HBS Means Business

Harvard Business School may not be an investment bank, but it has never been a stranger to the deep, amorphous, and stubborn biases that operate in the worlds of business and finance.

It is for this reason that we commend the work done at HBS to address the inequality faced by a group of students particularly affected by traditional attitudes in the business world: women.

According to a New York Times report, several years ago, business school administrators decided to confront the institution’s gender imbalance head-on, enacting policies aimed at reducing the gap between female students and professors and their male counterparts. They coached junior female faculty members, brought in stenographers to prevent gender-biased grading, and emphasized collaborative approaches to learning in lieu of the characteristically severe case-study method. The reforms were unambiguously successful, closing the academic performance gap and improving female teachers’ evaluations.

HBS’s reformers did not assign themselves an easy task—barriers to female success in conventionally male domains are often difficult to define and deeply entrenched. For example, the business school classroom is one in which confidence is crucial for the appearance of competence. But that confidence can be difficult to muster—even for the most intelligent and capable of women—when lurking is a fear of confirming a negative stereotype (say, about women’s mathematical acuity) or of being perceived as aggressive (or worse).

The experiment’s pioneers deserve all the more credit for being “unapologetic,” an eventual buzzword adopted by one administrator, and proceeding in the face of certain resistance. Indeed, that some male students considered the experiment “painful”—an exercise in “social engineering,” or a return to primary school—should alert us to the fact that the success of the HBS program within the context of the larger business community is yet to be seen. Though armed with higher grades and additional accolades, Harvard’s female MBAs graduating in 2013 still entered an environment in which only 21 Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Most will be paid less than their former male classmates and many will experience sexual harassment in the workplace.

Given such an imbalance, we encourage other institutions (Harvard Law School and the College, to name just two) to emulate HBS. Policies perceived as handholding will do little to alter skeptics’ views of women’s abilities. As such, we note the importance of nuanced reform: sensitive, of course, to female students’ concerns, but careful not to inadvertently stigmatize them further.

It seems, however, that HBS’s reformers struck the right balance. It may be quite a while before having two X chromosomes is not an impediment to making six figures. But if the institution that incubates many future influential businesspeople can achieve and, hopefully, sustain real progress for female students, we’ve good reason to believe that a rise in their standing throughout the professional sphere is possible.