Gender and the MBA: Differences in Career Trajectories, Institutional Support, and Outcomes

By Sarah E. Patterson & Sarah Damaske

In 2013, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg directed women to “lean in” at work by taking individual initiative to move into leadership positions. While Sandberg acknowledges that women are behind men in terms of promotion and pay, she suggested these gender differences could be explained primarily by the choices women were making at work. Sociologists have long been skeptical of such an individual framing, as we were. In the study described here, we seek to understand the primary factors driving gender differences among MBA graduates, asking: do women’s and men’s pathways diverge following completion of the MBA program? If so, how and why do they diverge? Using 10 to 12 years of life history information from 74 MBA graduates of an elite University, we traced men’s and women’s work patterns after they graduated with their MBA, seeking to identify places of similarity and difference across gender.