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Oxford Saïd welcomes its largest percentage of female MBA students ever

Published

48% of students in this year’s class are female, making it one of the most gender-balanced business schools in the world.

Nearly half of all participants enrolled on the Oxford 2022-2023 Masters in Business Administration programme are women. They make up 48% percent of this year’s MBA students, making it the largest ratio of female-to-male participants in the school’s 26-year history and one of the best gender-balanced cohorts in the world.

Despite progress in recent decades, female participation in MBAs still only averages at around 40% among the leading business schools.

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Kathy Harvey, Associate Dean, MBA and Executive Degrees, at Saïd Business School, who has spearheaded the drive to boost female engagement at the school said:

‘This is an incredibly proud moment for everyone at Oxford Saïd. Diversity, equality, and inclusion are paramount to everything we do as a school, and empowering women is key to that. To achieve such a high ratio of female MBA students is a testament to our mission to prepare the next generation of female leaders and to end gender inequality in business once and for all.

I would like to thank everybody who has made this milestone possible and to warmly welcome all of our new students starting at the school. As you join, may you be inspired by the news, reminded that change is possible, and encouraged to champion your female peers and their achievements.’

Saïd Business School has long promoted female participation, seeing it as a critical way to increase female representation in business. In spite of industry progress in recent years, women in business remain largely underrepresented, especially at board level. As of July 2022, just 8.8% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were female.

Saïd Business School currently runs two major scholarship programmes aimed exclusively at women, the Laidlaw scholarship and the Forté Fellowship. For the 2022 cohort, there are eight Laidlaw and three Forté scholars.

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Zoe Woods, a current Oxford 1+1 MBA student, and Forté fellow said:

‘I couldn't be more proud to be part of this cohort. It truly makes me feel like 50/50 is within reach. Saïd’s focus on diversity is one of the main reasons I chose Oxford. Gender is of course just one aspect of diversity, but I think Saïd’s focus on gender is indicative of a broader commitment to bring diverse voices into the classroom -- and you can really feel that in our cohort.

I feel so privileged to be a Said Business School Forté Fellow, and share Forté’s mission of advancing women in business. I can’t wait to work with future female applicants as they apply to Oxford, and get us closer to gender parity.

So many businesses claim that underrepresentation of women in leadership is a pipeline problem. Looking around the room at my classmates I can confirm there are a plethora of truly talented women out there ready to lead. In doing so, we need to keep challenging our default assumptions about what a leader looks like, to make way for more diverse styles of leadership.’

The school is also home to the highly successful Oxford Women in Leadership Alliance, a student run group which works to challenge conventional conceptions of women in business and cultivate the next generation of leaders by staging discussions and events. They recently hosted chef, social entrepreneur and women’s advocate Asma Khan to mark International Women’s Day.

Aside from its recording-breaking level of female participants, this year’s MBA cohort also boasted an impressive proportion of international students, with 93% of participants coming from outside of the UK, representing a total of 64 different nationalities. The candidates bring with them an average of 5 years of work experience from across 18 different industries. There are 313 students enrolled in total.

This year also marks another important milestone in our drive to support and empower women leaders throughout their career stages. This week the school welcomed the 10th cohort of the Women Transforming Leadership Programme, a course open to women in influential leadership roles.

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The MBA class of 2022