NEOMA Business School’s Rouen Campus.
Delphine Manceau
Dean at NEOMA Business School
“In schools where women make up a large share of the student body, it is not credible to claim that “everything is possible” for female students while maintaining leadership teams that are almost exclusively male. Students, accreditation bodies, and international partners are increasingly scrutinizing governance structures. At NEOMA, for example, we have explicitly embraced gender parity in governance and within the faculty, sending a strong signal to our students.”
Beyond her duties as NEOMA dean, Delphine Manceau also serves as President of the Conférence des Grandes Écoles (CGE), which brings together 250 top engineering, business, and specialized schools. She sits on the Board of AACSB, a global standard-setting body for business education, and on several advisory boards of higher education institutions in North America, and Asia. A specialist in marketing and innovation, Manceau was a professor and held various leadership roles at ESCP.
AACSB data shows that women now represent around 30% of business school deans worldwide, compared with roughly 26% a few years ago. From your perspective, what has driven this increase, and what is still holding back faster progress? The increase to 30% women deans is first and foremost a generational effect. For the first time, an entire cohort of women has completed a full career in higher education and research, combining roles as faculty members, researchers, program directors, associate deans, and more. These profiles are now fully legitimate candidates to lead business schools.
There has also been a clear shift in awareness. In schools where women make up a large share of the student body, it is not credible to claim that “everything is possible” for female students while maintaining leadership teams that are almost exclusively male. Students, accreditation bodies, and international partners are increasingly scrutinizing governance structures. At NEOMA, for example, we have explicitly embraced gender parity in governance and within the faculty, sending a strong signal to our students.
The remaining barriers are more structural. Female candidates are less mobile geographically, and we find it harder to recruit female profiles from other countries for senior roles. Besides, in the recruitment processes, the implicit model remains that of a leader who is available at all times and has an uninterrupted CV. This model no longer reflects the reality of people’s lives, neither women’s nor many men’s, but it still weighs heavily on decision-making.
‘To stakeholders who are skeptical or primarily focused on economic performance, I explain that diversity only becomes a true asset when it is built on genuine equality; equal pay, equal career opportunities, and equal influence.’
What obstacles to advancement do you still see? Women’s careers are often marked by periods of interruption or slower progression: parental leave, increased family responsibilities, or decisions not to pursue international mobility or highly time-consuming roles at moments when family life would have been disproportionately affected. On a CV, this can translate into less visible periods, more gradual increases in responsibility, or moves back and forth between roles. These realities do not reflect lower commitment or fewer skills but still are sometimes perceived as weaknesses. This mechanically sidelines many women. At NEOMA, we try to look differently: we focus on the diversity of responsibilities held, the real institutional impact achieved, and the ability to work collaboratively and lead complex projects, rather than on purely chronological alignment.
Another barrier relates to application behavior. Many women wait until they meet 100% of the criteria before applying, whereas some men feel legitimate when they meet only part of the requirements. In environments where self-promotion, network visibility, and the ability to project oneself into a role are critical, this inevitably delays access to top positions. This is why mentorship and sponsorship are so important: it is crucial for people in leadership roles to explicitly tell women, “You have the profile. You can go for it. Your application is legitimate.”
Why does gender parity in corporate leadership still matter? Parity is a matter of coherence and credibility. You cannot tell female students that they can aspire to the highest positions if they rarely see women leading business schools or flagship programs. It is also a basic matter of fairness in institutions where female talent is present at every level.
To stakeholders who are skeptical or primarily focused on economic performance, I explain that diversity only becomes a true asset when it is built on genuine equality; equal pay, equal career opportunities, and equal influence. Under these conditions, women’s presence at the top brings complementary perspectives and experiences, enriches debate, and improves the quality of decision-making, particularly in uncertain environments.
Once they become deans, what challenges do women continue to face? I perceived that a lot of progress has been made. It is important to mention it.
Still, once in office, it sometimes still happens that women deans are still subject to a form of double scrutiny. Their results are assessed, as they should be, but so too are their leadership style, the way they assert authority, manage conflict, and communicate. Too tough, too soft, too cautious, too bold, too ambitious. They are scrutinized. There is an implicit expectation of perfection, as if women leaders must also prove the legitimacy of female leadership itself.
This pressure is real, but it also forges valuable strengths. Women who reach these roles have often learned to navigate resistance, biased remarks, and doubts about their legitimacy. They develop strong resilience, listening skills, and the capacity to explain and drive change.
At a school like NEOMA, this translates into close attention to the consistency between decisions, how they are explained, and how faculty, staff, and students are brought along in transformation processes. This leadership style—firm on principles and attentive to dialogue—is a real asset in times of change.
Female deans also tend to discuss and share, and to support each other. A few years ago, we organised a breakfast meeting for female deans at the EFMD Dean’s conference, it was amazing to see how many we are and to share our experience.
Why is increased representation of women important for students? For female students, seeing women lead major institutions makes ambition feel far more natural. They can more easily project themselves into senior roles and ask more direct questions about career prospects and pay. For male students, it helps normalize the idea that leadership teams can and should be diverse, shaping how they will recruit and work in the future.
But still today, we see female students choose more job perspectives in marketing and HR while male students are more numerous in finance and entrepreneurship. So we have been hiring more female faculty and program directors in the latest topics to act as role models, and we try to promote those careers.
For companies, business schools play a powerful role-model function. When a school demonstrates that it can achieve parity among its faculty and leadership and implement clear equality policies, this directly feeds into dialogue with HR leaders and executives. Graduates enter the workforce with strong expectations around equality and fairness, and companies increasingly recognize that these issues influence both talent attraction and retention.
Describe the programs, initiatives, or institutional practices your school has implemented to advance gender parity: At NEOMA, we have chosen to embed gender equality over the long term, and to focus on tangible results. We first addressed parity within the faculty, despite often hearing that “there are not enough female candidates.” By diversifying recruitment channels and questioning ingrained assumptions, we demonstrated that this argument did not hold. And I am now very proud to have reached 50% of female faculty.
We also commissioned an external pay audit, which confirmed the absence of a gender pay gap for comparable roles; an absolute non-negotiable for me.
But parity is not only about internal figures; it is also about the role models we present to our students. That is why we actively showcase female leaders who are our alumni, with female class sponsors like Angeles Garcia Poveda, Chairwoman of one of the top 40 French companies, and top executives like Ouarda Ech Chykry, CEO of Kiabi, and Doris Birkhofer, CEO of Siemens France, who share their career paths, choices, dilemmas, and successes.
Finally, we provide very concrete support to female students through workshops on salary negotiation and career development, with targeted support in fields where they remain underrepresented, such as finance, entrepreneurship, or data. The goal is for equality not to be merely an institutional principle, but a lived reality—backed by evidence—throughout their academic journey.
Looking ahead, what changes would be necessary to move the proportion of women deans significantly beyond the current 30%? To sustainably move beyond 30%, leadership pathways need to be structured rather than relying on “opportune” appointments. This means identifying high-potential women earlier, offering intermediate leadership roles (programs, campuses, departments), implementing mentorship and sponsorship, and explicitly encouraging women to apply when positions open.
Selection processes must also evolve: systematically gender-balanced shortlists, selection committees trained to recognize bias, and criteria that value hands-on leadership and transformation experience. At NEOMA, for example, we have ensured parity on selection panels and diversity of profiles for leadership roles, so that female talent is genuinely visible and seriously considered.
Is there anything else you would like to add? I would like to say to female students, and more broadly to young women, that they do not need to minimize or “justify” their ambition. Wanting to lead, create, and decide is both legitimate and necessary to transform our organizations and our society. Our role as a school is not only to provide the skills to do so, but also the examples, networks, and fair rules of the game that make these paths possible.
I also believe that business schools will increasingly be judged on the coherence between what they teach and what they do. The question will no longer be, “What do you say on March 8?” but rather, “Who actually leads your programs, centers, and teams? How do careers and pay evolve?” This is where the trust of a generation—rightly demanding alignment between values and actions—will truly be built.
Next page: Claire Jollain, Dean of HIM Business School