- An MBA can bring a significant salary bump—but female graduates aren’t seeing huge gains like their male classmates. In fact, new research shows they earn nearly $10,000 less than their male counterparts right from their very first job. Over the years, that tallies up. Right now, the average female MBA grad is taking home around $36,000 less, despite an increase in female CEOs role models like Mary Barra and Jane Frazer.
Getting an MBA has long been considered a cheat code for a high-paying salary. In fact, obtaining the graduate business degree will boost your pay by over 70%—that is, if you’re a man.
New research by the Forté Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding inclusion among business education, highlights that the level of increase remains dramatically lower for women.
In their first post-MBA job, women’s salaries rose by 52%, on average, to $131,449, but men’s salaries surged by some 73% to $140,007. Elissa Sangster, CEO of Forté, said the current pathways to leadership continue to create unequal opportunities for success.
“Despite earning the same degree from the same elite institutions, women still lag men in every measure of career advancement,” she told Fortune. “This runs the gamut from compensation to promotions, the number of direct reports, the size of budget managed, and how many levels away they are from becoming a CEO.”
While the gender pay gap is about 6% in women’s first post-MBA job, it only widens later in their careers, according to the Forté survey of over 1,000 MBA alumni from over 60 schools.
The pay gap only gets worse beyond their first job
More and more women are getting MBAs and taking on management roles—and yet the pay gap between them and their classmates only gets worse as they climb the ladder.
About 42% of all MBA students are now women, up 10% from 2011. And at many schools, including Northwestern and Duke, gender parity is finally being reached among cohorts.
Moreover, the gaps in salaries between white women and women of underrepresented minorities decreased from a 11% difference to a 3% difference in their first post-MBA jobs.
However, even beyond their first jobs, women with MBAs go on to earn 17% less than their male counterparts. And while it’s an improvement from a 28% pay gap in 2016, that’s still $36,000 less in their pockets this year alone.
In 2025, male MBA grads earned a staggering $216,487. Meanwhile, women didn’t even hit the $200,000 mark with an average salary of $179,987 this year.
Women are making their way into management—but not fast enough
The number of Fortune 500 female CEOs has also slowly increased—reaching a record 55 this year. Close to half of the leaders attended business school, including General Motors CEO Mary Barra (Stanford), Elevance Health CEO Gail Bourdreaux (Columbia), and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser (Harvard).
However, there’s still progress to be made, Sangster said, and it can start with increasing sponsorship of female leaders.
“What’s happening is that managers don’t look around and find women who need a sponsor to help them advance and they don’t connect them with one. So, women are left on their own. Women are more likely to put their head down and work and forget about networking,” Sangster said. “Sponsorship takes care of a lot of that issue.”
Nearly three out of four women with a sponsor report it helped them advance faster, but according to Sangster, only 46% of women have one.
While some of the post-MBA pay gap may stem from career path differences, Sanger said that fields that attract more women, like marketing, actually have less of a gender pay gap, and having more women across all industries and departments will help elevate other women to leadership roles.
“It’s likely that fields with more women help other women to move up the career ladder, sponsor them, and help them to create career development plans, versus fields with fewer women. It’s less of an exclusive club to advance if there are more leaders who are like you.”
