Mommy's MBA

On some B-school campuses, women's groups are offering support for women juggling the roles of mom and MBA student

By Alison Damast

Katherine Bose, 31, a 2006 Stanford MBA, with her one-year-old son

Columbia EMBA student Gillian Core, 30, with son, Jordan, in a 2004 photo

Michelle Fertig, 28, a 2006 Columbia grad, and her daughter, Ellis Pearl

Terri Wedge, 42, a MBA student at the University of Denver, shown with her four-month-old grandson, Sebastian

Rebecca Williams, 31, a Columbia Business School student who will graduate on Mother’s Day, with her son, Xander

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When Rebecca Williams got into Columbia Business School two years ago, she was faced with a decision that wasn't even on the radar of most of her soon-to-be classmates.

Williams, who lived in Texas at the time, had to decide whether to take her 3-year-old son with her to New York while she pursued a full-time MBA. "I didn't know of any other moms doing business school, so I chose to leave my son with my mom," said Williams, 31, who will be graduating May 13 from Columbia—coincidentally on Mother's Day—with her son, Xander, now age 5, in tow. "I wish I knew then what I know now because I would have made a completely different decision," she says.

It was a lack of information on how to handle the challenges of motherhood while in B-school that led Williams and two of her classmates, also moms, to form a campus group, Mothers in Business, devoted exclusively to exploring those issues (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/1/06, "The Return of the MBA Mom").

By forming the organization, the three students brought a once nearly invisible population on campus to the attention of fellow students, administrators, and alumni. "You wouldn't look at a fellow classmate and know they're a mom because they look like everybody else in the classroom," Williams said. "You wouldn't know they have a really different set of needs than your average student."

Critical Issue for Admissions

The club is one of a handful of groups and programs at business schools across the country that are trying to address the questions and concerns of women students who are moms, are pregnant, or are considering becoming mothers in the near future. Whether it's a lactation room on campus for breast pumping or a club where mothers can meet to hash out parenting concerns, there is a growing demand for these types of offerings on business campuses, several student-life administrators interviewed for this story said.

The issue of MBA moms is a critical one if business schools are going to reach their oft-stated goal of increasing the number of women earning MBAs. Female enrollment at business schools still hovers around 30%, according to a 2006 report by the Forte Foundation, a consortium of schools working to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs. About 35% of full-time graduate business programs and 22% of part-time programs reported special outreach efforts to attract female applicants in 2005, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).

And if women remain a minority in business schools, the trend is even more pronounced for mothers. Even if a female student doesn't have children, the issue weighs heavily because female MBAs are often at the stage of their lives when they are deciding whether to start a family. Statistics on mothers in business schools are hard to find because parenthood is not a question typically posed to incoming students in surveys or tracked by schools, said Rachel Edgington, director of research at GMAC.

Sitting Out Happy Hour

Indeed, women put off or avoid enrolling in MBA programs because they fear that business school will make them delay marriage, delay having a child, or otherwise interfere with personal plans, according to a GMAC study on prospective women students. Still, some women, like Katherine Bose, 31, a 2006 graduate of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, saw B-school as an ideal time to start a family. She became pregnant at the start of her first year of business school in 2004 and had her son, who is now 2, six days after her last final of her first year.