Is a Woman’s MBA Worth Less?

Turns out the answer is “yes, apparently it is.” In fact, a study published last year in the Harvard Business Review showed that on average, women MBA’s made $4,600 less per year than male MBA’s.

So what’s up with that? In their HBR article “Women in Management: Delusions of Progress,” authors Nancy Carter and Christine Silva found that, although as a society we’ve come a long way, many of the gender biases are still alive and well in the workplace. The biases may not be as obvious and overt, but they’re apparently still there. It’s hard to look at an average $4,600 difference in pay and come to any other conclusion.

Looking at the data, Carter and Silva discovered that when women started their careers, they tended to start at lower levels than an equally qualified man did. They also tended to stay in positions of lower responsibility and lower pay longer than men did.

All of the data in the study was “normalized” so that the researchers were looking at people with equal resumes: equal qualifications, equal experience, and so on. The only difference was gender. The conclusion was that women tend to start out behind men in pay and that this gap widens as their career unfolds.

Although the article went a long ways towards documenting the problem, it didn’t really offer much in the way of solutions – other than the standard researcher’s reply of, “more research is needed.” Maybe just being conscious of the problem will help avoid it.

What do you think?

Hiram
MBA, University of Houston 1989

One Comment for “Is a Woman’s MBA Worth Less?”

Hiram says:
January 24, 2012 at 8:22 pm

With all the people that have read this post, I can’t believe that there are no comments. Doesn’t this bother anyone? I mean Geez, this is 2012. Haven’t we moved a little bit past gender bias?

However, there’s a school of thought that argues that being the “fairer sex,” women are less likely to “stand up for themselves” and therefore, bring the situation mentioned in the post upon themselves. I think this is “blaming the victim.” What do YOU think?

Hiram