Women Take Their Place on MBA Teams

How do women experience and influence classroom and team dynamics in MBA programs? … Laurence Villion, an MBA student at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management, says MBA programs tend to attract very strong, determined and driven individuals. "This program is extremely demanding," she says. "Once you start doing it, you need to have the drive so there's really less of a difference than there might be in other environments because most of the women are very strong."

On average, MBA classrooms across the country are made up of about two-thirds men to one-third women, which can mean women often find themselves the only female in their MBA team. Yet female students hold their own, says Susan Christoffersen, an associate professor at McGill University and Leibovitch Faculty Scholar in Finance.

Ezequiel Salazar Virginillo, an MBA student in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, agrees. "If there's a woman there, the men try to be more polite, so it's not so much what she brings to the table but how the dynamics change," he says.

National Post

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2741451