Deborah Merrill Sands, dean of the Simmons School of Management – a business school designed especially for women – says she is asked all the time whether an all-women's MBA programme is necessary in an age where female executives have made so much progress climbing the ranks of corporate America.

Prof Sands has a ready answer: “Only 2 per cent of chief executive officers at Fortune 500 companies are women, only 16 per cent of corporate officers are women and only 8 per cent of top level staff,” she says matter-of-factly. “We have not completed this work.”

Located in Boston's Back Bay, Simmons is one of the first – and until very recently, the only – MBA programme targeted specifically at women. (Mills College in California also has one.) Simmons' course of study is the stuff of a typical MBA with classes on finance, accounting and marketing. But laced through the curriculum are lessons in how gender affects organisational behaviour.