Recruiting female business leaders

IOWA CITY - When Sarah Gardial began her career in academia in the early 1990s, business schools across the country were trying to figure out why more women weren't enrolled in programs for master's in business administration.

'There is constant dialogue at the national level,” said Gardial, dean of the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. 'But in the last 30 years, the needle really hasn't moved.”

More women are attending and graduating from college than ever before, even outpacing the number of male graduates.

According to the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of recent female high school graduates enrolled in college in the fall following graduation in 2012, up from 63 percent in 1994.

And a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that women 25 to 34 years old were 21 percent more likely than men to be college graduates and 48 percent more likely to have completed graduate school in 2013.

But somewhere along the way, there's a major drop off when it comes to female students pursuing an MBA.

'Women enrolled in our undergraduate programs are much closer to a 50-50 split,” Gardial said. 'When it comes to MBA programs, it's great to have females make up 20 to 25 percent.”

She thinks several factors contribute to this outcome - the biggest being timing.

'A lot of people in MBA programs come back to school once they've spent time in the work force,” Gardial said. 'The prime time to get an MBA is in the late 20s to mid-30s, which kind of is a train wreck for women when it comes to biological reasons.”

Gardial added that, often, women choose a different career path, such as starting their own business, than one that involves climbing the corporate ladder - so an MBA doesn't seem as necessary.

But this can create pipeline issues when it comes to the number of women serving on boards or leading big companies.

Women hold only 4.6 percent of CEO positions at Standard & Poor's 500 companies - with only 23 female chief executives out of 500 companies, according to research group Catalyst.

Here in Iowa, women hold 22 percent of executive positions at publicly held companies, 25 percent in the private sector and 57 percent in the not-for-profit sector, according to a 2015 report by the Iowa Women's Foundation, a Coralville-based group that wants to identify the barriers women face when it comes to leadership.

Women also only make up 16 percent of the members of Iowa's public company boards.

Targeted recruitment

Experts say that the number of women enrolled in full-time MBA programs can increase if universities reach women earlier and if they work on outreach.

At Iowa State University, the percentage of women enrolled in the full-time MBA program averages about 37 percent each year, said Diana Sloan, director of graduate marketing and alumni relations at ISU's college of business.

Sloan said that number fluctuates from year to year, adding women make up 33 percent of the college's newest MBA class.

One thing ISU has done to increase the number of female MBA students is target women pursuing careers in STEM fields - science, technology, engineering and math - rather than just business students, she said.

'We look at the marketing and recruitment efforts every year of women and minorities, which is at the core of our objectives,” Sloan said.

The business school also attends conferences, including the society of women engineers, to recruit MBA candidates and help start the young women in business program, which allows high school girls to explore career opportunities and business majors.

However, female-specific recruitment isn't always a tactic business schools use, including at the University of Northern Iowa.

But the college regularly uses women in advertising campaigns to help working women visualize themselves as MBA candidates, said Leslie Wilson, an associate dean and the MBA program director at UNI.

UNI's program is smaller than the state's other public universities - with only around 20 students. It also puts full-time and part-time students in the same class, Wilson said, adding that females make up about 30 percent of its students.

The classes generally are once a week, making the class time commitment less demanding than at the larger programs in the state.

'But you still have to put in the time,” she said.

At UI, Gardial said Tippie created a scholarship specifically for female MBA students, made up of alumni donations. And the school has started having conversations with female undergraduates to help them 'see themselves moving up.”

The school's tactics appear to be working - the number of women enrolled in the program has increased over the years. Women made up 23 percent of the class of 2014 compared with 27 percent of the class of 2016.

'We have to be aggressive,” she said. 'You don't just wait for them to show up.”