The article below is one that I thought would be of interest to my female readers. In it, the author explores the career paths of women who choose to pursue an MBA degree. Among the items covered in the article are the rise in the number of women earning the degree and the large difference in the types of jobs that female MBAs and their male counterparts want. It is the latter point that leads to some of the differences in median compensation that are mentioned.

I have several friends who attended top business schools and, instead of pushing hard to climb the corporate ladder, chose to work for a few years and become stay-at-home moms. According to this article, this is a not-too-unique choice for female MBAs, which was a bit of a surprise to me. This idea is something that is a central point of the “Work and Family” course at Stanford GSB and it’s an area that I wish more business schools would explore. I think male MBAs tend to underestimate the impact of the tradeoff between pursuing MBAs and career goals and the desire to have a family. Perhaps, some of the inequities between compensation and career trajectory along a given career path noted in the article would change if more of us male MBAs would open our eyes to issues like this…

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Title: What Women Do With Their M.B.A.s
Author: Jenna Goudreau
Source: Forbes.com

Excerpt text from the article:

More women are heading to business school than ever before. According to a report released last year by the U.S. Department of Education, women received 44% of all M.B.A.s in 2007, a 75% increase from a decade earlier.

That’s thousands of women pouring into the market every year with newly minted business degrees. Many are making traditional career choices–going into finance and consulting–and many more are using their degrees to chart their own course.

“Women want to get to the c-level,” says Tonya Olpin, executive director of the National Association of Women M.B.A.s (NAWMBA). “Going for the M.B.A. is how they make it happen. It opens up a lot of opportunities.”