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On the Outside at HBS
When I started at HBS in 2006, I was a 24-year-old Jewish Latina who was also enrolled at Harvard Law School. In my brief professional experience, I had already been a successful public-relations consultant and communications director for a legal nonprofit. I quickly learned, however, that my accomplishments did not shield me from feeling like an outsider during my RC year.
HBS Dean Nitin Nohria was right when he recently said that even in a community that can pride itself on diversity — more than a third of MBA students are women, a third are international, and roughly a quarter are ethnic minorities — the School can be a difficult place for these groups to thrive. To its credit, HBS understands that the real value of diversity is not in the statistical percentage of minorities but in what diversity engenders: diversity of thought.
In this or any context, however, there is a lot of “baggage” in being from a minority. As an outsider, there is an unspoken pressure to speak and act on behalf of “your” people. For example, consider an individual female professor who has a bad day in the classroom. Despite prior occasions of successful teaching, her performance is more likely to cause some students to judge all women as inferior business professors. By contrast, a single poorly conducted class by a male professor is likely to be dismissed as such and nothing more. Women students feel that judgmental difference.
Similar pressures exist for other students who are in a minority: They feel a subconscious pressure to exceed and excel every time and to prove themselves on behalf of their race, gender, or religion. Consider also the experience of a student in a section where participation is dominated by a voluble group — a group of which that student is not a part. HBS students are exceptional people, but they are also human beings: They too can be hurtfully critical, or fail to be inclusive of their classmates in ways that maximize the HBS learning experience for all.
One solution would be to increase the number of minorities at both the student and the faculty level. This would alleviate the discomfort minority students feel with not only having to prove themselves as individuals in the classroom but also having to serve as spokespersons for their minority group. It would also provide a greater assortment of role models for all students.
Another positive step would be for HBS to facilitate more open classroom dialogue during case studies, not just in the context of LEAD or LCA but also in TOM and Finance, to create opportunities for minorities to openly share their experiences with discrimination and unfair situations. Looking back, I learned the most about basic human interaction during those ad hoc conversations — both formally in the HBS classroom and outside it.
I often wonder about the source of my discomfort at HBS. It’s not clear to me if my feelings of inadequacy or exclusion were a result of my race, gender, age, professional background, or some combination thereof. And it probably doesn’t matter: Assumptions about race and gender exist across all contexts, and those stereotypes are likely no worse at HBS than anywhere else. Certainly, these issues are far bigger than the confines of HBS; these are systemic issues in business, society, and our global environment.
The challenge for this generation of leadership at HBS is to confront these issues head-on, as it is doing right now. I look forward to watching the brightest minds work to find solutions to one of business’s hardest cultural issues.
— Debbie Rosenbaum (MBA ’08/JD ’10) is an intellectual property, technology, and Internet attorney with a law firm in Washington, D.C. She also works with entrepreneurs on new-media communications strategies and cutting-edge legal issues in the Internet space.
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