | 33% | 42% | 36% | 43% | 4 | -6 |
| 22. Emory (Goizueta) | 30% | 31% | 30% | 30% | 24% | -1 | 6 |
| 23. Indiana (Kelley) | 35% | 33% | 35% | 29% | 30% | 2 | 5 |
| 24. Georgetown (McDonough) | 32% | 29% | 29% | 32% | 34% | 3 | -2 |
| 25. Rice (Jones) | 35% | 38% | 31% | 34% | 24% | -3 | 11 |
The average gain among the 10 schools that grew their women’s MBA population between 2019 and 2020 was 3.5 percentage points. Last year when we wrote this story, the average gain among 12 schools was 2.6 points. The average loss this year for the 12 schools that declined was 3.3 percentage points; last year, the average loss between the two cycles at 11 schools was 3.5 points.
Women At The Top MBA Programs Outside The U.S.
| School | 2020 % Women | 2019 % Women | 2018 % Women | 3-Year Change |
| London Business School | 36% | 38% | 40% | -4 |
| HEC Paris | 34% | 31% | 32% | 2 |
| Rotman | 44% | 42% | 35% | 9 |
| INSEAD | 35% | 35% | 33% | 2 |
| IE | 32% | 30% | 31% | 1 |
| IESE | 31% | 31% | 32% | -1 |
| Cambridge | 37% | 35% | 36% | 1 |
| Oxford | 47% | 44% | 39% | 8 |
| CEIBS | 40% | 40% | 43% | -3 |
Over the last five years going back to fall 2016, eight U.S. schools have lost ground, one is even, and 16 have improved. The biggest five-year improvement was 11 percentage points at both Duke Fuqua and Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business, the latter of which improved to 35% women this year. Three other schools — UCLA Anderson (32% to 40%), NYU Stern (35% to 43%), and USC Marshall School of Business (32% to 40%) all improved by 8 points. The biggest decline over the last five years: the University of Washington Foster School of Business, which dropped 6 percentage points to 37%.
Outside the U.S., only one major school out of nine we’ve watched — London Business School — lost ground from 2019, and only three have lost ground over three years: LBS, IESE of Spain, and CEIBS of Shanghai, China and Zurich, Switzerland. Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, are the top non-U.S. schools for women at 47% and 44%, respectively. See table above for details
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