The School of Management has seen a nearly 70 percent increase in female enrollment for fall 2008, a trend many other graduate business programs are not following, SMG officials said.

While most graduate business programs have an average male-to-female ratio of 7-to-3, SMG’s program is 45 percent female, SMG Assistant Dean of Graduate Admissions Hayden Estrada said.

“This is a new record for SMG, and we are very excited,” Estrada said.

The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s MBA program is only 37 percent female, according to its Class of 2009 class profile. New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business MBA program’s Class of 2009 is only 42 percent female, according to its class profile.

Business is generally a male-dominated field, so the increase in female enrollment at the graduate level could be the start of a positive change, Estrada said. More people than ever are taking the Graduate Management Admission Test, he said.

Ana Maxim, an SMG graduate student, said she is not surprised by the increase in female involvement in the workforce, with female figures like U.S. presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and other women snatching top spots in academia, medicine and world affairs.

“As more women join the business world, things will get better,” Maxim said. “I think that the business world can only improve as the number of women involved in it rises.”

Aarti Kapuria, an SMG graduate student, echoed Maxim’s sentiments.

“If you look at small business owners, a lot more of them are women, and now these women are going back to school to thumb their noses at the ‘old boy’ establishment and say ‘I’ve got my master’s, what do you have?'” Kapuria said.

Some women said they have faced multiple obstacles while taking the path to business-world success.

“There’s the assumption that if you’re good at work, you must be failing somewhere else as a woman,” Kapuria said.

Kapuria said though not everyone knows how much money her coworkers are making, there is still an unspoken consensus that women need to work twice as hard as men to make the same income.

“[Business] is not blind yet,” Kapuria said. “If you were the CFO and a woman . . . It’s not going to be, ‘Wow, they’ve got a CFO that graduated from BU SMG grad school,’ it’s going to be ‘Wow, it’s a woman.'”

Maxim said she has faced sexism in the workplace as well.

“I would love to say I haven’t run into sexism in the business world, but that just isn’t true,” she said.

Reporter Sara Esquilin contributed reporting to this article.