I’m half way through Jodi Kanter’s article about gender equity at Harvard Business School. Wow. Worth a read.
It’s so good that I’m going to post my thoughts as I go along.
Drinking and Dating Culture. Kanter talks a lot about the extreme dating and drinking culture that goes on outside the school, which undermined any feminist or gender equity programs within the school. Is this a Harvard Business School-specific thing? A close high school friend started at University of Chicago’s Business School, when I started at the grad school program, so we all socialized together. They didn’t drink or date any more or less than the other grad students.
The lack of female professors and the challenges.
Kanter writes:
Ms. Frei been promoted to dean of faculty recruiting, and she was on a quest to bolster the number of female professors, who made up a fifth of the tenured faculty. Female teachers, especially untenured ones, had faced various troubles over the years: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunities to write papers with senior professors, and students who destroyed their confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the spot or commenting on what they wore.
“As a female faculty member, you are in an incredibly hostile teaching environment, and they do nothing to protect you,” said one woman who left without tenure. A current teacher said she was so afraid of a “wardrobe malfunction” that she wore only custom suits in class, her tops invisibly secured to her skin with double-sided tape.
Women in academia have serious challenges, regardless of their department. Tell your horror stories in the comment section, please. I’ll repost them on the front page of this blog.
Women aren’t in the club.
Women are performing equally to men, even out performing at times. But they still weren’t getting the big ticket jobs after graduation, because they weren’t in the network.
…she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves.
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.
(For the record, I’m getting increasingly angry as I keep reading.)
Are Women Choosing To Take a Different Path?
In a group of 30-40 students who planned starting a “search fund” (an ambitious first step when starting off as a venture capitalist), only one was a woman. That woman quickly stepped off that track to take a much less demanding career path near her fiance, because she wanted a happier life. “You can either be a frontier charger or have an easier, happier life,” she said.
Choice or obstacles? We’re still not closer to answering that question.
Is Business School Anything Like Real Life?
Is behavior at one business school representative of post-business school life? If there is at sexism at HBS, does that mean that the business world is just the same, if not worse?
My husband is in finance. Strangely, the business students in the article seem to look down on finance jobs as less serious and competitive as other types of career paths. So, maybe working for a major investment bank on Wall Street isn’t real-world enough. I think it is.
In his area of the business (not trading floor), women are equally represented as men. There are many female executive directors. This is probably not true on the trading floor.
Also, due to a series of lawsuits, investment banks are extremely about sexism in the workplace. All e-mail is monitored, and Steve saw one guy escorted to the exit of the building, because he forwarded an inappropriate e-mail using the e-mail servers at work.
Apt. 11d 
I recommend you read the comments as well, especially the comments from people who claim to have graduated from other business schools, such as Booth, Sloan, Tuck, Wharton, London. After reading the comments, I think this could be a Harvard-specific thing.
I wonder if it comes back to admissions. I was shocked by the claim some women chose to socially network rather than prepare for class.
On further thought, this could be a Boston thing. Remember the recent BU hockey team scandal(s).
LikeLike
Re the social networking — a phenomenon I’ve noticed is that when the networking is male-dominated: “…she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves”, access to a man can be the most effective access to the network.
I remember reading about a study long ago that said that women who were married to other academics were more likely to drop out before they got tenure track jobs, but if they did get tenure track jobs, they were more likely to reach tenure than those who were married to non-academics. The study analyzed the result in the context of shared goals/common understanding, but I’ve always wondered how much of a role access to male dominated networks could play in the effect.
LikeLike
“…she pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves”, access to a man can be the most effective access to the network.”
Years ago, my reporting professor at USC brought in a female journalist to talk to the class, as the reporting class had somehow wound up 100% female, and he thought it would be useful to us. The journalist had previously worked at Rolling Stone, but left after discovering that it was impossible to advance there as a woman who wasn’t the girlfriend of a staffer. As she put it, “To make it at Rolling Stone, you had to make it.”
“I remember reading about a study long ago that said that women who were married to other academics were more likely to drop out before they got tenure track jobs, but if they did get tenure track jobs, they were more likely to reach tenure than those who were married to non-academics. The study analyzed the result in the context of shared goals/common understanding, but I’ve always wondered how much of a role access to male dominated networks could play in the effect.”
I have personally found it very educational to be the wife of a guy whose been tenured at two different institutions. It would have been even more helpful to have that body of knowledge when I was in graduate school myself and had no mentor, but what can you do?
LikeLike
I think asking if it’s “choice or obstacles” is a good question. And I was a little creeped out about this wholesale attempt ”to change how students spoke, studied and socialized”.
The biggest surprise to me was that a typical HBS female student had to ”be taught how to raise her hand”. Who knew that these best and brightest examples of high-achieving women were such wallflowers?
I’m a veteran of male-dominated careers, and I can relate much more closely to Megan McArdle’s perspective on this.
LikeLike
Megan McArdle comments on the culture, and indicates that the social life was rather different at UofC business school. Law school was not a heavy party scene for me, but my life might have been different, because (i) I went to a state school (i.e., Berkeley) and (ii) I was planning on coming back to the east coast, so networking at the law school wouldn’t have been a career help. Law firms just care about your grades, anyway.
I don’t know if it’s creepy or just silly, the attempt to change how 25-year-olds socialize. I was especially amused by the forbidding of Halloween, in order to prevent the women from dressing slutty. I thought, “The colonel’s lady, and Judy O’Grady, are sisters under the skin.”
LikeLike
It’s not a horror story, but I interviewed for a faculty position at HBS. It was a two day interview (plus meals, I was with someone and thus ‘on’ from 9:00am (arrived from airport) to 10:00pm on the first day and from 7:00am to 10:00pm on the second day) and I was not interviewed by any women. There were women faculty, they just didn’t do any of my interviews. Male post-docs did interview me. It seemed weird. They didn’t make me an offer and I was both depressed and relieved. The more time goes by, the more I think I am relieved I didn’t get an offer there.
Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund have done some interesting work on gender differences in competition. They used Harvard undergrads in part because they thought that Harvard women would be more likely to be competitive.
LikeLike
Case studies, in journalism or academia, are fun because you can get beyond the numbers and really get an in-depth picture of your subject. However, you always have to explain WHY you chose that particular case for scrutiny. You need to show that you believe your case to be typical of a larger group of subjects. I would have liked one paragraph or two that did that in Kantor’s article.
LikeLike
And, one of the questions that comes to mind is how much this is about business school culture, and how much is about Harvard, specifically.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, too, as Tulip describes, reading stories like this makes large groups of people reconsider Harvard (and, yes, they might go if they get in, but plenty of them chose not to apply based on stories like these). The feedback loop then makes Harvard even more like the story described in this case study than it might have been otherwise.
I am not as freaked out by explicit information given to 25 year olds on how to behave. One thing that’s become clear to me is the difference in cultures and the barriers those differences can produce (used broadly, female culture, school culture, business school culture, HS, New York, west coast, midwest). Knowing might not make one change how one behaves, but knowing can at least let you know, say, that speaking quietly will be perceived as a weakness among some, while speaking loudly might be seen as offensive among others (Swedish Minnesotans and Jewish New Yorkers come to mind). I knew someone who as all the aspect of a California surfer dude who was interacting with New york MDs at MIT. He said that he realized at some point that he would never ever get to say something if he waited for a long enough pause to politely interject (as he had been taught).
LikeLike
“The feedback loop then makes Harvard even more like the story described in this case study than it might have been otherwise.”
Yep.
“I am not as freaked out by explicit information given to 25 year olds on how to behave.”
Nope. Somebody I know here recently had to send out an email to his grad students on the subject of social media and not shooting yourself in the foot professionally after a couple of regrettable Facebook postings.
LikeLike
It’s one thing to tell people how to change their behavior to fit in better in their new culture, if that’s what they want to do. It’s another thing for the powers that be to find a culture distasteful–like it or not, slut-o-ween is part of New York yuppie culture–and try to stamp it out.
LikeLike
From Kanter’s piece: “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.”
The deans’ perhaps-understandable fear of not “making the women more self-conscious” sounds like the soft bigotry of low expectations. I wish schools would get over it and give women honest, caring feedback on the front end. Women (but not all women, of course) generally need more encouragement to come prepared for the quant demands of an elite B-school finance course. They should learn bread and butter finance stuff like how to price a bond well before they arrive on campus. Someone probably needs to tell some of them that before the “hierarchy” emerges in the first few weeks of class.
Let’s just say I know of this “hierarchy” pretty intimately. The issue is, frankly, innumeracy. Women who were raised to think they’re “bad at math” wind up feeling like they have nothing to teach the (predominantly male) ex-trader-types (and mistakenly assume they are not as smart as the quanty finance guys) so they go silent in the classroom, and ultimately, they don’t get comfy enough with finance patter to perform as well in high-pressure finance job interviews as their male peers.
It doesn’t help that the larger narrative out there in our society is very overtly anti-women in finance. People like Tina Fey are joking that they hope their daughters don’t choose a career in finance; otherwise well-meaning, feminsty bloggers elsewhere are saying they think people go into finance just for the money (therefore it’s not a worthy field. I bet they’ll be saying that about tech in a few years.
Actually, Laura’s last paragraph is 100% correct about monitoring for workplace inappropriateness – the bulge bracket i bank I used to work for sacked a very senior man for entertaining clients at at strip club. Wall Street these days can be a fantastic place for ambitious women, they put on all manner of seminars and assigned mentoring to champion their junior women, 12 weeks paid mat leave is the norm, etc.
LikeLike
If elite business schools think it’s necessary to have such rigorous quantitative skills to succeed, then they should require them as prereqs to entry. Not having a certain prereq shouldn’t make or break an applicant’s entry but she would need to complete them prior to or within the first year of the program.
This was how my grad program (not in business) operated for statistics and economics. Beyond that, once you completed the prereqs there was a more basic series of classes that you could test out of if you could demonstrate that your knowledge already exceeded what was taught in the class. It was only after those two levels that you got to more advanced classes.
If HBS is still experiencing this dynamic in advanced classes then I would chalk it up to a failure on their part to enforce the use of proper class management techniques. Instructors can’t let a bunch of showy know-it-alls dominate the class and content needs to tap the range of strengths among the students. This seems like something that could be instituted fairly easily and the fact that they seem to be throwing up their hands and saying “there’s nothing more to be done!” makes me think they really don’t care at all.
LikeLike