Shattering the B-school glass ceiling

Across our best institutes, we are years, if not decades, away from having an equal gender mix among students

In higher education in India, women have made impressive strides over the past decade. In 2014, for the first time since Independence, more women received postgraduate degrees than men. In engineering, medicine and the sciences, women enrollment and graduation has increased - albeit, less impressively.

In management education, things have evolved for the better as well. Yet, across our best institutes, we are years, if not decades, away from having an equal gender mix in the student body.

At the ISB (Indian School of Business), India's top private B-school and one of the finest in the world, the founding batch that graduated in 2002, had only 16 per cent of women students. The school has made a tremendous, concerted effort over the past 15 years to drive that figure up. The current batch has an all-time high 31 per cent of female students - creditable but still short of where that proportion should be. Even globally, among the very best, the most impressive benchmark is the 39 per cent that Harvard Business School managed in its 2012 batch - after a focused effort to work on fixing the gender mix in classroom.

This 30+ per cent level at ISB may seem like a reasonable glass ceiling for leading Indian B-schools, but the country average should make us all cringe. While no overall data or estimates exist, it is sad to see from anecdotal but empirical evidence that the per cent of women in most B-schools, including most IIMs, are in the teens or even the single digit percentage. Among the older, more prestigious IIMs, IIM Kozhikode leads the pack with 25.4 per cent women in its class entering in 2015, down from an unbelievable peak of 53 per cent in its 2013-2015 batch. Are women less interested in management careers? Or have we created admissions criteria and practices that ensure MBA programmes are meant for men? Also, while admissions statistics are moving in the right direction, they don't give us the whole picture. Once they enter these B-schools, do women students get the education they really need and deserve?

Our experience at the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women, a globally distinctive "reimagined" full-time management programme exclusively for women, suggests there is neither lack of interest nor dearth of potential in women to excel in business and management. There are unconscious biases operating against admitting women into leading B-schools that need to be consciously weeded out.

The lack of women on company boards and in senior management corners much of the narrative when it comes to the issue of gender diversity in the corporate world. Industry must do its part to fix the schisms. But, academia has to introspect, too. Even as we have worked to push enrollment statistics up, have we failed in ensuring success at the workplace?

We expect great colleges to be gender-blind. But, to fix the divides of equal pay and equal representation in the workplace, should business schools instead aim to be gender-transformative? Data has shown that there is a sustained exodus of women out of the workplace between the ages of 28 and 35 - the missing pipeline, as many say. This is as true for women armed with management degrees.

Research by organisations such as Catalyst, a not-for-profit that aims to increase women's role in business, McKinsey & Co. and Harvard Business Review has revealed that women managers, even those who stay the course, face challenges that are very unique to them. Women are found to negotiate less aggressively and are scrutinised more closely for behaviour, for instance.

Can our classrooms recognise gender differences (which is not the same as gender inequality) to ensure women students are equipped with the skills, training and mentorship that can help them navigate through some of the career choices, personal dilemmas and attitudinal obstacles?

For example, management institutes often fail to provide enough women role models. At Harvard Business School, its famous case studies - stories about a business person facing a problem that students must solve - overwhelmingly involve male protagonists. Even now, only about eight per cent of cases focus on a woman protagonist. And when a female protagonist is involved often times the problem being studied is work-life balance.

A few business schools have conducted "gender-blind" case studies, and found that students reacted very differently when they didn't know the manager in question was a woman. When they did, they found her decisions inadequate, questioned her leadership style and attributed more negative personality traits to her.

Our management education often misses another crucial point. They don't talk enough about leveraging women's natural strengths in the workplace. There is a need to encourage authentic leadership styles, as opposed to holding up the idea of "masculine leadership" as the default leadership style everyone must adopt.

Contemporary management literature has shown that 21st century leadership is moving away from the concept of being aggressive, dominating and inaccessible. Supposedly, "feminine" attributes, such as empathy and collaboration are now understood to be formidable advantages in a leader's toolkit. Encouraging all their students - especially women - to discover their authentic leadership style is another aspect management colleges should explore.

Again, at Vedica we have bucked widespread scepticism to create a women-only programme because we believe it is a powerful way to help women with potential be the best they can be. The Indian management education system is one of the largest in the world. By restoring gender balance in and across our B-schools, our management education has the potential to also be the best for the world.

The author is the founding dean of Indian School of Business and a founder of the Vedica Scholars Programme for Women