Harvard Business School’s most recent class is made up of more women than ever before, with the class of 2016 being made up of a record 41% women.
Out of the 9,543 applicants, 940 students were admitted into the program, 389 of them women, according to a preliminary profile of the university’s MBA class of 2016.
Harvard, the No. 1 ranked business school from U.S. News and World Report, has kept their amount of female business students over 40% for the past three years.
Harvard isn’t the only top-ranked business school that has increased its number of female students in the past few years. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, also ranked No.1 in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, has an even higher percentage of female students coming in (42%).
The Wharton School has admitted 40% or more female students for the last five years.
For Stanford University, the business school that tied with Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to rank No. 1 in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, 36% of the class of 2015 is female, an increase from last year.
The average percentage of female business school students in the country is 37%, according to The Women’s Leadership Gap by the Center for American Progress. The report states that though women make up 52% if the professional workforce, they are underrepresented in leadership positions.
Only 14.6% of executives, 8.1% of a company’s highest earners and 4.6% of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are women, according to the report. Less than 17% of board members for Fortune 500 companies are women.
There has been some progress with increasing the number of women in leadership roles since 1980. Back then there weren’t any female executives in Fortune 100 companies. In 2001, 11% of Fortune 100 executives were women.
According to the report, the number of female CEOs was six times higher in 2009 than it was in 1997. Though the numbers improved, the last decade has stayed pretty stagnant with female management and executive board growth.
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