Redressing the gender imbalance among students is high on the agenda for many business schools. While most struggle, others have seen an opportunity in the potential appeal to women of online MBAs and have focused on recruiting female students.
There are signs that these efforts are paying off. In some cases online MBAs attract a significantly higher proportion of women than full-time or executive programmes.
At Warwick Business School in the UK, for example, women make up 24 per cent of students on the full-time course and 22 per cent on the executive MBA, but account for 32 per cent on the Distance Learning MBA. At Babson College in Massachusetts, US, women make up 40 per cent of the intake on the Blended Learning MBA — a programme that is mostly online with face-to face elements — for the 2015-16 academic year. That compares with 34 per cent for the school’s two-year full-time MBA.