BOSTON — When the members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013
gathered in May to celebrate the end of their studies, there was little
visible evidence of the experiment they had undergone for the last two
years. As they stood amid the brick buildings named after businessmen
from Morgan to Bloomberg, black-and-crimson caps and gowns united the
905 graduates into one genderless mass.
But during that week’s festivities, the Class Day speaker, a standout
female student, alluded to “the frustrations of a group of people who
feel ignored.” Others grumbled that another speechmaker, a former chief
executive of a company in steep decline, was invited only because she
was a woman. At a reception, a male student in tennis whites blurted
out, as his friends laughed, that much of what had occurred at the
school had “been a painful experience.”
He and his classmates had been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have
once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard
Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum,
rules and social rituals to foster female success?
The country’s premier business training ground was trying to solve a
seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived
with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind. Attracting and
retaining female professors was a losing battle; from 2006 to 2007, a
third of the female junior faculty left.
Some students, like Sheryl Sandberg, class of ’95, the Facebook
executive and author of “Lean In,” sailed through. Yet many Wall
Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading
floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all
their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of
reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds,
commandeered classroom discussions and hazed
female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on
whom they would “kill, sleep with or marry” (in cruder terms).
Alcohol-soaked social events could be worse.
“You weren’t supposed to talk about it in open company,” said Kathleen
L. McGinn, a professor who supervised a student study that revealed the
grade gap. “It was a dirty secret that wasn’t discussed.”
But in 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president,
appointed a new dean who pledged to do far more than his predecessors to
remake gender relations at the business school. He and his team tried
to change how students spoke, studied and socialized. The administrators
installed stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased
grading, provided private coaching — for some, after every class — for
untenured female professors, and even departed from the hallowed
case-study method.
The dean’s ambitions extended far beyond campus, to what Dr. Faust
called in an interview an “obligation to articulate values.” The school
saw itself as the standard-bearer for American business. Turning around
its record on women, the new administrators assured themselves, could
have an untold impact at other business schools, at companies populated
by Harvard alumni and in the Fortune 500, where only 21 chief executives
are women. The institution would become a laboratory for studying how
women speak in group settings, the links between romantic relationships
and professional status, and the use of everyday measurement tools to
reduce bias.
“We have to lead the way, and then lead the world in doing it,” said
Frances Frei, her words suggesting the school’s sense of mission but
also its self-regard. Ms. Frei, a popular professor turned administrator
who had become a target of student ire, was known for the word
“unapologetic,” as in: we are unapologetic about the changes we are
making.
By graduation, the school had become a markedly better place for female
students, according to interviews with more than 70 professors,
administrators and students, who cited more women participating in
class, record numbers of women winning academic awards and
a much-improved environment, down to the male students drifting through
the cafeteria wearing T-shirts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
admission of women. Women at the school finally felt like, “ ‘Hey,
people like me are an equal part of this institution,’ ” said Rosabeth
Moss Kanter, a longtime professor.
And yet even the deans pointed out that the experiment had brought
unintended consequences and brand new issues. The grade gap had
vaporized so fast that no one could quite say how it had happened. The
interventions had prompted some students to revolt, wearing
“Unapologetic” T-shirts to lacerate Ms. Frei for what they called
intrusive social engineering. Twenty-seven-year-olds felt like they were
“back in kindergarten or first grade,” said Sri Batchu, one of the
graduating men.
Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans
were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about
developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for
parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men. “At each
turn, questions come up that we’ve never thought about before,” Nitin
Nohria, the new dean, said in an interview.
The administrators had no sense of whether their lessons would last once
their charges left campus. As faculty members pointed out, the more
exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less
resemblance it bore to the real business world. “Are we trying to change
the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the
world in which they are about to go?” a female professor asked.
From left, Robin Ely, Nitin Nohria, Frances Frei
and Youngme Moon, administrators at the school, pledged to continue
their efforts to foster women's success in the program.Katherine Taylor for The New York Times
The Beginning
Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class
participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian
immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia,
advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and
trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived
at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her
hand.
A second-year student, a former member of the military, stood in the
front of the classroom issuing commands: Reach up assertively! No
apologetic little half-waves! Ms. Navab exchanged amused glances with
new friends. She had no idea that she was witnessing an assault on the
school’s most urgent gender-related challenge.
Women at Harvard did fine on tests. But they lagged badly in class
participation, a highly subjective measure that made up 50 percent of
each final mark. Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on:
investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through
equations while others — including many women — sat frozen or spoke
tentatively. The deans did not want to publicly dwell on the problem:
that might make the women more self-conscious. But they lectured about
respect and civility, expanded efforts like the hand-raising coaching
and added stenographers in every class so professors would no longer
rely on possibly biased memories of who had said what.
They rounded out the case-study method, in which professors cold-called
students about a business’s predicament, with a new course called Field,
which grouped students into problem-solving teams. (Gender was not the
sole rationale for the course, but the deans thought the format would
help.) New grading software tools let professors instantly check their
calling and marking patterns by gender. One professor, Mikolaj
Piskorski, summarized Mr. Nohria’s message later: “We’re going to solve
it at the school level, but each of you is responsible to identify what
you are doing that gets you to this point.”
Mr. Nohria, Ms. Frei and others involved in the project saw themselves
as outsiders who had succeeded at the school and wanted to help others
do the same. Ms. Frei, the chairwoman of the first-year curriculum, was
the most vocal, with her mop of silver-brown hair and the drive of the
college basketball player she had once been. “Someone says ‘no’ to me,
and I just hear ‘not yet,’ ” she said.
After years of observation, administrators and professors agreed that
one particular factor was torpedoing female class participation grades:
women, especially single women, often felt they had to choose between
academic and social success.
One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising
seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad
choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been
invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service
that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product.
Did Ms. Navab want to come? “If I were in college, I would have said
let’s do this after the midterm,” she said later.
But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and
other students feared could be their “last chance among
cream-of-the-crop-type people,” as she put it. Like other students, she
had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social
lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others,
she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.
The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and
advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed
in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an
on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly
international students known for decadent parties and travel.
Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and
others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a
photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging
from comments from male friends about other women (“She’s kind of hot,
but she’s so assertive”), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious
could hurt what she half-jokingly called her “social cap,” referring to
capitalization.
“I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus,” she
said later. Were her priorities “purely professional, were they
academic, were they to start dating someone?”
As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian
restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at
the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the
test hung over, her performance a “disaster,” she joked.
The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their
academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the
school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. “We cannot
have it both ways,” said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program.
“We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we
don’t care what goes on outside the classroom.”
But Harvard Business students were unusually powerful, the school’s
products and also its customers, paying more than $50,000 in tuition per
year. They were professionals, not undergraduates. One member of the
class had played professional football; others had served in Afghanistan
or had last names like Blankfein (Alexander,
son of Lloyd, chief executive of Goldman Sachs). They had little
knowledge of the institutional history; the deans talked less about the
depressing record on women than vague concepts like “culture” and
“community” and “inclusion.”