It’s about time. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has done something that its peer institutions — Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia Business School, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management — have never achieved. For the first time in its history, The Wharton School will enroll more female MBA students than male MBA students. In fact, 52% of the fall 2021 cohort at Wharton’s graduate business school will be women, a major milestone.

As Patrick Thomas reports for The Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled “Wharton Is First Elite M.B.A. Program to Enroll More Women Than Men,” “Over the past 15 years, the number of women enrolled in M.B.A. programs has steadily increased. In 2005, women made up less than 30% of students enrolled in roughly 50 full-time M.B.A. programs tracked by the Forté Foundation in the year that the nonprofit started to tally gender. By 2020, female enrollment in M.B.A. programs stood at 39%, according to Forte Foundation, which focuses on advancing women into leadership roles through access to business education. Women have historically had more representation in other graduate disciplines and make up the majority of law school and medical school students, according to the American Bar Association and Association of American Medical Colleges. Women have also earned the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. since the early 1980s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”

Ivy Coach salutes The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for shattering the glass ceiling at elite graduate business programs. For too long, MBA enrollees at the nation’s top programs have been largely men. But as Bob Dylan sang it, “The times they are a-changin’.” Congratulations Wharton!