Female Enrolment Hits 40% in MIT Sloan’s Class of 2016: MBA News

By Tim Dhoul Updated Dec 04, 2019

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Introduction
A rare case of a significant gain for female MBA students this year

Class of 2016 at MIT Sloan sees female student numbers rise

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MIT Sloan has released its MBA class of 2016 profile, and the standout change from last year is a rise in female enrolment from 34% to 40% - a new high.

“We’re hovering around the 40,” says Dawna Levenson, admissions director at MIT Sloan: “It’s 39.4% when you combine our MBA and LGO [Leaders for Global Operations] programs. MBA alone is actually almost 41%.”

It’s welcome news, all the more so considering that elsewhere in the US, MBA class of 2016 profiles yielded little encouragement when it comes to their numbers of female MBA students, as this recent article shows.

Levenson believes that recognition of the need to portray the school “through different lenses” is now helping draw more female students to the school.

“Over the past couple of years, from a recruiting perspective we’ve done an awful lot to show the MIT Sloan experience from a woman’s perspective,” she says adding: “I choose my words carefully, it’s not about showing the female side of MIT Sloan, it's more the school itself and all it has to offer from a woman’s perspective to help other women see what the real value is.”

As such, Levenson is hopeful that this rise can continue: “The focus on women and the female experience whether it be in the classroom, club etc., I think is a really important addition.”

Learn more about the admissions process at MIT Sloan.

A rare case of a significant gain for female MBA students this year

For all the talk of improving the gender balance at MBA-level and beyond, the MBA class of 2016 profiles released to date indicate that a number of schools have in fact enrolled a lower proportion of female MBA students this year.

There were a couple of exceptions to this, most notably at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business which leapt from 31% to 43% female students in its MBA class of 2016 – a rise that exceeds that of MIT Sloan.

Despite the pluses, it is an underwhelming return in a year that some hoped would see an across-the-board rise in female MBA enrolment rates.

Prospective female MBA students responding to this year’s QS TopMBA.com Applicant Survey outnumbered male for the very first time in North America, but it is a little too early to see this translated into the MBA classroom proper – certainly the class of 2016 does not reflect this.

Released earlier this week, GMAC’s 2014 Application Trends Survey found that worldwide, the pool of prospective MBA students who applied across all formats (and related master’s degrees) was 38% female – and for two-year MBA programs alone it was 37%, a slight decrease on the 39% figure last year – which perhaps puts the figures released by MIT Sloan and Haas this year in a more useful perspective.

GMAC’s report also makes the point that the proportion of women who sat the GMAT this academic year worldwide – 43% – was higher than those who applied to programs which, again, may suggest that things are at least moving in the right direction. Although it might also be taken as a sign of the opposite, with women dropping out of the application process before reaching the end.

Written by

Tim Dhoul

Tim is a writer with a background in consumer journalism and charity communications. He trained as a journalist in the UK and holds degrees in history (BA) and Latin American studies (MA).