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.