Gender imbalance persists in MBA programmes, where, on average, little more than 30 per cent of the students are women, writes Alison Maitland

BUSINESS SCHOOLS are wrestling with a challenge: women. Schools recognise that women are a big potential growth market, yet their efforts to attract more female students are making little headway.

The numbers remain low, at little more than 30 per cent of MBA students on average. This is despite the fact that women account for a majority of graduates across the developed world, and companies are taking heed of studies that link the presence of women in senior management with greater profitability.

New research by London Business School (LBS) into the experiences of MBA students helps to explain the persistent gender imbalance and shows that different approaches are needed to tackle the problem.

The research, based on in-depth interviews with 10 male and 10 female students at a leading international school, demonstrates how the masculine environment still makes it harder for women to fit in. It also shows that both the male majority and female minority of students appear to accept as an inevitability that business is done according to male rules.

"There were many comments about 'playing the game' and 'having to do business like a man'," says Elisabeth Kelan, research fellow at the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business at LBS.

"One reason why women are not joining business school is that they cannot identify with the image of the manager as masculine, and might not want to practise this form of masculinity when at business school."

Management education contrasts with fields such as medicine or law, which women are entering in roughly equal numbers to men. Although there have been annual fluctuations, the number of women attracted to big international business schools has not changed much since the 1980s, says Kelan.

The LBS study asked students about the gender imbalance at the school; whether it mattered to them; how they explained it; and what difference a more even ratio of women to men would make.

The students were at different stages of a two-year MBA programme at the unnamed school, where 70 per cent of students and 80 per cent of teaching staff are men and which serves as a recruiting ground for investment banks and management consulting firms.

The interviewees, with an average age of 30, represented a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities. Ten were single or divorced, 10 had partners and one had children.

Although this is qualitative research, Kelan believes the findings are applicable to other top-ranking international schools.

They found that women students play down their gender to blend in. One says: "If you want to do business, you have to learn to play business like a man."

Another says it is not a problem that most case studies on the programme are about men because "that's just the way the world is".

"The students told us gender doesn't matter, but their experience indicates that it does," says Kelan. "A lot of the young men said: 'I want to be an involved father but that's not an appropriate option in the business world because the emphasis is still on the male's breadwinning role.' "

One interviewee describes as "vaguely annoying" a man in her study group who makes frequent references to parts of the female body. But she appears to be more unsettled by something else. "If I say something, he will almost disagree with me instantly but, if then someone who's male in the group says the same thing as me, he'll happily adopt the view."

She has learnt to be more aggressive in the study group, but says she found it initially exhausting to change her style.

The researchers comment: "Rather than complaining about the sexist behaviour, it appears that her strategy has been one of adaptation and that, by taking on more characteristically 'masculine' traits, she has found a way to work more effectively with her male colleagues."

The findings add a gender dimension to the intense debate among business school academics about the adequacy and effectiveness of management education.

"There are more models for leadership than just the heroic leadership model of toughness, individualism and assertiveness," says Kelan. "New leadership models need to leave room for men and women to enact a wide array of behaviours, not just those classified as masculine."

Why did the students in the study not see a link between the scarcity of women in business schools and the masculine environment? "We see what academics call post-feminism - the idea that feminism has achieved its goal and we have achieved equality," says Kelan.

"You find this particularly among young women. There's a belief that 'we've dealt with gender' but, if you talk to women, they tell you stories about how they have been discriminated against and these stories are very similar to [those of] the past."

More subtle strategies are needed to challenge students to understand how gender shapes organisational culture and practices, the study argues. Introducing examples of less traditional business women and men into the curriculum would show "gender diversity is part of what it means to do business".

Another approach is to include diversity training in induction programmes. This would give students an understanding of their own biases and a reference point for their subsequent teamwork. - (Financial Times service)