In honor of International Women's Day (Mar. 8), I am posting this:
Nov. 17, 2018 "Female MBA enrolment edges up with concerted effort": Today I found this article by Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail:
Nov. 17, 2018 "Female MBA enrolment edges up with concerted effort": Today I found this article by Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail:
Women are a growing presence at top MBA programs globally, aided by scholarships, mentoring and other support, although most business schools remain well short of gender parity, according to a new survey released this week.
Female enrolment in full-time MBA programs rose to 37.8 per cent this year (up fractionally from 2017) among the business school members of the Forté Foundation, a Texas-based non-profit organization that works with industry, education institutions and others to encourage women to pursue leadership positions in business.
In a survey of its 52 business school members – mostly in the United States but also from Canada and Europe – 19 schools reported they had cracked the all-important marker of 40-per-cent female enrolment, up from only three schools in 2014.
“The good news is that we are seeing more schools above 40 per cent, more schools above 35 per cent, and fewer schools below 30 per cent,” says Elissa Sangster, chief executive officer of Forté, which has been tracking gender trends at business schools for 15 years.
The University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business led the field this year with women representing 52 per cent of its MBA program.
Ms. Sangster credits the gradual progress globally to a collective effort by recruiters, faculty, alumni and others to send a welcoming message to qualified candidates.
“We have moved to a phase where it almost takes a village to recruit a good class that has gender balance,” she says, adding: "It takes an all hands on deck approach to coming up with unique ways to engage all of those constituent groups [faculty, recruitment, alumni] with the admissions process.”
Member schools in her organization are required to provide substantial scholarships – at least two recipients qualify for US$20,000 in each year of a two-year program – while Forté provides intensive coaching and networking sessions for prospective MBA candidates, and also promotes on-campus “men as allies” MBA chapters.
This year, York University’s Schulich School of Business was the only one of four Forté schools from Canada to surpass the 40-per-cent mark, though other Canadian Forté members are only a few percentage points lower. Female participation in Schulich’s full-time MBA program is 42 per cent this year, up from 40 per cent last year, according to the school.
“We are seeing consistent growth,” says Melissa Judd, assistant dean of students at Schulich. She cites several factors, including stepped-up social media and other marketing, in-person recruitment at global MBA fairs, and reliance on alumni networks to reach top male and female candidates.
This year, the school also tripled (to 27) the number of Forté fellows who receive financial aid and, with it, access to the foundation’s coaching and networking events in Canada and the United States.
“We were really intentional as we were awarding scholarships and bursaries to look at our strong female candidates and how we could leverage our Forté partnership to support them,” says Ms. Judd.
Scholarships are a key recruitment tool to reach top female candidates, says Ms. Sangster. “Financial burden, or concerns about that, is one of the top issues for women pursuing an MBA,” she says.
She cites scholarships and bursaries for undergraduate women as one strategy to “build a pipeline” of future candidates for graduate programs.
Last month, for example, Fidelity Investments Canada announced $40,000 over five years for top female finance students at the University of Guelph’s College of Business and Economics, part of an overall donation of $215,000 to support “gender equity and active learning.”
The scholarships – four were handed out this year – are aimed at top female candidates entering the college’s economics and finance program as well as those enrolled in specific finance-related courses. The female-focused awards are a first for the university and Fidelity, a major investment-management firm in Canada.
For Fidelity, the new scholarships (along with $100,000 for a finance-focused student investment club) are a tool for early talent spotting.
“From a career perspective, when women are in business they gravitate toward accounting because they see other women in accounting,” says Diana Godfrey, senior vice-president of human resources for Fidelity. “What we want to do is increase our profile in these [undergraduate business] programs to say [to students], ‘You have other options.’”
She says her company will evaluate the impact of the female-eligible scholarships in attracting top candidates into finance-oriented programs and, ultimately, into the financial services sector.
Guelph business school dean Julia Christensen Hughes says the new scholarships “break new ground” in addressing the low proportion of female students in some finance programs. For example, women account for 148 students in the college’s economics/finance major, compared to 573 men.
Her college’s relationship with Fidelity, adds Ms. Christensen Hughes, is “a fabulous example of corporate-university collaboration.”
Forte’s Ms. Sangster also gives high marks to the Fidelity scholarships. “It’s a brilliant way to tackle this [under-representation] problem,” she says.
Forté has set a target for its business school members to hit the 40-per-cent mark for female MBA enrollment by 2020, but Ms. Sangster has no firm date for business schools to enroll men and women in equal numbers.
For all Forté members to hit the 40-per-cent target in two years would mark a big breakthrough, she says.
“I feel 40 per cent gets you to a place where your community on campus has the culture, diversity and inclusiveness [traits],” she says. “A lot of the bells are ringing even if every one [of them] is not 100 per cent.”
It's equal opportunity - nobody is stopped from going after a MBA - so why is this article wasting ink?
MBA's are already starting to lose their cache......but good luck
Now we need a program to bring up male medical school enrolment to exactly 50 percent as they are presently well below that!
"although most business schools remain well short of gender parity, according to a new survey released this week."
I don't expect an answer, because this isn't about gender equality. If it were, where is the push to achieve gender parity in ditch digging or jack hammering?
Are nursing schools/faculties near gender parity? How about education?
Why is gender parity a big concern when it comes to underrepresented females and not males?
Rhetorical Question? it is well known the G&M has a feminist agenda which you can see in the many, many articles on this site in some cases the articles seem like it is toxic feminism and comes off as male hate speech to me
That’s easy to explain. Woman want to be equally represented in jobs they like not any old job.They complain they are under represented in high income positions but couldn’t care less about lower income positions.
My opinion: There are a lot of G&M articles about women in the workplace. I have some saved into my drafts and haven't published yet. I don't find any of those articles bad.
"High- pressure 'hackathons' reveal students potential to employers": Today I found this article by Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail:
Best Buy Canada is not alone in the race to harness the potential of online shopping in a fast-moving digital age.
To get there, the consumer electronics retailer is on the hunt for a scarce asset – new hires who have the technical expertise to manage data, the business smarts to expand digital opportunities to reach customers, and, not least, the communication skills to share insights with senior management.
“It sounds simple or obvious, but it is rare,” says Matt St. John, director of digital intelligence at Best Buy Canada’s Burnaby headquarters, adding that the “trilogy” of technical knowledge, business acumen and communication skills “is the No. 1 thing I am looking for.”
Two years ago, Mr. St. John was invited to serve as a judge at a business analytics “hackathon” – a day-long competition at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business for teams of students to examine a business problem using data supplied by the organizers and, within hours, present their solutions to a panel of industry judges.
Throughout the event, the judges get a close look at how students work together on a team, analyze data to define the business problem and draw up pithy slide presentations for each round of the competition.
“It is an unbelievable way to spot talent,” Mr. St. John says of the hackathon event.
To date, he says Best Buy has hired four new employees directly from Beedie’s hackathon in the past two years and recently signed on as the sponsor for this year’s competition, being held this weekend at Beedie. Best Buy and several other companies are also sponsors of BizHacks, a 24-hour competition (the next one is in February) at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business for teams of students to solve various real-world business problems using technology and other tools.
At Best Buy, Mr. St. John says his team of 11 employees (with current openings for eight additional staff) work at the intersection of analytics and e-commerce, looking to drive online consumer traffic and raise the retailer’s profile on popular websites. He says he needs employees who, beyond their technical knowledge, are flexible, nimble, adaptable and able to identify creative solutions under tight deadlines.
All of those traits are on display at the hackathon, says Mr. St. John, a Beedie executive MBA graduate and one of several industry advisers to the school’s business analytics and decision-making certificate program. “It’s pretty cool to see people who have expertise in statistics, computer science and data engineering come together and come up with creative solutions.”
In 2016, then a Beedie undergraduate in the certificate program, Rhythm Tang was one of the hackathon competitors who caught the eye of Best Buy recruiters. “Rhythm was a great presenter and storyteller, smart, articulate and with her team you could tell they were on point and had a great presentation to deliver,” Mr. St. John says.
Ms. Tang, now a digital analyst in Best Buy’s digital intelligence team, was hired by the company several months after she graduated in 2017.
At Beedie, where she studied operations and management information systems, she signed up for the new analytics certificate because it taught students how to mine data and come up with solutions to business problems.
A veteran of case competitions, she saw the business analytics hackathon as a venue to polish her skills in sorting out data to solve a problem. By design, the event gave her direct contact with the data analytics community in Vancouver and potential employers, including Mr. St. John and his colleagues at Best Buy.
“It’s so great to see that the connections I made a year ago had an impact on me coming here [to Best Buy],” she says, describing strong similarities between the hackathon experience and her current job.
“I love it. I come in at 9 a.m. and the [Best Buy] site changes every day,” she says. “Different people buying different products; different people behave differently; sometimes our website breaks. Within five to six hours I need to come up with my recommendations and that is exactly how the hackathon is structured.”
Like Ms. Tang, UBC third-year commerce student Katie Na, a vice-president of Sauder’s BizHacks competition, is enthusiastic about a format that gives students and prospective employers (who serve as mentors and judges) a measure of each other in a high-pressure environment.
“They can really connect over the 24 hours [of the Sauder hackathon],” Ms. Na says. “They [mentors and judges] can actually see the way the students think and how they come up with innovative solutions. ... It’s a good opportunity for them [employers] to know more about the participants before they hire them [after graduation].”
To date Best Buy has hired one full-time employee and four interns from the Sauder BizHacks event.
Beedie marketing professor Bob Krider, acting director of his school’s business analytics and decision-making certificate, says students in the program take a variety of courses that includes a one-term “capstone” for students, in a consulting capacity, to work with a company on one of its real problems.
“The idea is to take business students and give them STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] skills that allow them to at least be a ‘bridge’ person in this space between business and data science,” he says. Feedback from employers, he adds “has been very positive.”
Prof. Krider says data analytics competitions have grown in popularity and now have “morphed into recruiting tools.”
As for Mr. St. John, he offers a tongue-in-cheek reservation about the recruitment potential of a hackathon. “I feel it is my secret place to spot top talent and now the cat is out of the bag.”
Great idea. Hackathons rock. But not sure how the students are supposed to eventually succumb to corporate bureaucracy and seniority when we pretend they're awesome. Life in a cubicle sucks, no one cares about your ideas as long as there is an entrenched culture and cost saving measures are in place.
Hackathons are free labour under sweatshop conditions. No thanks.
