LBS offers scholarship to women destined for the corporate board

London Business School has teamed up with the 30 Per Cent Club, an initiative to get more women into senior management positions, to offer a scholarship on the LBS flagship Senior Executive Programme. The scholarship, worth £29,500, is for women with board-level potential.

The collaboration is a departure for the 30 Per Cent Club, which has previously co-ordinated scholarships for women on Executive MBA programmes — degree programmes for working managers.

The scholarship is being pitched to both companies and individual managers, says Gay Collins, a member of the 30 Per Cent Club Steering Committee. “It’s about getting companies to assess who has the qualities and ability and you’ve got to get the candidate to put themselves forward as well.”

The four-week LBS programme focuses on strategy, leadership and transformation, and is generally regarded as a training ground for board level executives. “It’s about the training but also the network,” says Ms Collins.

In addition to LBS, the Club promotes EMBA scholarships at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, Henley, Cambridge Judge and Imperial in the UK, the Irish Management Institute and Queen’s School of Business in Canada. “All our focus now is on the pipeline [getting women to the top], not on non-executive directors,” says Ms Collins.