Master degree in accounting

Women make up nearly half the recipients of undergraduate business degrees at U.S. colleges and universities, but lose considerable ground when it comes to master of business programs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The reasons aren't mysterious: Women are more likely than men to trade the career path for raising a family. Also, it seems to be harder for women, once they've left school and started a family, to return for a master's degree--this from female MBAs themselves.

Robert Sumichrast, LSU's business dean, says he would like greater diversity in his college. That includes adding more women MBAs, though a 50/50 ratio or anything close is unlikely anytime soon. Still, compared to the rest of the country, LSU looks pretty good.

This spring's master of business administration degree graduate pool was 36 percent female--43 women out of 121 total MBAs. LSU has averaged 34.8 percent over the last 20 years, peaking at 42 percent in 1988 and 2002. By contrast, women represented only 29 percent of the enrollment at the country's top 20 business schools in 2004, according to U.S. News & World Report.

In undergraduate business degrees, women dominated for the first time this year. LSU's graduating class this spring contained 230 women earning business bachelor's degrees out of 444 total business undergraduates. LSU's average for female business undergrads since 1984 is 46.6 percent.

Sumichrast calls it "a timing issue" in that women are more likely to enter an MBA program right after graduation and less so after spending time out of school. One reason LSU has a relatively high percentage of female MBA students is that the program takes younger applicants than many business schools.

"It's not something that we aspire to, but it's something that we do," Sumichrast says.

The older the MBA student, the less likely that student will be female.

"We are able to attract women into business careers. It's just that after that first degree--not just at LSU but across the country--business programs have a difficult time getting females to come back and complete another degree."

Allison Dill agrees. The LSU MBA graduate and controller for Antares Technology Solutions says she knows few women who earned their master's after a hiatus from school. Most of Dill's female MBA acquaintances went into the program fresh from their undergraduate degrees, she says. Dill says lots of women choose marriage and raising a brood over taking their business educations to the next level--especially in the South.

"A lot of people I was in school with at LSU, who were from Louisiana, most of the young ladies were very interested in graduating and getting married and starting a family. If there was an emphasis on graduate level work, it was to go to some type of law school or medical school as soon as they graduated."

Dill took another route. She's married, but has no kids, a factor she cites in her MBA success. Dill says that for a mother to study until midnight or 1 a.m. three or four nights a week instead of taking care of the children ... well, that would be rough.

Working for Bank One after earning a bachelor's degree in finance from LSU in 1997, Dill was fully aware she would eventually return to school. She heard about LSU's executive MBA program and in 2000 began studying there. Dill says that even without kids, committing to two years of a full-time job and a full-time class schedule was a major decision. Today she's happy with her choices and has no plans to veer off the career path into motherhood anytime soon.

"I feel like I want to stay in the work force for a pretty long time because I know how much hard work it was to go through the MBA program. Time and money and effort, all the way around. I just don't want to throw it away."

Abby McCurry is director of internal auditing for American Gateway Bank, though she worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers right after earning her MBA at LSU in 2001. Like Dill, she had no children while working on a her master's degree. Unlike Dill, McCurry went into the program right after graduation. She'd considered a master's degree in accounting, her undergraduate major, but McCurry decided an MBA afforded more flexibility. She also decided she better get one right away instead of waiting, knowing how life throws curveballs.

"I felt that if I didn't go right out, that I may not go back, just because of life's circumstances. You never know what's going to happen."

Today McCurry has a child, not quite 11 months old. Even with the MBA out of the way, she concedes, balancing family and career has the potential of being difficult. Even so, McCurry says she's found a good balance with her employer that lets her tend to family and career. If she didn't have that balance, she says, she wouldn't work there.

McCurry says one reason she left PriceWaterhouseCoopers is that she would have been on the road all the time and that, ultimately, her family is the most important thing. Meanwhile, having a career helps her grow individually as well as professionally, she says.

Is the business world a hospitable place for women to succeed?

"I think it depends on where you are," McCurry says. "Our senior management has been very open to that. If this was an organization that I didn't feel I could advance in, I wouldn't be working here. Do I think that there are still obstacles? Yes. It has improved, but I definitely think there is still a ways to go there."

David Shields, LSU's MBA program director and chair, says the number of women taking business classes nationwide began to grow substantially in the late '70s, then leveled off. Shields admits LSU's percentage of women MBA students is relatively high "because we tend to take inexperienced students."

Still, he doesn't feel there's anything particularly amiss about the low percentage of women MBAs overall. In a population in which gender is essentially evenly split, he says, many women exercise options besides a business career.

"If you're talking about 40 percent of women in their late 20s wanting to be married and have children and stay home for a while, they're unlikely to go to the trouble of getting an MBA. It's not impossible, but they're much less likely to make that sacrifice. I think it's basically a statistical thing. Insisting on having a proportion that somehow mirrors the environment misses the whole point of why it naturally occurs this way."

STEVE CLARK covers health care, higher education, environment and transportation. Reach him at sclark@businessreport.com.