Why There Are So Few Female Consulting Partners

In my high-school most of the top 10 graduates were female. In my undergraduate studies, the top students were again predominantly female. Graduate school was the same. Women dominated the honors roll and dean's lists. Something happened on the way from graduate school to the top consulting. If you look at Bain, BCG, McKinsey, Booz and Roland Berger, the picture is all the same. There are so few female management consulting partners. At the managing partner level, the problem is even more acute. Besides Orit Gadiesh, the Bain Chairman, not many people can name an influential female consulting partner. Can you? Management consulting is more merit driven than almost any other profession in the world. There is no other profession which spends the majority of time giving you pages and pages of blunt criticism and areas for improvement. There is no other profession which hires you with the full expectation that you have only a 20% chance of making it. There is no profession which actively manages-out Ivy League graduates if they don’t make the grade. And the profession gets away with this. In fact it is revered for these very same high standards. It doesn’t matter how old you are,…