Poets&Quants | Deans At The World's Top Business Schools Are Overwhelmingly Male, White & Old

From year to year, business schools continue to make progress — gradual but measurable — in achieving gender parity in the enrollment of women in MBA and other master’s programs; in the hiring of women faculty and adjunct faculty; and in women’s advancement in leadership positions. So it is for B-school deans as well, according to a new report by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

AACSB’s report, Leading Today’s Business Schools: Insights From Deans, released February 26, finds that women continue to make gains in rising to the top of the leadership ladder at the world’s business schools. From 2020-2021 to 2023-2024, AACSB reports, the percentage of women deans globally increased from 26% to 30%; since 2008, women deanships have increased by 43%, from 17% a decade-and-a-half ago to nearly 1 in 3 today.

A separate analysis by Poets&Quants of leading B-schools — those ranked in P&Q’s top 50 in the United States and The Financial Times’s top 100 outside of it — reveals that women deans are a small but significant population at elite institutions, as well — and that there are more women leaders at the top 50 U.S. schools than there are at 56 leading schools in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere outside the U.S.

‘YOU HAVE TO BE ASSERTIVE TO BE VISIBLE’

Deans At The World's Top Business Schools Are Overwhelmingly Male, White & Old

AACSB President and CEO Lily Bi: “I don’t think anyone is expecting 10% difference year over year, but the gradual change shows that society is giving more space and that women are probably being more assertive in their leadership”

AACSB is a business education network and global accreditor. Its 2023-2024 Insights From Deans report surveyed 434 deans and 36 interim deans across 64 countries; the report also includes responses from 143 senior business school administrators — vice deans, associate deans, department chairs, and others — spanning 23 countries.

In addition to finding that women have growing representation at the pinnacle of B-school leadership, the report describes an ongoing evolution in deanship diversity:

Among today’s women deans, 69% are in their first deanship, compared to 57% of their male counterparts;
21% of female deans have ascended to their positions from interim dean roles, compared to only 12% of male deans; and
Just 13% of female deans have advanced from the department head/chair role, whereas 25% of first-time male deans came from this role.

“If you just talk about the dimension of female versus male, that’s encouraging,” Lily Bi, president and CEO of AACSB, tells Poets&Quants. “I don’t think anyone is expecting 10% difference year over year, but the gradual change shows that society is giving more space and that women are probably being more assertive in their leadership. You have to be assertive to be visible, right? So that’s very encouraging.” She adds that the 30% of women as deans among the 470 respondents includes 28% in non-accredited B-schools and 32% in accredited B-schools — “so accredited schools have more female leadership than non-accredited schools.”

DEANS AT AACSB-ACCREDITED B-SCHOOLS 3 YEARS AGO VERSUS DEANS TODAY

Source: AACSB

40.3% OF B-SCHOOL TENURE-TRACK FACULTY ARE WOMEN — ‘BUT THAT’S WHERE THEIR PROGRESSION STALLS’

Progress for women at the highest echelons of business school leadership may be measurable, but it is not yet equal, and AACSB’s new report is only the latest illustration of this fact. The accreditor’s 2022-23 Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey, released in September 2023, showed that women make up 40.3% of tenure-track faculty, “but that’s where their progression stalls”: In addition to only 30% of deans being women, only about a quarter (25.7%) of full professors are women, as well. “This underrepresentation at the highest levels affects all aspects of the business school milieu: the diversity of our students, the dynamics of our MBA classrooms, the quality of advice we offer to organizations, and the signals we send to donors and other stakeholders,” the report’s authors write.

However much women have advanced in B-school leadership in the last 15 years, deanships still plainly skew male — and the journey of male deans is a significantly different one than those of their female counterparts. In AACSB’s latest survey, half of male deans ascended from either associate dean or department head/chair positions, and about one in four served as interim deans or vice deans. In contrast, 21% of women used the interim dean position as a launchpad — significantly more than the 12% of their male counterparts — and only 13% rose from department head/chair roles, “underscoring a distinct divergence from the male trajectory (25% of first-time male deans).”

B-school deans aren’t just mostly male — they are overwhelmingly white and older, too. However, this is shifting as well, albeit slowly. AACSB’s latest report shows that in addition to 70% of current deans being male, 65% are non-Hispanic white, down from 79% in 2018; and the average age is 57, down from 58 in 2021-2022.

DEANS AT P&Q’S TOP 50 U.S. B-SCHOOLS: 2024

Women deans are in bold.

P&Q 2024 MBA Rank	School	Dean
1	Stanford	Jonathan Levin
2	Harvard	Srikant Datar
3	Dartmouth Tuck	Matthew Slaughter
4	Columbia	Costis Maglaras
5	Yale SOM	Kerwin Charles
6	Duke Fuqua	Bill Boulding
7	Cornell Johnson	Vishal Gaur
8	Virginia Darden	Scott Beardsley
NR	Virginia McIntire**	Nicole Thorne Jenkins
9	Michigan Ross	Sharon Matusik
10	NYU Stern	Raghu Sundaram
11	Chicago Booth	Madhav Rajan
12	Northwestern Kellogg	Francesca Cornelli
13	UCLA Anderson	Antonio Bernardo
14	MIT Sloan	David Schmittlein
15	UC-Berkeley Haas	Ann Harrison
16	Carnegie Mellon Tepper	Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou
17	Washington Foster	Frank Hodge
18	Rice Jones	Peter Rodriguez
19	Texas-Austin McCombs	Lilian Mills
20	UNC Kenan-Flagler	Mary Margaret Frank
21	Vanderbilt Owen	Thomas Steenburgh
22	USC Marshall	Geoffrey Garrett
23	Emory Goizueta	Gareth James
24	Georgetown McDonough	Paul Almeida
25	Florida Hough	Saby Mitra
26	Rochester Simon	Sevin Yeltekin
27	Georgia Tech Scheller	Anuj Mehrotra
28	Washington Olin	Mike Mazzeo
29	Georgia Terry	Benjamin Ayers
30	Notre Dame Mendoza	Martijn Cremers
31	Wharton	Erika James
32	BYU Marriott	Brigitte Madrian
33	Texas-Dallas Jindal	Hasan Pirkul
34	William & Mary Mason	Todd Mooradian
35	Arizona State Carey	Ohad Kadan
36	Boston Carroll	Andrew Boynton
37	Indiana Kelley	Ash Soni
38	Michigan State Broad	Judith Whipple*
39	Maryland Smith	Prabhudev Konana
40	UC-Irvine Merage	Ian Williamson
41	Boston Questrom	Susan Fournier
42	George Washington	Vanessa Perry*
43	Texas A&M Mays	Nate Sharp
44	Minnesota Carlson	Jamie Prenkert
45	UC-Davis	H. Rao Unnava
46	SMU Cox	Matthew Myers
47	Northeastern D’Amore-McKim	Hugh Courtney
48	Babson Olin	Ken Matsuno
49	Rutgers	Lei Lei
50	Ohio State Fisher	Anil Makhija

*Interim
**NR for P&Q’s MBA ranking; ranked 4th in Poets&Quants For Undergrads’ 2024 ranking
Source: P&Q analysis

WOMEN ARE DEANS AT 13 OF P&Q’s TOP 50 U.S. B-SCHOOLS

An analysis of the deanships at the top 50 U.S. B-schools as ranked by P&Q (see table above) finds that 28% (14 of 50) are held by women; however, two of those are currently interim deans: Judith Whipple at Michigan State Broad College of Business and Vanessa Perry at George Washington School of Business. Subtracting the interim deanships drops the percentage to 24%. The top-ranked B-school with a woman dean is Michigan Ross School of Business, ranked No. 9 this year, which is led by Sharon Matusik.

Looking at European, Asian, Canadian and Australian B-schools ranked in the top 100 of The Financial Times’s most recent global MBA ranking (see table below), 21% (12 of 56) are women; however, two are retiring and being replaced by men: Wendy Loretto at the University of Edinburgh Business School in the UK and Sharon Hodgson at Western University Ivey Business School in Canada. There are also two interim deans on the list, including Nanyang Business School in Singapore, the highest-ranked international B-school with a woman dean: Wai Fong Boh. Without the retirements and interims, only 14% of international schools can currently boast women deans.

Lily Bi, who became AACSB’s president and CEO in June 2023, says rankings aside, the overall picture of accredited B-schools shows Europe actually ahead of North America in gender diversity for deans. She says AACSB’s research shows that of 42 European B-schools, 16 currently have women deans, or 38%; compare that to 66 women deans at 210 B-schools in the U.S. and Canada: 31%.

Bi credits the growing number of women in MBA and other master’s programs, as well as Ph.D.s, over the course of the last few decades for the gradual growth in women faculty, senior leadership positions, and deanships at business schools.

“I think that overall, if we look at the number of female students in MBA programs, you don’t see a sudden change in one or two years, you see gradual change in the number of females in higher ed over decades,” she says. “The female deans obviously come from that pool — so when you have more female students going into higher education, then the pool is getting bigger to select female leadership for business school deans.”

DEANS AT NON-U.S. B-SCHOOLS IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES’S TOP 100 GLOBAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Women deans are in bold.

Financial Times 2024 MBA Rank	School	Dean/Director/President
2	INSEAD	Francisco Veloso
3	SDA Bocconi	Francesco Billari
5	IESE	Franz Heukamp
8	London Business School	Sergei Guriev
12	HEC Paris	Eloic Peyrache
17	Esade	Joan Rodon
20	IE Business School	Lee Newman
21	CEIBS	Frank Bournois
24	Shanghai University of Finance & Economics	Sun Zheng
25	ESCP	Leon Laulusa
26	Oxford Said	Soumitra Dutta
27	National University of Singapore	Andrew Rose
27	Fudan	Lu Xiongwen
29	Cambridge Judge	Gishan Dissanaike
31	Indian School of Business	Madan Pillutla
32	Nanyang	Wai Fong Boh*
35	HKUST	Kar Yan Tam
36	IMD	Jean-François Manzoni
37	Peking Guanghua	Qiao Liu
39	Imperial	Peter Todd
41	IIM-Ahmedabad	Bharat Bhasker
45	HKU Business School	Hongbin Cai
46	Alliance Manchester	Ken McPhail
47	IIM-Bangalore	Rahul Dé
54	Essec	Vincenzo Vinzi
57	Edhec	Emmanuel Metais
57	EmLyon	Isabelle Huault
60	Warwick	Andy Lockett
61	Rotterdam	Werner Brouwer
62	Queen’s Smith	Wanda Costen
63	WHU-Beisheim	Christian Andres
63	Sydney	Leisa Sargent
65	St Gallen	Reinhard Jung
66	Trinity	Laurent Muzellec
67	IIM-Calcutta	Manish Thakur
68	Bayes	Andre Spicer
70	Toronto Rotman	Susan Christoffersen
72	Singapore Lee Kong Chian	Bert de Reyck
73	Mannheim	Joachim Lutz
74	Lisbon Catolica	Filipe Santos
75	CUHK Business School	Lin Zhou
77	Audencia	Christophe Germain
78	Durham	Cathy Cassell
79	AGSM at UNSW	Nick Wailes
80	Cranfield	David Oglethorpe
83	McGill Desautels	Yolande Chan
85	IIM-Lucknow	Neerja Pande
89	Sunkyunkwan	Eric Shih
90	Western Ivey	Sharon Hodgson**
91	Dublin Smurfit	Anthony Brabazon
92	Edinburgh	Wendy Loretto**
94	Eada	Jordi Diaz
95	Copenhagen	Inger Askehave*
NR	ESMT Berlin	Jorg Rocholl
NR	Frankfurt	Stefan Kadelbach
NR	Vlerick	Marian Debruyne

*Interim

**Retiring

Source: Financial Times 2024 Global MBA Ranking/P&Q analysis

‘DEANS STRUGGLE WITH WORK-LIFE BALANCE’

Other findings in AACSB’s new report:

“Deans prioritize a mix of interpersonal skills and tangible, market-relevant expertise in their roles. They express a desire to enhance their abilities in fundraising, communication, and strategic planning, with fundraising particularly emphasized by deans from Northern America. Respondents chose student recruitment and retention as a critical priority, whereas they ranked government and political engagement lower on their priority lists and areas for skill development, despite acknowledging it as an increasingly significant challenge.”
“Deans struggle with work-life balance and finding time for professional development. While only 8% of deans report having enough time to pursue professional development and juggle the diverse demands of their role, an impressive 83% still find their work rewarding and feel optimistic about their career progression. Despite public perception of educational leadership as a brutal job, the average tenure of business school deans has slightly decreased over the past three years.”
“Central to the experience of new deans is receiving mentorship and exchanging best practices with colleagues. Resources related to staff/faculty management and fundraising expertise are particularly sought after by first-time deans at the beginning of their tenure. In Latin America and the Caribbean, over half of dean respondents indicated a need to better understand what their role would entail, significantly higher than deans in other regions. For deans in Asia, meeting accreditation standards is highlighted as a critical area where additional support and preparation could greatly assist those new to the position.”
“Notably, a higher percentage of female deans (54%) emphasized strategic planning/thinking compared to male deans (48%). Also, fewer female deans than male deans highlighted faculty/people management as a top competency.”