Meet the Female Dean Championing Diversity at Vlerick

Diversity is a quintessential part of MBA programs around the world, with business schools priding themselves on selecting the best candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds.

At a time when female empowerment is at an all-time high, Prof Dr Marion Debruyne, Dean of Vlerick Business School is championing diversity within the business school.

Debruyne knows the importance of this pillar when it comes to the business world. She says, “Showing diversity includes women in business, but it can also include many different types of people. That’s one of the things we have sought out to do.

“We have a series of people we profile, students and alums of our school. Our ambition was to showcase people from different walks of life and show anything is possible.

“They’re people from the arts, entrepreneurs, doctors and we had a specific zoom in on women.”

Vlerick’s ‘journey to your dream’ series demonstrates the importance of showing what’s possible, rather than simply telling. Debruyne says, “We believe it can be very valuable to see people like you or role models to show you there’s a diverse set of people who do an MBA and it’s this diversity that enriches the MBA experience.”

One of the profiles features a student who was a musician when he started his MBA and, following completion of his studies, started his own digital music company.

Debruyne adds, “Another was a young, female entrepreneur with three children. The tagline was ‘doing an MBA with three children? Yes, you can.’”

The series of profiles (which you can read here) is all about dreams. According to Debruyne, the whole idea surrounding the profiles was homing in on what a student’s dream was as a child, their dream at the start of the MBA and how they put that learning into action.

According to Debruyne, gender shouldn’t be an issue at business school and Vlerick has taken measures to boost this. She says, “We created a Female Leadership Grant for our Executive MBA as well as our master’s programs.

“We’ve found the Female Leadership Grant not only gives a real concrete opportunity to promising women, but it’s also an enabler for women to start putting it on the table, express their ambition and start that dialogue, both at home as well as at work.”

Working parents understand the difficulties which arise when going back to education, problems which can hold them back from pursuing their dreams. Debruyne says, “We see that, for women, juggling family, work and an MBA is especially hard.

“It’s hard for men as well but, maybe because of society’s expectations, it can be even harder for women and demands to be on-campus have been even harder.

“That was one of the motivations to launch an online MBA for people to fit the MBA into their lives and not fitting their life around the MBA.”

Although the online MBA only launched this year, Debruyne is hopeful it will appeal to many women. She says, “It’s early days, but we see there’s a slightly higher percentage of female participants in the online MBA, and one of their motivations is it’s flexible.”