An Unusual Public Apology By A Dean Goes Viral
When Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria said this week that he would boost the school's case studies with female protagonists to 20% in five years, the 600 alumni gathered to hear him speak let out an audible sigh of disappointment.
After all, a record 41% of Harvard's latest entering MBA class is female--and women make up half of the world's population. So why settle on just 20% and take five full years to do it? One woman sitting next to me at the San Francisco event--organized to celebrate more than 100 of the school's successful alumnae in Northern California--said simply: "It's disgusting."
As my report spread through the Internet this week, reactions ran the gamut. "This whole mea culpa smacks of gesture and performance: Nohria’s one concrete vow, to teach woman-centered case studies one-fifth of the time, feels underwhelming in a world where we make up half of the population," wrote Katy Waldman of Slate. "But maybe I’m expecting too much? Open contrition is a new look for HBS, groomer of trading-floor kings and boardroom honchos. When a willingness to admit fault, to question tradition, comes from entitlement-and-privilege land, perhaps that’s reason enough to celebrate."
Curiously enough, it is--because it's hardly the whole story.
Dean Nohria issued the pledge after making an extraordinary public apology for the way his school has treated women over the years. He conceded there were times when women at Harvard felt “disrespected, left out, and unloved by the school. I’m sorry on behalf of the business school,” he told the hushed room. “The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better.”
The 20% goal was one example he cited of how he hoped to make it better, not worse. It amounts to more than a doubling of the number of cases his professors produce with women featured as key leaders in challenging business situations. Today, only 9% of the 250 new case studies churned out annually by HBS feature female protagonists.
The impact of the dean's decision will reverberate around the world because 80% of all the cases used in all the business schools are published by Harvard.
Could he do better than 20%? Truth is, he has. This is just another of many things Nohria has done to stamp out gender inequality at a school that is essentially a reflection of the business culture all of us inhabit. Few leaders have done as much in so little time to change things for the better.
Shortly after becoming dean in 2010, he named the first woman in the school's history as the head of Harvard's flagship MBA program.
He closed the school's embarrassingly large performance gap in which men routinely received the lion's share of academic honors at graduation. (Though women accounted for 36% of Harvard’s Class of 2009, only 11% of the school’s Baker Scholars--the top 5% of the graduating class--were female. A record 38% of last year’s honors went to women.)
He tackled issues of sexual harassment on campus by getting student leaders to address them head on and making gender roles an open issue for discussion among students.
He increased MBA enrollment of women to record levels--41% of the Class of 2015.
He invested in an extraordinary celebration of women for the school's 50th anniversary of admitting women to its two-year MBA program in 1963 with eight students.
And now he is promising to more than double the number of case studies with women as role models and leaders.
You can endlessly argue over the actual number. I wish it were more ambitious. In fact, I wish it didn't have to be a target or a goal at all. I wish it would have occurred naturally, without the urging of the dean. Sadly, that's still not the world we live in.
To read the original account of Nohria's apology to HBS alumnae, see PoetsandQuants.com:
An Extraordinary Apology By The Dean of the Harvard Business School
Real Estate Development & Investment Analyst
11 年Yikes. Math is hard! But I don’t mean to denigrate the HBS case-method as a mathematically inferior way to learn about business. (And for those of you who went to HBS, denigrate means “put down.”) Please take 5 minutes to do a simple spreadsheet. It might soothe hurt feelings, and settle that northern CA woman’s upset over Dean Nohria’s 5-year 20% plan. Frankly, she should be thrilled with his proposal because it will be a miracle if the HBS can achieve it. So why look a gift horse in the mouth? Assuming an inventory of 9% female-protagonist cases among an existing library of 10,000 (and that’s a generous assumption,) 100% of cases studies published over the next 5 or 6 years would need to be devoted exclusively to female protagonists to achieve the promised 20%-80% female-male mix.. Dean Nohria did not specify that this was his plan although it is feasible at HBS’s current annual publication rate of 250. But not if Bay Area alumnae demand a 50/50 mix, that would take 33 years. God forbid if there are 50,000 existing case studies in the HBS library. It would take 25+ years at the 250/yr rate to get to a 20/80 female/male mix in the library, and every single one of those new cases would need to be exclusively female-protagonist. Didn’t reality dawn on the Bay Area woman (one hopes not an HBS alumna) before she registered her disgust? One doesn’t expect a journalist from Slate to run the numbers, but hopefully 100 “successful alumnae” from HBS pondered ”250 cases a year, 10,000 on hand, hey 20% in 5 years is a major commitment”, then stood up and applauded.
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11 年Does anyone know what time it is?
Global Sales Executive | Expert in DLA, DND, DOD, MOD, GSA, TCCA, and EASA | Multi-Sector Specialist in Aerospace, Military, Medical, Rail, and Industrial Markets
11 年These are the men that suggest women should take up golf to get ahead in the corporate world. Thanking John Tory and his elitist piers for that nugget of wisdom.
Purchasing Officer at Tai Poutini Polytechnic
11 年While I agree with much of Gina's comment, I can't help despairing over the rut we females are in - why do we still seek to build so many of our ambitions/aspirations on an educational base built by & for men? Of course a Harvard education is biased toward male performance - the people who see it as a measure of success, generally have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It's certainly a valid argument, that there should be a level playing field & a safe environment for anybody who chooses to undergo such an education. But why can't we consider alternatives that might become just as prestigious over time - if the standing of a university/college conveys prestige on it's graduates, equally the performance of those graduates polishes/tarnishes the prestige of the college. It's a two-way dynamic that allows for manipulation from both sides. If Harvard is so much a dinosaur that it can't/won't adapt to the changing face of the worlds workplaces, it will eventually count the cost by being sidelined into irrelevancy. In the meantime, if women begin making the choice to graduate from schools that combine gender blindness with a world class education, then maybe the prestige/reputation of those schools will rise in tandem with the fortunes of it's graduates. Yes, a Harvard/Princeton/Yale/Oxford (etc) education opens doors that might otherwise be closed, but it seems to me that the world could do with a few more mavericks, able & willing to take advantage of new technologies, ideas & platforms to their fullest extent. Women are in a prime position to fill that gap - they just need to extend themselves a little, and realise that writing their own rules of play isn't such a crazy idea.
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