Of the 90 students in IMD’s incoming MBA class this year, 25 will be women, the Swtizerland school reports. Though IMD has always prided itself on its diverse class, this figure is a milestone.
“When highly accomplished people from a broad range of backgrounds, perspectives and skill sets are brought together, they challenge each other and gain invaluable understanding of other points of view,” Claire Lecoq, IMD MBA director of marketing, admissions and career services, said in a statement. “We are so encouraged by the ever-growing number and quality of women applicants.”
According to the school, female participants, like their male counterparts, tend to be a bit older and bring more career experience than those in other MBA programs. IMD students on average are between 27 and 34 and have 4 to 10 years of professional experience before they begin the program.
In a recent post to the IMD website, women of the 2011 IMD class shared what the IMD MBA program is like, in particular for women.
German/British citizen Saskia Marsh, who has worked for the UN in Kosovo and Gaza, thinks the IMD MBA is better rounded than many other programs. “It gives you a solid grounding in the more traditional MBA subjects of accounting, finance and operations while also exploring the more psychological elements of managing a business and becoming an effective leader,” she said. “Women tend to look at the world in a multifaceted way and so this multidisciplinary approach is probably particularly attractive to female candidates.”
“The program makes no distinction between the men and women, not at all,” said IT business development professional Kamini Aisola, a dual citizen of India and the Netherlands. She described the program as a leadership development “laboratory,” an environment that requires all participants to be equally capable and committed. It wouldn’t work, she said, if “the female-male ratio were merely a diversity target exercise.”
For more on what women in the 2011 IMD class have to say about the school and its MBA program, click here.
Read the full article: Switzerland’s IMD Enrolls a Record Number of Women