When Ellen He looks around the classroom, she’s reminded how far women still have to go.
As a female MBA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, she’s in the minority. Barely a quarter of her fellow students at Olin Business School are women—a statistic on par with other top U.S. programs.
“This country used to be: ‘women do not go to work,’” says He, who is Chinese by birth. “I value female leadership a lot, so I definitely feel this is an area that needs a lot of growing in the government or the corporations.”
He is the new president of Olin Women in Business, a student-run group that organizes networking events, speaker series, and conferences for female students. When she joined in the fall of her first year, she found her niche, as well as a supportive community of like-minded peers. The organization, she believes, has played and should continue to play a major role in promoting gender parity on campus.
Women in her situation, He says, too often suffer silently.
“They don’t have anywhere to turn to talk about their challenges,” she says. “They need to think more about investing in themselves.”
OWIB’s parent organization, the National Association of Women MBAs, is one of a handful of groups promoting equal representation and increased support for women in graduate-level business and science programs. The numbers indicate the relevance of the organization’s efforts: in all but a few of the country’s elite business schools, female enrollment is below 40 percent. Of all the PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and math, 41 percent are earned by women.
Closing this gap has special significance in today’s competitive and tumultuous marketplace. Advanced degrees in these fields help budding entrepreneurs distinguish themselves and take their careers to the next level. They come with specialized and marketable skill sets, as well as the broadly applicable fruits of classroom life: the ability to collaborate, to speak and persuade eloquently, and to take the lead in discussions or group projects.
NAWMBA, founded in 1978, has chapters at business schools across the country, which provides members with leadership opportunities before they leave school. It connects women with recruiting companies, hosts resume and interview workshops, and sponsors numerous networking events. It even holds an annual conference, which draws thousands of female MBA students seeking professional-development and career opportunities.
Another resource for women in business is the Forté Foundation, which deals more explicitly with the “before-and-after” of business school—the financing, the motivation, and the career advancement.
A consortium of corporations, nonprofits, and graduate schools, Forté dedicates itself to helping women pursue degrees and propelling them into the business world. It operates the Forté Fellows program, which provides scholarships to women studying at participating business schools—among them Columbia, Babson, and Harvard. Since 2002, the foundation has awarded $68 million.
The foundation also works assiduously to open doors post-graduation. All fellows get their names in the annual “Forté Fellow Resume Book,” which is distributed to companies like Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Wells Fargo, and Unilever, among many others. They’re added to a special email list and LinkedIn group, inundated with mentoring opportunities, and granted access to conferences on female leadership and financial services.
Elissa Sangster, the foundation’s chief executive, is particularly enthusiastic about this last perk.
“Women really appreciate the stories of other women,” Sangster says. “By giving them this opportunity to connect with these women at a conference, it helps them to navigate their own career path.”
But MBAs aren’t the only useful degrees out there. Sophisticated capabilities in coding and engineering can transform nearly every division of a fledgling business: marketing, product development, logistics, web design…the list goes on and on.
Enter the Society of Women Engineers, which has been around for 65 years and continues to do important work promoting women’s science education. It provides a host of scholarships for female students—both undergraduate and graduate—of engineering and/or computer science at accredited universities. There’s even a “re-entry” option for non-traditional students who may have been out of school for a while. In 2014 alone, the society awarded $700,000 worth of funding.
Lke the Forté Foundation, SWE is more than just a scholarship provider. Membership entails reduced admission fees to entrepreneurial events and access to an online career center with job postings and resume-building tools. Both graduate students and professionals are eligible, meaning that the rewards persist long after the degree is earned.
Such rewards tie into these organizations’ broader goal: breaking down barriers to women’s education.
“Women should go in understanding what value they bring,” Sangster says. “They are contributing as much as anyone else.”
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen