Business schools in Utah and across the country grapple with gender parity. Some say, however, the problem is more acute at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. The Provo-based institution is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In interviews with one former professor and 16 current students and graduates from between 2021 and 2024, most recounted experiences of sexism. The students came from different programs within the business school, and 11 were from the Master of Business Administration program.
KUER learned that many women there felt frustrated, disadvantaged or isolated by how they were sometimes treated. A few described an atmosphere where some men assumed women were only there until they got married or had kids. Or if they already had children, some felt men questioned why they weren’t at home with them. A few mothers thought the MBA program was geared more toward men with wives at home. And while sexist attitudes in business are a problem across Utah and the country, BYU’s homogeneity could be compounding the problem.
However, the Marriott School says it is a place that focuses on “Respect for All.” The school has had a woman at its helm since 2019, and some students said the school has made moves to improve the experience for women. Plus, the Marriott School ranked number two in 2025 for overall student satisfaction from the Financial Times.
Most students KUER spoke with said overall, they had a good experience at BYU and felt the program set them up for career success, but they would still like to see change. The women’s stories wove a pattern of men undermining women and Latter-day Saint culture bleeding into business. That was exacerbated by the low numbers of female professors and students.
Jen Lee graduated from the MBA program in 2022. When she first applied, Lee said a recruiter told her he couldn't believe she wasn’t married yet.
“And he goes, ‘I really think, Jen, for the next year, you should focus on getting married instead of coming to school,’” Lee recalled.
“I was just kind of in shock, like, what, you're a recruiter, this is crazy. And I also understood where it was coming from, because I grew up LDS.”
Marriage is a requirement for the highest degree of heaven in LDS Church theology. And the church’s “Family Proclamation,” a 1995 declaration of doctrine and practices, states “Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”
While most students didn’t encounter gender discrimination as blatant as Lee, they did face subtle comments and actions they described as likely unintentional but still harmful.
They said some male students would steamroll, ignore or not take women seriously. They described men who were surprised by their intelligence or would suggest women were in the program or won awards only because of diversity quotas.
And a few students said professors did not confront these kinds of sexist comments in the classroom.
Several women recounted instances when married men would act strangely about or refuse to meet alone with female students. In the past, leaders of the LDS Church warned members to avoid the appearance of evil by not being alone with the opposite sex, like in a 1998 talk by Gordon B. Hinckley.
In the Information Systems program, one professor allegedly told women they couldn’t do mentorship lunches with him in a public place unless they brought someone else with them.
Katie Bankhead graduated from the integrated IS bachelor’s and master’s program in 2022. When she heard about that professor’s policy, she was “shocked.” She said the additional obstacle might hold women back from getting the mentorship.
“It impacts the women because they don't get those opportunities for development in college,” Bankhead said. “But then I think maybe even worse, it impacts the men in the class because it teaches the message that this is acceptable.”
A BYU spokesperson declined to comment on Lee and Bankhead’s experiences but said in an emailed statement, “Allegations of discrimination or harassment of any kind against either students or employees are taken seriously, and timely and appropriate measures are taken to address these issues when they occur.”
The boys club
A few students said some male students excluded women from get-togethers or avoided interacting with them at all. Katelyn Fagan, MBA 2023, said it felt like a boys club. That made it difficult to network, which may have made it harder to get a job.
“If men aren't willing to really become friends and get to know you, and then want to vouch for you, you're somewhat a little bit more disadvantaged,” she said.
Fagan believes that attitude could come from the gender barrier within the LDS Church — where a lot of activities and religious classes are separated by men and women.
And she didn’t have a lot of women to turn to in the program instead.
On average, MBA programs in the U.S. don’t achieve gender parity in their student bodies. The national average was 43% for MBA programs in 2023-24, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Utah falls well below the national average: for female MBA students in fall 2024, Utah Valley University had 32%, University of Utah 28%, Utah State University 26% and BYU 27%.
Still, a couple of the BYU business students KUER spoke with described times when they were one of a few, or the only woman, in a class.
Utah isn’t doing great when it comes to female professors either.
Nationally, the association found women made up 40.3% of tenure-track business faculty in 2022-2023. This year, around a quarter of UVU, U of U and USU’s full-time, tenure-track faculty are women. That number is just 16% at BYU, up from 11% in 2020.
More female professors would have made a big difference to the BYU students interviewed for this story. They said it would have boosted their confidence, helped them envision themselves as leaders and teachers and given them more mentors. Some added there are few women of authority to challenge discriminatory attitudes or show men that women should be taken seriously.
Several students mentioned how much they look up to the business school’s first female dean, Brigitte Madrian, and love that she’s there. She took the position in 2019, and her leadership team includes two women as associate and assistant deans.
Nevertheless, faculty representation affects the professors, too.
Sarah Agate was an assistant professor of experience design from 2019 until she quit in 2023, in large part because of the “pretty toxic environment” she said she experienced.
She recounted a time when the department told faculty there was a custodial staff shortage. A man at the meeting, Agate said, suggested with a laugh that the female faculty could take care of the garbage and vacuum.
“I shouldn't have to keep calling you out and say, ‘Hey, that's another one of those sexist remarks that you do under the guise of joking,’” she said.
And Agate believes those attitudes carry over to the students. She recounted a conversation with a female student who told Agate she always chose male professors because they seemed “more credible.”
Agate also thinks this belief was due to “internalized misogyny” from LDS culture and a lack of female leadership in the church.
It’s not just BYU
The BYU business school isn’t unique. The “bedrock” of a lot of business schools is that men are considered the leaders and "ideal workers," said psychologist Jennifer Griffith. She’s an associate professor of organizational behavior and management at the University of New Hampshire and not affiliated with BYU.
“There is an expectation … in many places that leaders typically are men and they act a certain way, and they have certain characteristics, and so we need to replicate those characteristics in order to be successful.”
Where BYU is more extreme, Griffith said, is in the avoidance of one-on-one interactions with women. She also said that outside of BYU, even if someone believes a woman should be a mother instead of getting a degree, “they certainly don't say it that explicitly.”
Plus, most business schools don’t integrate religious teachings into the classroom as happens at church-owned BYU, said sociologist Alyssa Calder Hulme. In fact, the vision of the Marriott School of Business is to “transform the world through Christlike leadership with the mission to develop leaders of faith, intellect and character.” And while some conservative Christian universities do include the Bible in their business schools, Calder Hulme said they don’t have the denominational homogeneity that Utah and BYU have.
Calder Hulme researches gender roles at the intersection of religion and labor. For her University of Chicago master’s thesis, she interviewed 100 people — Latter-day Saint women with MBAs and their classmates, teachers, co-workers and recruiters — and found similar behaviors and attitudes toward women at BYU as KUER did.
“Because the interpretation of certain doctrines are so cohesive, it really shapes what people feel is possible or what they can do,” Calder Hulme explained.
Her work is currently in peer review for the Journal of Mormon Social Science Association.
Calder Hulme also found these attitudes carry over into professional interactions in Utah’s tech center, Silicon Slopes.
A few graduates, like IS graduate Bankhead, wanted to work outside of Utah because of the sexism they experienced at BYU. She said she has noticed a difference in how she is treated at work in New York compared to BYU. “I’m treated like a regular contributor,” Bankhead said. “I'm not a weird fluke.”
What BYU is doing for women
Calder Hulme offered to share her research on gender discrimination at the business school with its leaders in 2024, and while they initially expressed interest in person, she said they never replied to her follow-up emails.
Some students and Agate, the former professor, said the school was dismissive of their concerns. Agate said she spoke to leadership about experiences she had with a man up for promotion, but he was promoted anyway. In another instance, she said human resources put the onus on her to identify what policies were violated in her experiences with gender discrimination.
That discouraged Agate and she dropped the issue. Plus, with the current atmosphere at BYU, investigated by The Salt Lake Tribune, she feared being labeled a “troublemaker” and how that could affect her path to continuing status, BYU’s version of tenure.
Agate lost hope and made the difficult decision to quit — she’s now at the University of Illinois.
BYU didn’t respond to KUER’s request for comment on Calder Hulme and Agate’s experiences. It did say the business school conducts a third-party, anonymous employee survey every other year to identify areas of improvement. They then present the results at employee forums and ask for “input on concrete and specific steps for improvement.”
One student who will graduate from the MBA program in April 2025, Kjerstin Roberts, feels the school is working on gender issues.
“I think things are changing, but I think it's just anytime you're doing a huge cultural shift, it's going to be tricky,” she said.
Roberts said she’s heading up a new MBA women’s recruiting committee. They’ve been investigating why more women aren’t coming to BYU to study business and how they can message that women “do belong,” she said.
They’re also looking to pair prospective female students with women in the program who are in similar life situations — like young, single women or divorced mothers.
Another effort is a dinner for women considering the program, Roberts said, and they’re hearing and assessing student concerns about things like child care.
BYU declined to comment on these efforts and turned down interview requests for Dean Madrian or Daniel Snow, the MBA program director.
But it did point to a school student belonging association and an on-site behavioral and mental health team, both started in 2020 for all business students. The school also started what it called a successful MBA women in business conference in 2023.
Several students interviewed by KUER mentioned the business school’s efforts to incorporate research from BYU’s Political Science Department. It explores how many women need to be on a team for them to feel comfortable speaking up.
Some said not being the only woman in a student study group did make a difference for them. But others observed it’s a double-edged sword. Because there are so few women in the business school, this effort to increase their number on some student teams meant other groups had no women at all. That gave those men less interaction with women and less exposure to their perspectives.
Is it enough?
Griffith, the New Hampshire organizational psychologist, worries an inaugural female dean might not feel empowered to make big changes — or could be made into a scapegoat. But as first steps, she thinks the business school leadership is going in the right direction with their initiatives.
For things to change long term, however, she said the culture has to change, and there have to be consequences for behavior that’s “explicitly stated” as inappropriate.
BYU’s workplace policy says employees are expected to create an environment “that is free from harassment, threats, intimidation, verbal or physical abuse, abuse of power, or other unprofessional behavior, even if the behavior does not rise to the level of unlawful conduct.”
“You can have training every day or every year, but if there's no follow up to it, if there's no concrete consequence for not adhering to those standards, then they're not gonna stick,” Griffith said.
She suggested strategies like setting aside class time to talk about being a teammate and a leader and creating a space for students to talk through issues.
“It has to be an ongoing conversation. There have to be regular check-ins,” Griffith explained.
Ultimately, she said BYU must decide: Do they want women as teachers and students or do they want women to focus on family life?
Griffith thinks the current low number of female students and professors is a reflection of the school’s values.
A few students think BYU is trying and it would take a culture shift within the LDS Church itself to address some of the issues — Latter-day Saints would need to be expressly taught it’s OK for women to have careers.
Samantha Loveland, who is due to graduate with an MBA in April, thinks a lot of what she sees as unintentional sexism comes from men having never confronted or wrestled with LDS cultural norms, especially those from Utah. Things have been better at BYU than she expected. Loveland is encouraged by the men who want to learn when given the opportunity, and she’s opened up in class about her experiences.
“I've had some incredible discussions with men after these in-class discussions where they'll come ask me, ‘Well, actually, how can I be better? Like, how do I work on this?’”
While it can be tiring to teach men that she can be both a woman and good at business, Loveland said seeing them learn and grow gives her hope.
