Businessweek reveals MBA gender pay gap

Bloomberg Businessweek compared the 11 most popular industries MBAs enter after graduation and found that female MBAs graduating from top business schools have fallen behind their male counterparts in pay over the past decade. Women graduates earn 93 cents for every dollar paid to their male classmates in general, but in some industries the pay gap is even wider.

Of the 11 sectors, women were behind men in pay in eight of them in 2012, including accounting, finance, marketing, and operations. The biggest pay gap is noted in the venture capital and private equity field, where women earned only 82.5 cents for every dollar men made. Consulting was the industry where women almost achieved parity with men, with women earning 99 cents for every dollar their male classmates made in 2012. Women outperformed men on salary in just three fields: human resources, investment banking and nonprofits.

Bloomberg Businessweek bases the information on more than 27,000 recent business school graduates that took part in the magazine’s biennial ranking survey of full-time MBA programmes. The following table from Businessweek shows the comparison between 2002, when the surveys started, and today.

(02.2013) Source: Businessweek