Chapter 14 finds that STEM education overtures frequently have less substance than one would believe. At the high school level, STEM still means enrollment in the “pipeline courses” (trigonometry, calculus, chemistry and physics, computer science, programming) that lead to the STEM majors at college or university.1 At university, the majors and departments remain what they have been traditionally: science, mathematics, engineering of various stripes, and technology. Often, then, STEM is an area of emphasis, a mental outlook, or a frame of mind, perhaps backed by a STEM advisor or an advising office.
At worst, then, STEM resembles a Western movie set, with false fronts lining Main Street. The question then becomes how to “dress” the set, to give STEM programs and offerings backbone and better equip STEM graduates for the job market and success beyond that. What can be added to the current array to give women in particular an increased chance for hiring, promotion, and further promotion in information technology?
The current array has not produced the results sometimes forecast for it.2 “Many graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like.”3 As first visited in chapter 14, in Will College Pay Off?, Professor Peter Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent STEM graduates got jobs that made use of their training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” Professor Cappelli writes.4
The idea that STEM programs might need some leavening does not originate with Professor Cappelli, although his findings support it. A germ of the idea comes from a book published in 2010 entitled The Last Male Bastion: Gender and the CEO Suite in America’s Public Companies.5 In that book, I examined the educational backgrounds and careers of the twenty-two women who, at that point, had become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, of whom fifteen were still in office as The Last Male Bastion went to press.6 A goal was to find out what courses and career paths these women had followed, rather than rehash the guidance and shoot-from-the-hip tips offered by the business advice books for women.
That exercise led to a number of findings, some of them more counterintuitive than others.7 One unsurprising finding was that education matters, more so for women than for men. All twenty-two women in my CEO sample had bachelor’s degrees. These included degrees from elite colleges and universities (Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown, Rice; Wellesley, with three CEO graduates, was the leader). The list also included degrees from lesser-known or regional institutions (Queens College; University of Florida; Augustana, Illinois; Maryhurst, Oregon; Marymount, New York).
Beyond that, the sample had to be truncated, albeit slightly. One CEO and her company, Carol Meyrowitz and TJX, refused to release information about Ms. Meyrowitz. The sample of twenty-two became a sample of twenty-one.
Sixteen of the remaining twenty-one women CEOs had advanced degrees. There were twelve MBAs and one law degree (Angela Braly, CEO of Wellpoint, JD, Southern Methodist University). Carol Bartz, Yahoo! CEO at the time, had an advanced degree in computer science (PhD, University of Wisconsin). Irene Rosenfeld, then Kraft Foods CEO, had a PhD in marketing and statistics (Cornell) as well as an MBA (also Cornell). Ursula Burns, Xerox CEO, had a master’s degree in electrical engineering (Columbia University). Only five in the twenty-one-member CEO group had not progressed beyond a bachelor’s degree, at least in a formal educational setting.8
Because so many of the female CEOs had advanced degrees in business, a question that arose was, Where did the MBAs come from? More than half the MBAs came from elite schools (Harvard [three], Yale, Columbia, MIT, New York University, Northwestern) and less than half but still a significant number from less well-known or regional schools (Bellarmine, in Louisville, Kentucky; Loyola, in Chicago; University of Maryland).
The examination of these CEOs’ career patterns produces three major lessons for women executives.
Don’t be lopsided. The women with broader skills and backgrounds, even if they had a technical specialty, advanced to senior management and then the corner suite. Very often they had an advanced degree, especially a master’s degree in business administration (MBA).
By contrast, though the sample is small, we may observe that the women who primarily had only a technical specialty had a short tenure in the CEO’s office. For example, Jill Barad’s short tenure at Mattel highlights her fixation with marketing and, more specifically, marketing the Barbie line of dolls. Mary Sammons, whose exclusive background was retailing, was unable to lift Rite Aid from the doldrums. A CEO or a senior manager must know about operations, distribution, markets, strategy, revenues, profits, share prices and finance, and a host of other topics beyond her specialty.
The direct implication of the survey was that, at a minimum, boards of directors regard women with an MBA degree as possessing the “right stuff,” or some of it, to qualify for senior management positions.
Go get an MBA. This has long been the advice for young men and women in business.9 After working three, four, or five years in an entry-level position, followed by a few years in the job after the first promotion, go back to school. In fact, many of the leading business schools regard practical seasoning as a de facto requirement for admission.
The market reflects and reinforces both the advice and the empirical evidence from examining female CEO career patterns. Over the last decade, “the number of applicants seeking admission to M.B.A. programs grew at 57% of schools world-wide offering full-time, two year programs.”10 Between 2014 and 2015, MBA applications increased 15 percent at Harvard School of Business, to approximately 9,900 applications. Other MBA schools experienced greater gains: Yale School of Management, 25.1 percent; University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler School of Business, 23.2 percent; and Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, 16.4 percent.11
Broaden STEM tracks. Specifically, universities and advisors should point STEM majors toward a mini-track, a course sequence, that gives them some idea of the milieu in which, hopefully, they will function in the world beyond college. A mini track would not replicate an MBA but would give STEM majors an idea how product markets and supply and demand work. Down the line, material about finance (stocks and bonds, mutual and hedge funds, analysts and financial advisors) may aid students in managing their personal financial affairs as well as better understanding corporate financial matters. A dose of managerial accounting would tell students what financial statements are, what they tell the reader, more importantly what financial statements do not tell you, how books may be cooked, and the ubiquity of financial reporting among units, divisions, subsidiaries, layers of subsidiaries, and publicly traded corporations.
A few universities have already implemented this sort of course selection through joint programs. For example, Carnegie Mellon University, an academic leader in information technology, offers a master of science degree in computational finance, which draws upon offerings and faculty from the Department of Computer Science, the Heinz School of Public Administration, and the Tepper School of Business.12
The Last Male Bastion’s study was in 2010. Since that time, other women have succeeded to Fortune 500 CEO seats, still others have stepped down or retired, and members of a further group have, effectively, received pink slips. The number of female CEOs stood at fifteen in 2010, rose to twenty-four in ensuing years, and settled back to twenty-two as this book was being written.
Eliminating the duplicates with the 2010 study (there are only three holdovers from the 2010 women CEO group)13 leaves nineteen of twenty-two female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Seventeen of the nineteen have advanced university degrees. Three have advanced degrees in electrical engineering (two master’s and one PhD). Two have law degrees, one from the University of Pennsylvania and one from the University of Texas.
Again, though, the most noteworthy finding is that twelve of nineteen female CEOs have MBAs. The balance seems to be tipped a bit more in favor of elite colleges and universities: Columbia and Stanford, with two each, and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, with one. Lesser-known and regional universities, though, are still represented: Bellarmine University (Louisville, Kentucky) once again, Webster University (Webster Groves, Missouri), and Baylor (Waco, Texas) (a major university but one not particularly known for its MBA program). The results in 2016 seem not dissimilar from those in 2010.
Is a study based upon two other studies a “meta-study”? Probably not, but academics are enamored of throwing around that “meta” modifier. Be that as it may, combining the two studies yields thirty-nine women who have held Fortune 500 CEO chairs since Jill Barad, at least in the modern era, became the first in 1997 (twenty-one from the 2010 study, plus twenty-two from the 2016 study, minus duplicates and nonparticipants equals thirty-nine). All thirty-nine have bachelor’s degrees from known universities. Thirty-two of those women hold advanced degrees, including two who hold PhDs.
There are five female CEOs who hold STEM-type advanced degrees: three engineering (all by chance in electrical engineering) and two computer science (Carol Bartz and Melissa Mayer). Three female CEOs hold law degrees, all from well-known law schools (Southern Methodist University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Texas). The most dominant finding, though, seems to be that twenty-four of the thirty-nine women hold master’s degrees in business administration, or MBAs.
A case may be made for adding three to the number twenty-four, representing law degrees in the CEO group. A law school business law curriculum can and often does replicate much of what an MBA course of study would contain. Courses in business organizations, agency and partnership, corporate governance, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, accounting for lawyers, securities regulation, income tax, and corporate income tax add up to twenty-four semester hours, equivalent to many MBA programs.
Adding back the three to the twenty-four is something of a leap of faith, albeit a small one, for the addition assumes that the female CEOs followed a business track in their law school careers. But if one makes that leap, assuming the known unknowable, the number of CEOs with business-oriented education backgrounds rises to twenty-seven.
Of the thirty-nine women who have succeeded in reaching the top positions in major corporations, then, 70 percent (69.23 percent) have MBAs or similar education backgrounds. In contrast, among those same women, five, or 12.8 percent, have STEM degrees. Below the CEO level, the evidence is scarce but some does exist. In 2015, overall, chief financial officers in public companies had average pay raises that exceeded those of CEOs. Two of those ten highest-paid CFOs were women with business backgrounds. Moreover, both were in or soon to be in information technology companies: Safra Catz at Oracle (now co-CEO) and Ruth Porat at Morgan Stanley (who soon left for Google).
A criticism of the STEM appellation and emphasis is that, as a result, “students don’t get a quality, well-rounded education.”14 Thomas Friedman of the New York Times predicts that “the best jobs in the future are going to be STEMpathy [rather than STEM] jobs—jobs that blend STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, and math) with human empathy. We don’t know what many of them will look like yet.”15 He laments the headlong swing toward deep immersion in STEM fields and STEM alone.
Others have offered similar critiques of the wholly instrumentalist approach taken by education programs in the United States. Longwood University president W. Taylor Reveley IV has pointed out that many high school and university curricula no longer contain the civics courses and civics exposure that once were mandatory:
Over the past two generations, the idea of education being about teaching people how to engage in public affairs has been lost. At one point, the core curriculum at the college level was focused on: How do you get ready to be an active citizen in America? How do we make democracy endure? Today, education is thought of almost exclusively in terms of career preparation. That is what we have lost.16
While astute observers may apply those observations to many educational pursuits, the comments ring especially true of the STEM phenomenon.
But isn’t a near-total dedication to STEM necessary because, without it, the United States would fall increasingly behind other countries in technical subjects and later in job skills and efficiency? Information technology’s felt need to import more and more workers from India and other nations because increasingly the United States is unable to provide the workforce needed (see chapter 15) provides support for the proposition.
“Much of this fear stems from the biennial findings of the Program for International Student Assessment, an organization that issues a test to fifteen year olds all over the world to rank their competency in reading, math and science.”17 The statistics are “scary”: out of sixty-five educational programs surveyed, the assessments ranked U.S. students twenty-seventh in math and twentieth in science. “US teens lag in global education ranking as Asian countries rise to the top,” headlined an MSNBC story.
As in many things, all is not what it may seem. Looking deeper, Michael Teitelbaum of the Harvard Law School found that while the statistics did not lie, they failed to give a complete picture. “I found that the U.S. has always been in the middle, we’ve never been at the top.”18 He elaborates: “I’m not saying that [other countries’] performance is irrelevant but the comparison shouldn’t be considered a direct one. Many of the countries above the U.S. in the rankings are much smaller and homogenous, places such as Singapore and Hong Kong.” He concludes, “If you take a national average across the U.S.,” as the studies do, “you have a huge disparity in educational performance across the country, even down to the local level. So you have a higher variety of educational outcomes. [Ergo] it makes sense that Americans’ average is not as high as smaller education systems.” Dr. Teitelbaum concludes, “We’re not falling back, [it’s that] some other [mostly smaller] countries are just rising.”
The alarm bells about educational outcomes, therefore, should be the one-alarm rather than the three- or four-alarm varieties that have sounded more often. The implication of that conclusion is that there is more room than previously thought for tempering or leavening the onslaught of STEM programs and STEM proposals. In turn, that finding buttresses the idea that women who aspire to leadership levels and positions in information technology should delve into business subjects and attain a more well-rounded educational background.
The empirical finding seems impressive but is subject to a number of reservations. First, the sample is small—thirty-nine women in leadership positions in business.
Second, based upon the finding, the contention would be that a STEM degree is best to equip a young woman to seek a position with an information technology firm and to obtain her first or even second promotion within the company. But to advance into management and leadership roles, an employee needs something additional that would give her a sense of perspective and some degree of depth in the issues that she will encounter.
Third, the further contention is that some sort of business and economics grounding suits that purpose better than heavy or straight-line STEM course sequences or majors a young man or woman could pursue.
The fourth reservation is that the sample is especially small on the STEM side. Not that many women have gone through STEM as corporations and universities presently conceive and emphasize it, and further few have matured and advanced to become eligible for leadership positions. We simply do not have sufficient raw material to postulate how a STEM background helps, or does not help, a young woman as she progresses in her career.19
Given the research, though, simplistic as it is, I believe that a very good case may be made that STEM needs some liberalization or tempering and that the direction to be taken is toward business, economics, and perhaps a dose or two of accounting and finance. Someone far above my pay grade, Larry Page, founder and now CEO of Google, also advises this:
I think that we are not educating people in a general way. You should have a pretty broad engineering or scientific background. You should have . . . MBA training of how to run things, organize stuff, and raise money. I don’t think most people are doing that and it’s a big problem. Engineers [and scientists] are usually trained in a very fixed area. When you are able to think about all these disciplines together, you kind of think differently. . . . That’s really an important thing for the world. That’s how we make progress.20