Chinese women make MBAs their business

An MBA course used to be an exclusive men's club, a passport to proceed to the highest echelons of the male-dominated executive world. But now the Chinese MBA students flocking to the United States to add this qualification to their curriculum vitae are dominated by aspiring female business leaders, according to figures released this week.

Statistics from the American Universities Admission Programme (AUAP), a non-profit making organisation which assists international students entering US universities, shows that of the 3,985 Hong Kong candidates who sat the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) last year for business school places, 1,493, or 60 per cent, were women.

Similar trends have been recorded for other Chinese communities. In the mainland, 54 per cent of 6,290 candidates were women and 58 per cent of 2,712 Taiwanese candidates were female. 'It is stunning to see that women represent more than 50 per cent of Chinese MBA students,' said Dr John Noel Prade, chairman of AUAP. 'This is absolutely not the case in European Union countries, ' he said.

The dominance of Chinese women MBA candidates contrasts markedly with other communities. Among all non-US candidates, 35 per cent were women, while only 22 per cent of British MBA candidates and 23 per cent of German candidates were female. For US MBA students, 41 per cent were women.

'The womanisation of the MBA student population is mostly notable for people of Chinese ethnicity, as the other big Asian countries have similar numbers to the European ones,' said Dr Prade. Only 19 per cent of South Korean candidates and 23 per cent of Indian candidates were women.

In other countries with large Chinese minorities, the number of women were on the rise among those applying to business schools, for example, to just under 40 per cent of all Indonesian candidates.

'I think these figures reflect a Chinese tradition to have women fully involved in business operations,' said Dr Prade.

The figures quoted are for all who take the GMAT test required by American business schools and some non-American schools using the test. But Dr Prade believes they do reflect admissions.

The figures suggest today's Chinese women have ambitions at least equal to men to excel in business. But they also indicate that women might feel they need the added security that the qualification provides to get ahead.

Esther Ma Tin-wai, chief executive officer of public relations consultancy Pretique Ltd and a consultant for her MBA alma mater, Columbia University, said: 'Women nowadays are very career orientated. They want to excel and do better than men.'

Compared with women in the Western world, easy access to child-care meant that even if they got married, they could look forward to uninterrupted careers that matched male colleagues, she said.

But she also believes that for the woman who wants to make it to the top in what is still a male-dominated business environment, the extra credentials that an MBA degree provides are all the more important.

This is confirmed by Alice van Kapel, sales and marketing manager of Asia Pacific Management Institute.

'A lot of women tell me they need an MBA because of the glass ceiling factor. They think they are not as recognised as their male counterparts and hence feel the need to upgrade themselves.'

Women dominate among some distance learning courses offered in Hong Kong. Ms van Kapel said: 'When we started in 1991, we had only about 30 per cent of women students. Now it is almost equal, and in some courses there are more women, as many as 60 per cent.'

Women, she said, tended to opt for general business rather than specialist courses, and also dominated in the shorter American courses.

Ada Ni Ka-po, manager of the Hartford Institute, estimates that about two-thirds of students enrolled in its University of Leicester MBA programmes are women.

Women also outnumber men in leading undergraduate business programmes in Hong Kong, accounting for 67 per cent of the current academic year's intake of students to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's School of Business and Management, for example. At Chinese University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Business Administration, 1,158 of current undergraduate students are women, compared with just 535 men.

'Consistently we get more female students than males, maybe because girls' scores are higher in A-levels,' said May Hung Fan-fong, director of HKUST business school's communications and public affairs department.

Among full-time MBA students admitted to the school in 1999, 69 per cent were women, though the level fell to 45 per cent last year.

'We take the best people,' said Steve DeKrey, the school's MBA programme director. 'Hong Kong is a very open community and we don't get hung up on male-female differences.'

An MBA degree may have lost its exclusive cachet among employers, but the qualification is still regarded as extremely valuable by female students. 'It is really enriching,' said Ms Ma. 'It offers the best mix of an academic and networking experience.'

Graphic: MBAGAN