Fueled by interest among young women in one-year specialized master’s degrees, graduate business schools that have struggled for years to attract women are seeing a slow but steady increase in their numbers, the Graduate Management Admission Council reported this week.
While women make up about half of all students in medical and law schools today, they represent less than a third of students enrolled in graduate business schools.
But after six years of modest increases, women last year represented 41 percent of those taking the council’s Graduate Management Admission Test, up from 34 percent in 1983. Women made up 64 percent of test takers in China, and 39 percent of the total in the United States.
Many of the female applicants are in their early 20s and are drawn to one-year master’s degrees in fields like accounting, finance, and management. Business schools have expanded such programs in recent years as interest in their two-year M.B.A. programs has slumped.
While M.B.A. programs typically require at least three years of previous work experience, the specialized master’s programs are open to recent college graduates who are looking for an edge in a difficult job market.
The one-year programs are proving particularly appealing to women, who made up 57 percent of applicants to master-of-accounting programs last year.
One reason medical and law schools have fared better in attracting women is that they offer a faster start on a professional education.
Unlike the two-year M.B.A. programs, “students can enter medical or law schools right after college,” said Elissa Ellis-Sangster, executive director of the Forté Foundation, a consortium of 39 business schools and 29 corporate sponsors working to encourage more women to pursue leadership roles in business.
Many women who are planning families find that a one-year program they can enter right out of college allows for an easier work-life balance, said Ms. Ellis-Sangster, former director of M.B.A. programs at the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business.
The fact that women in China far outnumber men in pursuing graduate business degrees could be in part “a legacy of communism,” said Michelle Sparkman Renz, director of research communications for the graduate admissions council. “There isn’t as much a perception of a glass ceiling that women in other countries may grapple with.”
William Boulding, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, said much of the demand for one-year programs was coming from the surge in students graduating from Chinese colleges. “From the perspective of employers, they aren’t ready to enter the business world,” he said.
Applications to Fuqua’s three-year-old Foundations of Business program have doubled each year. The one-year program is geared toward recent college graduates with little or no professional work experience. Out of this year’s class of 112 students, 54 were women, half of them from Asia. When the program began, in 2010, just 32 of the 96 students admitted were women, six of them from Asia.
