A Pay Gap for Female MBAs Has Reemerged

Ten years ago, the wage gap between men and women graduating from top MBA programs appeared to have been nearly erased. That suggested that women would launch their careers on an equal footing with men and then experience a gender-blind sprint up the corporate ranks. A decade later, a far more sober picture is emerging: The pay gap among graduates of elite business schools is widening, according to new research from Bloomberg Businessweek’s biennial survey of MBA graduates. On average, female grads from top MBA programs now earn 93¢ for every dollar paid their male classmates. At about a third of the top 30 U.S. business schools, women earn less than men—sometimes far less. Female MBA graduates from the class of 2012 at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, earned 86 percent of male wages, while those at Stanford Graduate School of Business earned 79 percent.

That’s a dramatic turnabout. In 2002, women at the top 30 MBA programs earned 98 percent of what males earned. That fell to 94.1 percent in 2004 and never really rebounded. In 2012 the figure was 93.2 percent. “The gap numbers at the beginning are not very large and can be mostly accounted for by differences in grades, course selection, and the fields people are starting in,” says Marianne Bertrand, an economics professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, citing results of studies on compensation among female MBA graduates from her school. “What is much more striking is how much that gap grows over time.”