Women deans in a tough guy's world

2000-10-01T20:00:00-04:00

Why are so few of the deans of the world’s leading business schools women? In fact there are just three of them: Laura Tyson at the Haas 91��Ƶ of Business at the University of California at Berkeley;Carolyn Woo, at the newly namedMendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; and Sandra Dawson, director of the Judge Institute of Management 91��Ƶ at Cambridge University in the UK.p. “Why? Because I think business school is still very much a man’s world,” saysProfessor Woo. “There’s a whole concept of fund-raising where you reach into a male network and where one of the primary audiences is CEOs and executive and senior vice-presidents. Those positions still tend to be dominated by men.”p. The Judge Institute’s Professor Dawson agrees: “The obvious point about women deans is that we are working in two worlds that are largely populated by men – the world of business and the world of business schools. I also think there are so few because it’s a supply-side problem. There just aren’t the young women coming through who are at the time in their careers when they could be deans.”p. One reason may be that MBA programmes, a traditional starting point to a career in business academia as well as a high-salary job in management, tend to have disproportionately few women. Most undergraduate programmes tend to be 50-50 men and women.Many business schools struggle to raise the percentage of women MBA students above 25 per cent or 30 per cent.p. “The current trend, certainly in the US, is for declining numbers of women students,” saysProfessor Woo. "This is for a number of good reasons. We now look for four years of experience from our students, which puts a lot of women at the age of 27 or 28 to start a program and then start a career. And that’s usually when they are making decisions about marriage and a family. The second reason is that now there are a lot more professions open to women. "p. Both women are concerned about the problems of generalising about the different management styles of male and female deans. But both say, while they are tough and dem-anding, they manage in a non-hierarchical, consultative way.p. “We tend to operate in an open manner between myself and our management team, department heads and programme directors,” says Professor Woo.p. The job of a business school dean has been called one of the toughest in the world. Lots of male deans would agree. But professors Woo and Dawson do not. “I think it is difficult, but there are pretty tough jobs generally in the world and being a dean is just one of them,” says Professor Dawson. “I wouldn’t say it was the toughest job in the world.”p. Both women believe that the numbers of women deans will increase, though Professor Dawson believes this will need encouragement: “I would certainly hope some of the young women I know who are beginning their academic careers in business schools will go through the system and become deans. I think it will come earlier in the US than it will in the UK because the proportion of women active in the business school world is higher there.”p. October 2, 2000

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Something out of the Ordinary

1999-03-03T19:00:00-05:00

An interview with Carolyn Woo, dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Notre Dame, on ambitious plans to get the university’s MBA programme towards the top of the rankings.
p. When the College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in the US appointed a new dean in 1997 it came up with an unusual choice: Carolyn Woo, a specialist in strategy, entrepreneurship and technology, born in Hong Kong.p. “I am very different to the Notre Dame profile,” says Prof. Woo. “I am not an alumnus; I’m not a man and I’m not a Caucasian.” But Notre Dame needed something out of the ordinary (and in fact it courted Prof. Woo assiduously during most of the 1990s).p. Although the college’s undergraduate and postgraduate accounting programmes are highly rated, its MBA programme languishes in the lower reaches of business school rankings. The aim is to get the programme within the top 25 within five years.p. “Notre Dame’s MBA programme is about 30 years old but up to now has not had a culture of strongly promoting and marketing itself,” says Prof. Woo. “It’s a sort of a gracious mentality that education is not for promotion. But the market place has changed in the past 10 years. Until about two years ago we didn’t have a formal placement office for the MBA, again stemming from the notion that education is to prepare your mind, not to prepare for a job.”p. Prof. Woo has adopted a five-point plan to achieve her goal, starting with improving the marketing of the programme and, crucially, increasing the size of the programme and the quality of students admitted.p. The 1998 incoming class has about 120 students in the main two-year programme (up from 90 in 1997) and there are plans to expand it to 130 in two sections.p. The college has a significant war chest in the form of fellowships (scholarships at the postgraduate level) to attract the brightest and the best. Last year it handed out about $1.4m fellowship money.p. Currently about 30 per cent of MBA students are international, mainly from Asia, Latin America and Europe. “We try to keep it about that level, though we could go higher if we wanted,” says Prof. Woo. “But about 15 per cent are also minorities, so 45 per cent of our students are non-US mainstream.” Prof. Woo is also boosting the curriculum, particularly the provision of new elective courses in areas such as entrepreneurship, organisational consulting, accounting and finance.p. “The third area,” says Prof. Woo, "is placement. We are building a new placement centre to be ready by this summer. What we are trying to improve is the number of offers per student and the salaries per students.p. “The next is our day-to-day operations. We’re really tightening that process to make sure we render excellent services and we do it in a way that is efficient. So there is a lot of process re-engineering that has to be done.”p. The fifth area is culture. Like the university, the college has a strong sense of the Catholic religion and a commitment to the teaching and practice of business ethics. Prof. Woo, herself a Catholic, comments: “One reason I came to Notre Dame was because I wanted to be a part of an ”caps">MBA programme that had a very strong sense of values and a strong sense of stewardship in addition to being very rigorous.p. “I am concerned that we are training young people and preparing them to succeed beyond their wildest imagining. It is not unusual that three years or even one year after graduation students start making $100,000 – $150,000, carrying wonderful titles and wonderful responsibilities. But I don’t want to prepare people who are casual and dismissive about decision making. I don’t want them to be arrogant.”p. The teaching of ethics is a tradition at Notre Dame. There are four professors whose main area of research and teaching is ethics and about 15 others who do secondary work in this area. “but,” says Prof. Woo, “it’s about more than ethics, or ethics as a course. It’s more a sense of who we are, what are our values, and what are the roots from which we go into the world to do this work. There’s nothing wrong with an MBA or a business career or business success but it’s about whether you can handle the seductions that come with it.”

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Women deans in a tough guy's world

Something out of the Ordinary