(Photo courtesy White House blog)
UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian represented the school today at a White House roundtable to discuss best practices for a 21st century workplace. The forum consisted of White House senior advisors and deans from a number of top business and management schools around the country.
The meeting focused on how schools might best prepare students for the "increasing importance of women in the labor force and the prevalence of employees with families where all parents work."
According to the White House blog:
Women are now more likely to graduate with a college degree and are increasingly entering formally male-dominated professions, however recent research has shed light on the issues still facing professional women. Women not only start their careers with lower pay, but the pay gap grows over time. One study of MBA graduates from a leading institution found that women earned $115K on average when they graduate and $250K after nine years while men earn $130K when they graduate and $400K after nine years. CEA analysis has shown that a similar trend holds for all men and women with a professional degree—the pay gap grows over time and earnings are more than 50 percent higher for men when professionals are in their late 30s.
The meeting also delved into issues of leadership, retention rates, business school culture and the timing of business school in the lifecycle. For more on the summit, please click here to read the White House blog summary of the meeting.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal's Melissa Korn offers coverage of the roundtable, quoting Dean Judy Olian.
Attendees said they framed the conversation not in terms of fairness, but in terms of improving the country’s economic health.
“It’s a major, national performance issue,” said Judy Olian, dean of University of California, Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management. “We need every talented, trained person—including women—in the workforce.”
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