Another Driveway Moment Brought to You by NPR

The bright, happy faces to the left are those of my dMBA cohort (it was early in the program - we all look a lot more tired now). Quick - do you notice anything unexpected about this picture? Your hint is a reminder of what the program is: an MBA program with an emphasis in Digital Media Management.

If you caught NPR's, Addressing the Shortage of Women in Silicon Valley last week you might be surprised to learn that 46% of the students in our cohort are women! Not only are we beating the odds in technology, however, it turns out our cohort beats out the national average in U.S. business schools where a whopping 70% of the student body are men!

Now, I've worked for tech companies for the last few years and as a former volunteer with the non-profit, Girlstart*, I wasn't surprised to hear about the shortage of women in technology. So perhaps its precisely because of that background that upon hearing NPR's report I felt so appreciative to be a part of a program that is opening doors for women in these areas**.

With the focus in digital media, we are not only learning the language of business (accounting, finance, marketing, etc.), we are also learning the language of technology so that we can be the bridge between the various functions and stakeholders of an organization. And, according to NPR's report, it is precisely women who are needed to help propel such organizations towards success:

One of the things that's a barrier to our ability to grow is our ability to hire the best talent. If we could get more women to go into computer science, we would have more talent to hire from.

Mark Bregman, senior exec at Neustar
& former chief technology officer @ Symantec

To be clear, this is an MBA program, so we're not being trained to be the much needed engineers as discussed in NPR's story. Because of the digital media focus, however, we are improving our fluency in information technology; many of us can write code and we've all taken classes in AdobeCS5 - and then of course, there was the assignment where we built a computer from scratch!

These skills set us up to be that organizational bridge... now, if I could just cross that bridge between me and the end of the 50+ pages I gotta read for Digital Law tonight... (sigh)



*An award-winning, Austin based non-profit whose mission is to empower girls in science, technology, engineering and math... check 'em out!

**Yikes! For full disclosure, I have to say that the newest cohort has only 2 women! I'm not sure how that happened... but based on the previous years this is quite the anomaly. Let's just hope so!