Women plus maths plus what Chanda Kochhar’s saying about MBA entrance exams
Chanda Kochhar walked into the eye of a storm when, at a CII summit on human resources, she said, “The MBA entrance exams are so quantitative-oriented that it keeps out more and more women from joining the MBA classes. If we were to make the entrance exams more all-rounded, you could see more participation.”
This is the era of outrage and within minutes of this report, predictably, most champions of gender equality were outraged. Some women dusted off twenty 20-year-old report cards and pointed to their near perfect score in mathematics, while others snorted at Kochhar’s suggestion and advised that deeply ingrained sexism that discourages ambition, assertiveness and self-worth are the reasons for the lack of women in business schools.
Both of these arguments are correct — there are women who consistently ace mathematics, and there certainly exists sexism that discourages ambition in girls — yet the inability to look beyond these binaries to actually understand what keeps young Indian girls out of business schools is merely ignorance garbed as a cry for equality.
Gender and genetics
Even in the age of 140 characters, Kochhar’s remark about the focus that MBA entrance examinations have on mathematics and the resultant number of successful women candidates is worthy of a deeper analysis. For one, there is significant research that has proved that overall, boys tend to outperform girls in standardised tests in mathematics.
In these testing formats, girls do better in the verbal section. This is not to say that girls’ understanding of mathematics (or boys’ grasp of verbal skills) is inferior, it only implies that their performance under the testing conditions yields them lower scores. The reasons for this are largely cultural, partly genetic. A study on the gender gap in math test scores conducted by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund of Stanford University found that gender differences in competitive attitudes may cause mathematics test scores to give a biased representation of the underlying gender differences in math skills. What this means is that while women may be just as competent as men in mathematics, because their approach to competition varies, so do their test scores in mathematics.
These differences are further acutely felt in the entrance examinations to Indian business schools. Students who study mathematics and quantitative methods most intensely in their undergraduate programmes are those who opt for engineering, a field of study which is largely the domain of boys. The exposure that engineering students get to mathematics gives them a distinct advantage in cracking the MBA entrance examination.
This explains the lopsided ratio of engineers to non-engineers, as well as boys to girls in business schools. In 1997, when this writer joined the MBA programme at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, the batch size was 127 students. Of this, 110 were boys, 17 girls; 112 were engineers, 15 had non-engineering graduate degrees. The batch which was a year senior had 11 girls and 112 boys, and roughly the same ratio of engineers to non-engineers. These numbers aren’t a coincidence, they are entirely reflective of how much the entrance exams are skewed towards engineers, most of who tend to be boys.
Right questions
Kochhar is further right in questioning the need for an examination that is so heavy in its testing of quantitative skills. The ability to understand and execute complex quantitative methods is not necessary for all managers. “If there is a course that is quant-oriented, you need to focus on that but if it is a course that is more general management-oriented, do you not need entrance examinations which are more all-round?” Kochhar asked. What she is implying is that unless a student is specialising in finance, there isn’t a reason for a potential manager to be a math ninja. It’s a perfectly logical argument.
When several years of SAT data was analysed and it was discovered that girls did better in verbal tests, the test was modified in order to make them more balanced for boys. There were no shouts of outrage then. Kochhar is merely suggesting the same be done for girls.
Champions of gender equality in India would do well to take a minute and understand this to be the righting of a wrong instead of opting for an intellectually lazy, Pavlovian response and predictably scream that this is an insult to all women.
(This article was published on November 11, 2015)
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