Women Shattering B-Schools' Glass Ceiling

Once almost solely the province of men, the offices of business school dean are increasingly held by women

By Alison Damast

Watch the Video…

• View Slide Show

Patricia Flynn went from being a bookish economics professor to an overnight sensation when she was named dean of Bentley University's Graduate School of Business in the early 1990s. As the sixth woman to take up a business school deanship in the U.S., she found herself in the center of a media maelstrom. The spotlight was so intense that even her son took notice, proudly inviting his mother to his kindergarten classroom for show-and-tell day.

"I couldn't believe how much publicity and attention there was," said Flynn, who stepped down from the deanship in 2002 and now serves as the school's trustee professor of economics and management. "It was sort of mind-blowing."

Today, female business school deans are unlikely to receive such celebrity status. One reason? There are more of them than ever before, according to new data from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), one of the leading business school accreditation agencies. Of the 668 deans at AACSB-member schools in the U.S., nearly 17% are women. Meanwhile, women deans at the 460 AACSB-accredited schools in the U.S. now make up 15.5% of the dean pool, a 35% increase from the start of the decade, according to AACSB. (See our slide show featuring female deans of top U.S. business schools.)

Permanent Trend

"You're seeing more and more women who take on the role of associate dean or interim dean and say: 'Not only can I do this, but I kind of like it,'" says AACSB President John Fernandes. "This is a permanent upward trend."

Driving the change is a renewed effort by search committees, administrators, and B-school associations to encourage women to take on these roles. One of the more active groups, AACSB's Women Administrators in Management Education, has 225 members and provides women with mentoring programs, and specialized outreach. Meanwhile, there has been a surge in the number of women getting PhDs in business, with female faculty members at business schools making up 27.6% of the faculty pool in the 2008-09 academic year, up from 21% a decade ago.

As a result, some are predicting that business schools will become places more sensitive to the scheduling and work family issues faced by women deans, many of whom are working mothers. There is also hope that the demographic shift will have a trickle-down effect on the entire business school community, leading to more women attending MBA programs and more women faculty taking on administrative posts. Even recruiters and corporate boards are likely to take notice, as women deans start playing more of a role in networking with the larger business community.

"People can look at these schools and say: 'Wow, in this particular institution, women can rise through the faculty, do research, publish, and eventually become dean," says Bentley's Flynn. "It's a message about the culture of the whole institution."

Promoted from Within

Meanwhile, a separate survey, "Characteristics and Career Paths of Male and Female Business School Deans," offers some insight into why the landscape is changing. It is one of the first published surveys that compares the different career paths of B-school deans by gender, say co-authors Flynn and Susan McTiernan, a visiting associate professor of management at the University of New Haven. There were 350 deans who responded to the survey, 18% of whom were female.

The career paths of women deans tend to differ sharply from those of their male counterparts, the study shows. More women were likely to take on the role of dean after having served as interim dean, and most rose into the position from within their respective schools, according to the study. For men, 20% served as deans at other schools prior to taking their current jobs, compared with only 16% of women.

Many of the women who rose to the deanship have held a variety of those roles prior to becoming dean.