White House senior advisors met with business school deans in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, April 16, 2014.
As part of the lead up to the White House Summit on Working Families, the Obama administration sought advice from leading business schools to discuss best practices for business schools for boosting women in the labor force.
One study of MBA graduatesfrom a leading institution found that women earned $115K on average when they graduate and $250K after nine years while men earn $130K when they graduate and $400K after nine years.
CEA analysis has shown that a similar trend holds for all men and women with a professional degree—the pay gap grows over time and earnings are more than 50 percent higher for men when professionals are in their late 30s.
One important reason for this disparity is the lack of flexibility in the workplace. Surveys of MBA graduates demonstrate that women are penalized due to career interruptions, often from motherhood.
Even if women are working, they often must accept positions that offer significantly lower pay or growth opportunities in order to have flexible work schedules to balance responsibilities outside of the workplace.
Business schools can take important steps to prepare the next generation of business leaders to focus on these issues. In order to ensure business practices that fully utilize a 21st century workforce, it is important for business school deans to update their curriculum and practices to fully reflect the importance of women and working families in our labor market.
The business school deans who contributed to today’s valuable discussion:
• Maryam Alavi, Emory University (Goizueta)
• Sally Blount, Northwestern University (Kellogg)
• William Boulding, Duke University (Fuqua)
• Robert F. Bruner, University of Virginia (Darden)
• Robert M. Dammon, Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
• Alison Davis-Blake, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ross)
• Soumitra Dutta, Cornell University (Johnson)
• Thomas W. Gilligan, University of Texas, Austin (McCombs)
• Peter Blair Henry, New York University (Stern)
• Richard K. Lyons, University of California, Berkeley (Haas)
• Nitin Nohria, Harvard Business School
• Judy D. Olian, University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson)
• Douglas A. Shackelford, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
• Edward A. Snyder, Yale University
For more details on the Working Families Summit: visit http://workingfamiliessummit.org/.
The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business earlier this month announced its strategic Asia Initiative at Darden, part of the school’s continuing investment in globalization.
