Harvard Business School is making progress toward the advancement of women before and after they graduate from this prestigious school. Dean Nitin Nohria has made it his business to improve conditions at HBS by doing the following:
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 ofadmitting 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.
Dean Nohria even apologized for the way Harvard Business School has treated women over the years by acknowledging that women there have often felt disrespected. His intention is to continue to change this and so he said: “The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better.”
Unfortunately, doubling of the number of case studies with women as role models and leaders only brings the total to 20% of the case studies students will be reading. Since Harvard case studies are used extensively at business schools around the world (80%), this decision reverberates. Had he promised that as of next year the number of case studies with women in significant roles will be 20% as opposed to 9%, rather than aiming to reach 20% in five years time, the response would have been somewhat more positive.
Dean Nohria’s intentions are positive. With Harvard Business School classes boasting 41% women now, it’s time, however, to make sure teaching materials reflect the changing times. Years ago, I wrote “The Memo Every Woman Keeps In Her Desk” — a Harvard Business Review reprint bestseller still relevant today. It was about the subtle and not so subtle exclusionary practices of an organization and a young woman’s quandary about sending a memo about those to her CEO. By now such case studies should be antiques. They aren’t. Times have not changed sufficiently and we can hardly expect that they will any time soon unless women are represented in teaching materials at business schools in accordance with their class numbers.
Dean Nohria deserves credit. But until case studies reflect the increasing presence of women entering the pipeline to the top of organizations and, to some extent, the struggles they face emerging from that pipeline to senior positions, things will remain woefully the same. It’s time for Harvard to get busy writing cases in which women are senior executives. Until then, business schools may need to drop that 80% reliance on Harvard cases by developing some of their own.
@kathreardon
