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The Stay-At-Home MBA

Illustration by Michael Kirkham

By Alison Damast

The Stay-At-Home MBA

Women with MBAs are more likely to opt out of the workforce than women with M.D.s or law degrees, a study of Harvard degree-holders suggests. Professors Catherine Wolfram and Jane Leber Herr at the University of California at Berkeley followed the career paths of nearly 1,000 women who got such Harvard degrees from 1988 to 1991. Their finding: Some 28% of the MBA graduates were full-time mothers 15 years later, vs. 21% of the lawyers and 6% of the doctors. One likely reason for the disparity: Many of the doctors and lawyers said they could arrange flexible hours, while “the infrastructure is not there in the business world,” says Elissa Ellis-Sangster, executive director of the Forté Foundation, which encourages female MBA candidacies. (Female enrollment at 25 of the top full-time U.S. MBA programs hovers around 31%, according to the foundation.)

Women MBAs juggling children and career may also have weaker ties to their profession, partly because they have invested less money in their schooling than lawyers and doctors do. Finally, says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings law school in San Francisco, many women in business school “end up being stay-at-home wives” because they meet and marry ambitious men who want them to manage the family’s life full-time.