Monday, September 9, 2013

Trying to Improve Gender Equity at the Harvard Business School?

CSW recommends this fascinating article, which appeared over the weekend in the Education section of The New York Times.  It chronicles Harvard Business School’s efforts to “give itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules, and social rituals to foster female success.” The school has been criticized in the past for its male dominated, even misogynistic environment, in which women struggle to succeed as students and professors. In order to rectify these problems, HBS’ administrators took various measures, including mandating classes to encourage students (in particular, woman students) to participate more in courses and not feel intimidated by male colleagues, seminars on sexual harassment, and one on advisory and training for pre-tenure female faculty members. The study incurred both praise and criticism from students and faculty. Many participants found that the experiment revealed that issues of gender inequity on campus and in the business world are more deep-seated and complicated than they’d anticipated, and thus harder to solve. Prominently, the study raised concerns that class and gender inequity at Harvard, and in the business world as a whole, are tightly intertwined.  



What do you think of the study, its results, and the article’s analysis? We'd love to get some comments about this disturbing study. Write to us: cswpubs@csw.ucla.edu

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