No salary equality between men and women after an MBA

A gender-based pay divide has crippled the work relationship between men and women for decades – and there is no end in sight. Even women who have invested in the coveted and expensive MBA degree face the same pay divide and struggle to catch up with their male counterparts financially.

This is the result of a recent survey by Bloomberg Businessweek. The pay divide starts as soon as they graduate, and plagues them throughout their careers, writes the magazine.

MBAs normally see their salaries triple within eight years of graduation, but women are lagging behind: Within a few years of graduation, women earn lower salaries, manage fewer people, and are less pleased with their progress than men with the same degree, says Bloomberg Businessweek.

The gap widens the more years pass by with women and men starting their post-MBA careers at an average of $98,000 for women and $105,000 for men (graduates 2007 to 2009). By 2014 the same group of men earned a median of $175,000 whilst women only made $140,000. This divide gets larger the more prestigious the business schools gets. As an example the magazine quotes a stark contrast at Columbia Business School, where women who graduated in the mentioned time bracket earned a median of $170,000 in 2014, or 2.7 times their pre-MBA salary, while men had an average income of $270,000, four times more than what they earned before their MBAs.

In general Bloomberg Businessweek found that the base salary was less contrasting, but that men pulled much higher year end bonuses than women. As responsible factors the magazine found that women were less likely to be bosses and if they were they were responsible for a median of three employees; whereas men managed five. Another contributing factor seemed to be that women chose less financially rewarding fields with male MBA graduates gravitating towards higher paying professions such as real estate, finance and consulting.

But in the end a lot came down to inequality as the magazine had to concede as even when women went into high-paying fields, they were underpaid relative to men. In finance, women earned a median of $53,200 less than men, women in marketing at a bank earned $7,000 less than men and female investment bankers earned $115,000 less than men.

Barbara Barkhausen