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Case Study: A Place at the Table
by Carmen Nobel
In 1962, the Harvard Business School faculty voted for women to be directly admitted to the two-year MBA Program for the first time. In September 1963, eight female students enrolled in the Class of 1965, alongside 676 men. The School has come a long way toward gender equity since then, with women making up 41 percent of the Class of 2015. But a recent case study shows that there's still a ways to go.
"Women MBAs at Harvard Business School: 1962–2012" delves into the experiences of alumnae and alumni over the past 50 years, both inside and outside the classroom, as protaganist Dean Nitin Nohria considers what HBS might be like 10 years from now when his daughters are grown.
"It looks back and asks whether we have been successful," says Boris Groysberg, the Richard B. Chapman Professor of Business Administration at HBS, who cowrote the case with HBS Global Research Group associate director Kerry Herman and research associate Annelena Lobb. "It also lets us look into the future and ask, how can we create a more inclusive culture? And how should HBS change over the next 10 years to accelerate the advancement of women leaders who make a difference in the world?"
The authors conducted some 60 interviews for the case, resulting in stories that run the gamut from inspiring to unsettling. A 1971 alumna remembers several professors who never called on a woman in class "unless it was a discussion of a 'woman's product.'" A Class of 1973 alumna recalls professors "who, in the middle of a class, would look at the women and the African Americans and say, 'Is this too difficult for you?'" Yet just as many speak of the transformative nature of their experience: "What I learned at HBS I don't think could be learned anyplace else," states a 1962 alumna quoted in the case.
By 1985, women made up 25 percent of the graduating MBA class; 10 years later, that number had crept up to only 28 percent. Even so, the School was making strides in research on gender issues. For example, Myra Hart (MBA 1981, DBA 1995) joined the faculty in 1995 and initiated an executive program for women, which was based on her doctoral research on the career choices of female HBS grads.
By the middle of the next decade, 38 percent of entering students in the MBA Program were women. Yet, today, only about 8 percent of HBS cases focus on a woman protagonist. "I think we can certainly do better," says Groysberg. "The argument in the 1970s was that we just didn't have enough examples of female protagonists in business. I don't think that's a valid argument in 2013."
Descriptions of life after HBS reveal a stubborn consistency from 1962 to 2012: the reality that women continue to bear the brunt of work-family trade-off decisions. And classroom discussions in a variety of courses indicate that students just assume that's the way it goes. In the case, Nohria recalls his experience teaching the first-year required leadership course: "When there were women protagonists in a case, students had questions about how they managed work-family balance. Men had families, too, but we didn't seem to ask those questions about men."
The case was taught to MBA students on March 8, in observance of International Women's Day, in addition to HBS staff, and to 800 alumnae and alumni at the W50 Summit on April 4. "I think it made some complicated issues much more discussable," comments Groysberg, adding that he and his team also created a nine-segment multimedia case from videotaped interviews to generate dialogue on topics ranging from women on boards to gender issues in the workplace. No discussion prompts were necessary at the W50 Summit, however: "We had people in the room who had lived the case," observes Groysberg. "There was passionate discussion of the past, present, and future of women at HBS."
—Carmen Nobel is senior editor of HBS Working Knowledge.
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