The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 12th, 2014
Women are underrepresented among business leaders. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Ross School of Business wants to change that. And it’s starting at home.
In recent years, the school has worked to increase the shares of its faculty members and doctoral students who are women. That’s one way the school can help address a larger social problem, says Alison Davis-Blake, its dean. Besides, she says, it’s hard to draw a diverse student body—an institutional goal—to study with a homogenous faculty.
The effort has had some success. Women are better represented among both professors and doctoral students than they were in 2010, the year before Ms. Davis-Blake arrived. Thirty-one percent of faculty members are now women, for instance, up from 26 percent in 2010.
Percentages don’t tell the whole story, Ms. Davis-Blake says. For one thing, the numbers in question are relatively small: Ross has only about 120 faculty members and 90 to 100 doctoral students. Part of the effort is hiring and retaining women in fields where they are especially underrepresented, like finance and accounting. And the climate women face, as well as their number, matters. Still, the numbers do show that the school has in fact hired more women.