I'm curious about something. I keep hearing about how many business schools want to increase gender diversity in the programs, but often cohorts are still pretty unbalanced.

I may apply for an MBA program next year, and I would like to know if as a woman I would have an advantage. Say I scored 680 on the GMAT, which is what I have been scoring on practices. Could I safely apply to NYU or Columbia, all things else being equal?

I don't think anyone can *safely* apply to any school: all the applicants are similarly well qualified, so the odds are against any one applicant applying to any one school. The Manhattan schools are heavily finance-oriented, so those are perhaps less flexible on GMAT than other top schools.

I would say that there might be an advantage, but at this tier of school it's pretty negligible, certainly not enough to rely on as the only factor to offset a lower-than-average GMAT score.

The only data I can find is from Businessweek, which says that surveyed cohort at NYU Stern was made up of around 36 percent women, but that 39 percent of the applications were from women. Seems to me that there's no real advantage there.