The glass ceiling and MBA’s

During my time working for the Centre for Women’s Enterprise (CWE) at the University of Bedfordshire I frequently had to consider whether the services we provided were accessible to women with childcare responsibilities. This included ensuring that the CWE services were offered during school hours to ensure women with children were able to participate and on occasions, providing a crèche to enable mothers with pre-school children to benefit from business support services.


This isn't a subject I come across much working on the Executive MBA programmes, however, a recent article entitled ‘of MBA’s and motherhood’ in the Economist caught my eye last week.

The article suggests that parents could be helped to undertake an MBA programme if Universities provided information about local nursery and childminding services or ideally, provide childcare for parents on campus. Our Executive MBA programmes only require attendance at four weekend business schools each semester, at either our UK campus or at overseas partner centres, so go some way to address this.

Research by the Cranfield School of Management suggests that the glass ceiling may well be intact with only 12% of FTSE 100 directors being female. Could providing additional support to women with childcare responsibilities to enable them to undertake an MBA programme help to boost the numbers of women getting into the ranks of senior management? I would be interested to hear the views of our blog readers on this subject - your comments and thoughts are welcome.

About the Author: Julie Tysoe

Julie is the MBA Project Officer at the University of Bedfordshire, managing the operational delivery of Executive MBA programmes. She has worked for the University of Bedfordshire since 2005 and prior to the MBA, worked at the Centre for Women's Enterprise in the Business School, as an Account Executive.