I have been waiting to write a blog post about famous female alums from the MBA programs that I am targeting for a while now but I wanted to wait until I have narrowed my schools down. Since I did that last week, I thought it would be perfect timing to start researching this post. I was so excited at the onset to hear about all the remarkable women who are kicking ass and taking names out there and how I may be able to get started just like them by (hopefully) getting into a top MBA program. Imagine my disappointment when I realize that there are literally hundreds of notable male alumni and very, very few women listed (full disclosure, Wikipedia was my top source of info). Harvard by and large has the most and the other schools were a struggle to even identify the few in the chart below. The chart includes notable male alumni and female alumni of the business schools in the first two columns and the last column has notable female alumni from any of that university’s various degree programs.
In researching this I found some interesting information about women MBAs that also surprised me. Even though all of these top programs are comprised of about 40% women, women under achieve vs. their male counterparts in terms of academic honors. Some folks at Harvard decided to look into the achievement gap and there were two major conclusions why all of these bright, driven women are not performing near parity vs. the males of their cohort. They came up with two things, women don’t like to speak up as much as men in the classroom and they want to appear to not be “overly bookish”. The article also said that the gap was narrowing – a good sign.
The women MBA alumna above include some of the most notable women business leaders of our time and people who can be considered true trail blazers. Some of the names have an (F) next to them. This indicates that they also appeared on the Forbes 100 Power Women List (the list incredibly includes three different women named ‘Sheikha’!) which I cross referenced the above with. Something I noticed while doing this research is that many of the women listed seem inclined to be entrepreneurial, involved in politics or involved with non-profits.
This post is not meant to lament about glass ceilings and the like – quite the opposite. Even though I was at first disappointed to find so few women vs. men on the notable alumni lists of these schools, I think it is very positive that more women than ever are getting their MBAs and the environment for women in business is so much more positive than it was when many of the women listed above started out. I suspect that in 20 years time there will be many more notable female alums at these top schools. Also, many women achieve greatness without MBAs or even graduate degrees, which frankly surprised me. Many of the women on the Forbes 100 Power Women List had undergraduate degrees from slightly above average schools and no other schooling but managed to reach the highest levels of achievement without a ‘prestige’ degree. It just goes to show you that you are only limited by you – anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard and smart enough.
Are there any other alumni that should be in my chart? What do you think will happen with the gender achievement gap 10 or 20 years from now? Why do you think there are so few notable female alums listed?
mbagirljourney 
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