Skirts and Ladders 'Computing is too important to be left to men' — Karen Spärck Jones

“Not everyone can be Gandhi, but each of us has the power to make sure our own lives count” – Jeff Skoll

Like most early career professionals in the city, I've contemplated whether to do an MBA. My friends and I have a running joke about how the only people that get into Harvard are those that have run off and built a village in Venezuela. Despite having not done that, I decided to go to the Harvard Business School presentation last Thursday, and followed it up with Stanford's Graduate School of Business presentation on Tuesday.

Of course, the first person I met at the latter said that she had been worried that she would be late, because she had forgotten how the tube worked, having been out of the city for the past nine months working on a microfinance project in Honduras. Good for her.

And yes, the first person I met at the Stanford presentation was female. In fact, every person but one was female, because they held a specific women's presentation. Our host, admissions officer Lisa Giannangeli, opened by explaining the reason behind it as nothing but the obvious: look at the world around you, then look at business. Where are the women?

On Tuesday night, they were sitting right there, in a welcoming atmosphere at McKinsey's Piccadilly Circus office. Everyone I met was clever, articulate and widely travelled. I don't have the figures to back it up, but I assume that the reason that there aren't more women in business school is because they don't apply, so if events like this increase the application pool then that in itself is a good enough reason to hold it.

Of course, men aren't excluded. Stanford is holding three events in London this week, and the other two are open to all.

The nice thing was that apart from Lisa's initial statement, there was no mention about women (or the lack thereof) until a potential candidate asked the question during the panel Q&A. It was a standard presentation. The only difference was the audience.

Harvard didn't do that. As far as I'm aware, they only held the one presentation, unsurprisingly at Goldman Sachs’ Fleet Street office. There was a much greater ethnic minority audience than I had expected (proportionally speaking), and many women - at least, enough that I didn't notice a lack or abundance either way.

Which was better?

Unfortunately, only having women at Stanford's presentation meant that they were restricted to finding female alumni in London. That seemed to hamper them slightly, and so the panel consisted of four women and one husband (also a Stanford alum). One of the women was a consultant turned stay at home mother, which is fine in principle, but I'm not sure it provides the right motivation to do an MBA. All of them were originally from the US and moved to the UK either pre- or post-MBA.

It dampened my enthusiasm at the time, because part of what I'm looking for as an international student is a truly global school that has networks that reach right back to my home country. All of the panelists were able to speak enthusiastically about how the network affects their lives day in and day out in London, but the evidence simply wasn't in front of me.

In comparison, Harvard had a panel of six alumni, all of whom were in careers that actively used their MBAs and some were actually British, having lived here since birth. They were joined at the end by another seven or eight current students, who were presumably carrying out internships in London. There were two women on the panel, and that was all I needed to see.