The gender police have discovered a new disparity between men and women and have now flooded the nation with slick materials sounding the alarm. Here’s the hot new issue: more men than women enroll in business school. The nation is expected to treat this as an emergency. On one level, however, the disparity hawks have it right.

Despite a nationwide recruitment campaign and a huge jump in the number of women pursing MBAs, business schools still have not achieved parity. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, although the differences narrowed between 1971 and the mid-1980s, by 1994 males were still twice as likely as females to earn a master’s degree in business management.

In recent years, women’s enrollment in MBA programs has plateaued at about 30 percent—a tremendous difference from 3 percent in 1970, but still not total parity with men. Now an ongoing study by Catalyst, an influential research organization cooperating with the University of Michigan, will study the gap and seek ways to attract more females. The study, underwritten by corporations, will include the former students’ recommendations for enhancing a business school education for women, and ideas for retaining high-potential women on the job.

Academic institutions—a primary target—have been more than receptive to the disparity panic being spread by the gender police. At Harvard Business School, enrollment of women is up to 30 percent, an increase from 26 percent in 1996. The school’s managing director of admissions recently told the Wall Street Journal that Harvard would be distributing a new brochure geared towards women, stressing the flexibility of the degree and the value of networking with fellow business school graduates.

Statistical disparities are the rule, not the exception in life. While broad recruitment and equal opportunity are good ideas, there may be perfectly mundane reasons to explain the disparities in business school enrollment. There is also reason to reject the notion that male and female enrollment must be the same.

Business school, though valuable, simply isn’t for everyone, male or female. For example, one young high-tech entrepreneur told the same Wall Street Journal reporter that after weighing the benefits, she decided to pass and continue in her chosen field. Silicon Valley, she explained, placed more value on innovation than "three little letters after my name."

While women choose business school less than men, women continue to earn a significant majority of master’s degrees. And so it seems rather patronizing to dispute the preferences of more than 150,000 women a year for a less lucrative but perhaps more stimulating field of study, as if they were unable to make independent choices.

The choices women are making about their education and careers bode well for their future performance in the job market. For many female executives around the country, they have already begun to pay big dividends. What is responsible for this success are the free personal choices of individual women, not glossy pamphlets or alarmist opinion surveys. And despite the disparity propaganda, there is no cause for alarm.

The doors remain open and the tools of access are available to any and all comers, male and female. The time has come to stop second-guessing women’s career choices and to accept and applaud them instead. Rather than spreading panic, the gender police would be better employed at celebrating the diversity of the economy women have helped to create.

— Katherine Post

PRI Senior Fellow,

Women's Studies