For those of you who are afraid of reading, the NYTimes has kindly provided you with a video for this article! How kind of them.
This is quite a long article, so what follows is only the beginning and a few excerpts I found interesting; read the article at the source for the whole thing:
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In spite of some of the missteps, administrative overreaches, and students feeling overmanaged, it did seem to have some really positive effects - improving student satisfaction, increasing female representation at top grade levels, and a more welcoming culture.
This is quite a long article, so what follows is only the beginning and a few excerpts I found interesting; read the article at the source for the whole thing:
BOSTON When the members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013 gathered in May to celebrate the end of their studies, there was little visible evidence of the experiment they had undergone for the last two years. As they stood amid the brick buildings named after businessmen from Morgan to Bloomberg, black-and-crimson caps and gowns united the 905 graduates into one genderless mass.
But during that weeks festivities, the Class Day speaker, a standout female student, alluded to the frustrations of a group of people who feel ignored. Others grumbled that another speechmaker, a former chief executive of a company in steep decline, was invited only because she was a woman. At a reception, a male student in tennis whites blurted out, as his friends laughed, that much of what had occurred at the school had been a painful experience.
He and his classmates had been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?
The countrys premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind. Attracting and retaining female professors was a losing battle; from 2006 to 2007, a third of the female junior faculty left.
Some students, like Sheryl Sandberg, class of 95, the Facebook executive and author of Lean In, sailed through. Yet many Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would kill, sleep with or marry (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked social events could be worse.
You werent supposed to talk about it in open company, said Kathleen L. McGinn, a professor who supervised a student study that revealed the grade gap. It was a dirty secret that wasnt discussed.
But in 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvards first female president, appointed a new dean who pledged to do far more than his predecessors to remake gender relations at the business school. He and his team tried to change how students spoke, studied and socialized. The administrators installed stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased grading, provided private coaching for some, after every class for untenured female professors, and even departed from the hallowed case-study method.
The deans ambitions extended far beyond campus, to what Dr. Faust called in an interview an obligation to articulate values. The school saw itself as the standard-bearer for American business. Turning around its record on women, the new administrators assured themselves, could have an untold impact at other business schools, at companies populated by Harvard alumni and in the Fortune 500, where only 21 chief executives are women. The institution would become a laboratory for studying how women speak in group settings, the links between romantic relationships and professional status, and the use of everyday measurement tools to reduce bias.
We have to lead the way, and then lead the world in doing it, said Frances Frei, her words suggesting the schools sense of mission but also its self-regard. Ms. Frei, a popular professor turned administrator who had become a target of student ire, was known for the word unapologetic, as in: we are unapologetic about the changes we are making.
By graduation, the school had become a markedly better place for female students, according to interviews with more than 70 professors, administrators and students, who cited more women participating in class, record numbers of women winning academic awards and a much-improved environment, down to the male students drifting through the cafeteria wearing T-shirts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the admission of women. Women at the school finally felt like, Hey, people like me are an equal part of this institution, said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a longtime professor.
And yet even the deans pointed out that the experiment had brought unintended consequences and brand new issues. The grade gap had vaporized so fast that no one could quite say how it had happened. The interventions had prompted some students to revolt, wearing Unapologetic T-shirts to lacerate Ms. Frei for what they called intrusive social engineering. Twenty-seven-year-olds felt like they were back in kindergarten or first grade, said Sri Batchu, one of the graduating men.
Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men. At each turn, questions come up that weve never thought about before, Nitin Nohria, the new dean, said in an interview.
The administrators had no sense of whether their lessons would last once their charges left campus. As faculty members pointed out, the more exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less resemblance it bore to the real business world. Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go? a female professor asked.
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Women at Harvard did fine on tests. But they lagged badly in class participation, a highly subjective measure that made up 50 percent of each final mark. Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on: investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through equations while others including many women sat frozen or spoke tentatively. The deans did not want to publicly dwell on the problem: that might make the women more self-conscious. But they lectured about respect and civility, expanded efforts like the hand-raising coaching and added stenographers in every class so professors would no longer rely on possibly biased memories of who had said what.
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After years of observation, administrators and professors agreed that one particular factor was torpedoing female class participation grades: women, especially single women, often felt they had to choose between academic and social success.
One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product. Did Ms. Navab want to come? If I were in college, I would have said lets do this after the midterm, she said later.
But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and other students feared could be their last chance among cream-of-the-crop-type people, as she put it. Like other students, she had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others, she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.
The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel.
Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women (Shes kind of hot, but shes so assertive), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her social cap, referring to capitalization.
I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus, she said later. Were her priorities purely professional, were they academic, were they to start dating someone?
As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the test hung over, her performance a disaster, she joked.
The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. We cannot have it both ways, said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program. We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we dont care what goes on outside the classroom.
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Breaking the Ice
One day in April 2012, the entire first-year class, including Brooke Boyarsky, a Texan known for cracking up her classmates with a mock PowerPoint presentation, reported to classrooms for a mandatory discussion about sexual harassment. As students soon learned, one woman had confided to faculty members that a male student she would not identify had groped her in an off-campus bar months before. Rather than dismissing the episode, the deans decided to exploit it: this was their chance to discuss the drinking scene and its consequences. They could not have gone any more front-page than this, Ms. Boyarsky said later.
Everyone in Ms. Boyarskys classes knew she was incisive and funny, but within the campus social taxonomy, she was overlooked she was overweight and almost never drank much, stayed out late or dated. After a few minutes of listening to the stumbling conversation about sexual harassment, she raised her hand to make a different point, about the way the schools social life revolved around appearance and money.
Someone made the decision for me that Im not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X, she told her classmates, her voice breaking.
The room jumped to life. The students said they felt overwhelmed by the wealth that coursed through the school, the way it seemed to shape every aspect of social life who joined activities that cost hundreds of dollars, who was invited to the parties hosted by the student living in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston. Some students would never have to seek work at all they were at Harvard to learn to invest their families fortunes and others were borrowing thousands of dollars a year just to keep up socially.
The discussion broke the ice, just not on the topic the deans had intended. Until then, no one else had publicly said Section X, Mr. Batchu said. Maybe it was because class was easier to talk about than gender, or maybe it was because class was the bigger divide at the school and in the country.
That was only one out of 10 sessions. At most of the others, the men contributed little. Some of them, and even a few women, had grown to openly resent the deans emphasis on gender, using phrases like ad nauseam and shoved down our throats, protesting that this was not what they had paid to learn.
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Id like to be candid, but I paid half a million dollars to come here, another man said in an interview, counting his lost wages. I could blow up my network with one wrong comment. The men were not insensitive, they said; they just considered the discussion a poor investment of their carefully hoarded social capital. Mr. Erker used the same words as many other students had to describe the mandatory meetings: forced and patronizing.
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The first year of their experiment was ending with a catastrophe that brought home how little sway they really had over students actions. Mr. Bihlmaier had not even been the drinking type. In the spirit of feminist celebration, Ms. Sandberg gave a graduation address at the deans invitation, but during the festivities all eyes were on Mr. Bihlmaiers widow, visibly pregnant with their first child.
Amid all the turmoil, though, the deans saw cause for hope. The cruel classroom jokes, along with other forms of intimidation, were far rarer. Students were telling them about vigorous private conversations that had flowed from the halting public ones. Womens grades were rising and despite the open resentment toward the deans, overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they had been for years.
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This was the lopsided situation that women in business school were facing: in intellectual prestige, they were pulling even with or outpacing male peers, but they were not touching the money, as Nori Gerardo Lietz, a real estate private equity investor and faculty member, put it. A few alumnae had founded promising start-ups like Rent the Runway, an evening wear rental service, but when it came to reaping big financial rewards, most women were barely in the game.
At an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field. Dont, he laughed, according to several students present. Male partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor by warning them.
In spite of some of the missteps, administrative overreaches, and students feeling overmanaged, it did seem to have some really positive effects - improving student satisfaction, increasing female representation at top grade levels, and a more welcoming culture.
