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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.
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.”
As
the semester went on, many students felt increasingly baffled about the deans’
seeming desire to be involved in their lives. They resented the additional work
of the Field courses, which many saw as superfluous or even a scheme to keep
them too busy for partying. Students used to form their own study groups, but
now the deans did it for them.
As
Halloween approached,
some students planned to wear costumes to class, but at the last minute Ms.
Frei, who wanted to set a serious tone and head off the potential for sexy
pirate costumes, sent a note out prohibiting it, provoking more eye rolls. “How
much responsibility does H.B.S. have?” Laura Merritt, a co-president of the
class, asked later. “Do we have school uniforms? Where do you stop?”
A
few days before the end of the fall semester, Amanda Upton, an investment
banking veteran, stood before most of her classmates, lecturing and quizzing
them about finance. Every term just before finals, the Women’s Student
Association organized a review session for each subject, led by a student who
blitzed classmates through reams of material in an hour. Some of the
first-years had not had a single female professor. Now Ms. Upton delivered a
bravado performance, clearing up confusion about discounted cash flow and how
to price bonds, tossing out Christmas candy as rewards.
Like
many other women, Kate Lewis, the school newspaper editor, believed in the
deans’ efforts. But she thought Ms. Upton’s turn did more to fortify the image
of women than anything administrators had done. “It’s the most powerful
message: this girl knows it better than all of you,” she said.
Breaking the Ice
One
day in April 2012, the entire first-year class, including Brooke Boyarsky, a
Texan known for cracking up her classmates with a mock PowerPoint presentation,
reported to classrooms for a mandatory discussion about sexual harassment. As
students soon learned, one woman had confided to faculty members that a male
student she would not identify had groped her in an off-campus bar months
before. Rather than dismissing the episode, the deans decided to exploit it:
this was their chance to discuss the drinking scene and its consequences. “They
could not have gone any more front-page than this,” Ms. Boyarsky said later.
Everyone
in Ms. Boyarsky’s classes knew she was incisive and funny, but within the
campus social taxonomy, she was overlooked — she was overweight and almost
never drank much, stayed out late or dated. After a few minutes of listening to
the stumbling conversation about sexual harassment, she raised her hand to make
a different point, about the way the school’s social life revolved around
appearance and money.
“Someone
made the decision for me that I’m not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section
X,” she told her classmates, her voice breaking.
The
room jumped to life. The students said they felt overwhelmed by the wealth that
coursed through the school, the way it seemed to shape every aspect of social
life — who joined activities that cost hundreds of dollars, who was invited to
the parties hosted by the student living in a penthouse apartment at the
Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston. Some students would never have to seek work
at all — they were at Harvard to learn to invest their families’ fortunes — and
others were borrowing thousands of dollars a year just to keep up socially.
The
discussion broke the ice, just not on the topic the deans had intended. “Until
then, no one else had publicly said ‘Section X,’ ” Mr. Batchu said. Maybe
it was because class was easier to talk about than gender, or maybe it was
because class was the bigger divide — at the school and in the country.
That
was only one out of 10 sessions. At most of the others, the men contributed
little. Some of them, and even a few women, had grown to openly resent the
deans’ emphasis on gender, using phrases like “ad nauseam” and “shoved down our
throats,” protesting that this was not what they had paid to learn.
Patrick
Erker was not among the naysayers — he considered himself a feminist and a fan
of the deans. As an undergraduate at Duke, he had managed the women’s
basketball team, wiping their sweat from the floor and picking up their dirty
jerseys.
But
as he silently listened to the discussion, he decided the setup was all wrong:
a discussion of a sex-related episode they knew little about, with “89 other
people judging every word,” led by professors who would be grading them later
that semester.
“I’d
like to be candid, but I paid half a million dollars to come here,” another man
said in an interview, counting his lost wages. “I could blow up my network with
one wrong comment.” The men were not insensitive, they said; they just considered
the discussion a poor investment of their carefully hoarded social capital. Mr.
Erker used the same words as many other students had to describe the mandatory
meetings: “forced” and “patronizing.”
That
week, Andrew Levine, the director of the annual spoof show, was notified by
administrators that he was on academic and social probation because other
students had consumed alcohol in the auditorium after a performance. (His
crime: dining with visiting family instead of staying as he had promised in a
contract.) He was barred from social events and put on academic probation as
well.
That
was just what students needed to believe their worst suspicions about the
administration. Ms. Frei had not made the decision about Mr. Levine and worked
to cancel his academic probation, he said later, but students called her a
hypocrite, a leadership expert who led badly. Hundreds of students soon wore
T-shirts that said “Free Andy” or “Unapologetic.”
“Daddy,
why are the students hating on you?” Mr. Nohria’s teenage daughters asked him,
he told students later.
A
few days before commencement, Nathan Bihlmaier, a second-year student,
disappeared while celebrating with classmates in Portland, Me. He had last been
seen so inebriated that a bartender had asked him to leave a pub. When the
authorities told students that Mr. Bihlmaier’s body had been dredged from the
harbor, apparently after a fall, Mr. Nohria and Ms. Moon were standing beside
them.
The
first year of their experiment was ending with a catastrophe that brought home
how little sway they really had over students’ actions. Mr. Bihlmaier had not
even been the drinking type. In the spirit of feminist celebration, Ms.
Sandberg gave a graduation address at the deans’ invitation, but during the
festivities all eyes were on Mr. Bihlmaier’s widow, visibly pregnant with their
first child.
Amid
all the turmoil, though, the deans saw cause for hope. The cruel classroom
jokes, along with other forms of intimidation, were far rarer. Students were
telling them about vigorous private conversations that had flowed from the
halting public ones. Women’s grades were rising — and despite the open resentment
toward the deans, overall student satisfaction ratings were higher than they
had been for years.
A Lopsided Situation
Even
on the coldest nights of early 2013, Ms. Frei walked home from campus,
clutching her iPhone and listening to a set of recordings made earlier in the
day. Once her two small sons were in bed, she settled at her dining table,
wearing pajamas and nursing a glass of wine, and fired up the digital files on
her laptop. “Really? Again?” her wife, Anne Morriss, would ask.
Ms.
Frei been promoted to dean of faculty recruiting, and she was on a quest to
bolster the number of female professors, who made up a fifth of the tenured
faculty. Female teachers, especially untenured ones, had faced various troubles
over the years: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunities to
write papers with senior professors, and students who destroyed their
confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the
spot or commenting on what they wore.
“As
a female faculty member, you are in an incredibly hostile teaching environment,
and they do nothing to protect you,” said one woman who left without tenure. A
current teacher said she was so afraid of a “wardrobe malfunction” that she
wore only custom suits in class, her tops invisibly secured to her skin with
double-sided tape.
Now
Ms. Frei, the guardian of the female junior faculty, was watching virtually
every minute of every class some of them taught, delivering tips on how to do
better in the next class. She barred other professors from giving them advice,
lest they get confused. But even some of Ms. Frei’s allies were dubious.
At
the end of every semester, students gave professors teaching scores from a low
of 1 to a high of 7, and some of the female junior faculty scores looked beyond
redemption. More of the male professors arrived at Harvard after long careers,
regaling students with real-life experiences. Because the pool of businesswomen
was smaller, female professors were more likely to be academics, and students
saw female stars as exceptions.
“The
female profs I had were clearly weaker than the male ones,” said Halle Tecco, a
2011 graduate. “They weren’t able to really run the classroom the way the male
ones could.”
Take
the popular second-year courses team-taught by Richard S. Ruback, a top finance
professor, and Royce G. Yudkoff, a co-founder of a private equity firm that
managed billions of dollars. The men taught students, among other lessons, how
to start a “search fund,” a pool of money to finance them while they found and
acquired a company. In recent years, search funds had become one of the hottest,
riskiest and most potentially lucrative pursuits for graduates of top business
schools — shortcuts to becoming owners and chief executives.
The
two professors were blunt and funny, pushing a student one moment, ribbing
another one the next. They embodied the financial promise of a Harvard business
degree: if the professors liked you, students knew, they might advise and even
back you.
As
Ms. Frei reviewed her tapes at night, making notes as she went along, she
looked for ways to instill that confidence. The women, who plainly wanted to be
liked, sometimes failed to assert their authority — say, by not calling out a
student who arrived late. But when they were challenged, they turned too tough,
responding defensively (“Where did you get that?”).
Ms.
Frei urged them to project warmth and high expectations at the same time, to
avoid trying to bolster their credibility with soliloquies about their own
research. “I think the class might be a little too much about you, and not
enough about the students,” she would tell them the next day.
By
the end of the semester, the teaching scores of the women had improved so much
that she thought they were a mistake. One professor had shot to a 6 from a 4.
Yet all the attention, along with other efforts to support female faculty, made
no immediate impact on the numbers of female teachers. So few women were coming
to teach at the school that evening out the numbers seemed almost impossible.
As
their final semester drew to a close, the students were preoccupied with the looming
question of their own employment. Like graduates before them, the class of 2013
would to some degree part by gender after graduation, with more men going into
higher-paying areas like finance and more women going into lower-paying ones
like marketing.
Ms.
Navab, who had started dating one of the men — with an M.D. and an M.B.A. —
from the Ethiopian dinner, had felt freer to focus on her career once she was
paired off. She was happy with her job at a California start-up, but she
pointed out that she and some other women never heard about many of the most
lucrative jobs because the men traded contacts and tips among themselves.
This
was the lopsided situation that women in business school were facing: in
intellectual prestige, they were pulling even with or outpacing male peers, but
they were not “touching
the money,” as Nori Gerardo Lietz, a real estate private equity investor
and faculty member, put it. A few alumnae had founded promising start-ups like Rent the Runway, an evening wear
rental service, but when it came to reaping big financial rewards, most women
were barely in the game.
At
an extracurricular presentation the year before, a female student
asked William Boyce, a co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital
firm, for advice for women who wanted to go into his field.
“Don’t,” he laughed, according to several students present. Male
partners did not want them there, he continued, and he was doing them a favor
by warning them.
Some
women protested or walked out, but others said they believed he was telling the
truth. (In interviews, Mr. Boyce denied saying women should not go into
venture capital, but an administrator said student complaints prompted the
school to contact the firm, which he had left decades before.)
The
deans had not focused on career choice, earning power or staying in the work
force; they felt they first needed to address campus issues. Besides, the
earning gap posed a dilemma: they were hoping fewer students would default to
finance as a career. “Have the courage to make the choices early in your life
that are determined by your passions,” Mr. Nohria told students.
Plenty
of women had taken Mr. Ruback and Mr. Yudkoff’s classes on acquiring and
running businesses, including Ms. Upton, who had delivered the crackerjack
finance presentation. She counted 30 to 40 classmates planning search funds,
all men except for a no-nonsense engineer named Jennifer Braus. The professors
eventually decided to finance and advise Ms. Braus, hoping other Harvard women
would follow.“Nothing succeeds like success,” Mr. Ruback said.
Ms.
Upton decided to take a far lower-risk job managing a wealthy family’s
investments in Pittsburgh, where her fiancé lived. “You can either be a
frontier charger or have an easier, happier life,” she said.
Looking Ahead
Of
all the ceremonies and receptions during graduation week, the most venerated
was the George F. Baker Scholar Luncheon, for the top 5 percent of the class,
held in a sunny dining room crowded with parents who looked alternately
thrilled and intimidated by what their offspring had achieved.
In
recent years, the glory of the luncheon had been dimmed by discomfort at the
low number of female honorees. But this year, almost 40 percent of the Baker
scholars were women. It was a remarkable rise that no one could precisely
explain. Had the professors rid themselves of unconscious biases? Were the
women performing better because of the improved environment? Or was the faculty
easing up in grading women because they knew the desired outcome?
“To
my head, all three happened,” Professor Piskorski said. But Mr. Nohria said he
had no cause to think the professors had used the new software, and the
subjective participation scores, to avoid gender gaps. “Sunshine is the best
disinfectant,” he said, a phrase that he said had guided him throughout his
project.
One
of the Baker scholars was Ms. Boyarsky, the classroom truth-teller. Two hours
after the luncheon, she stepped up to a lectern to address thousands of graduates,
faculty members and parents. Of the two dozen or so men and only 2 women
who had tried out before a student committee, she had beaten them all, with a
witty, self-deprecating speech unlike any in the school’s memory.
“I
entered H.B.S. as a truly ‘untraditional applicant’: morbidly obese,” she said.
The
theme of her speech was finding the courage to make necessary but painful
changes. “Courage is a brand new H.B.S. professor, younger than some of her
students, teaching her very first class on her very first day,” she said.
“Courage is one woman” — the one who reported the groping episode — “who wakes
the entire school up to the fact that gender relations still have a long way to
go at H.B.S.”
And,
Ms. Boyarsky continued, she had lost more than 100 pounds during her final year
at Harvard. “Courage was then me battling the urge to be defensive — something
I believe I had been for a long time about this particular issue — and taking a
hard, honest look within myself to figure out what had prevented change,” she
said.
Even
before she finished, her phone was buzzing with e-mails and texts from
classmates. She was the girl everyone wished they had gotten to know better,
the graduation-week equivalent of the person whose obituary made you wish you
had followed her work. She had closed the two-year experiment by making the
best possible case for it. “This is the student they chose to show off to the world,”
Ms. Moon said. For the next academic year, she was arranging for second-year
students to lead many of the trickiest conversations, realizing students were
the most potent advocates.
The
administrators and the class of 2013 were parting ways, their experiment
continuing. The deans vowed to carry on but could not say how aggressively:
whether they were willing to revise the tenure process to attract more female
contenders, or allow only firms that hired and promoted female candidates to
recruit on campus. “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s
permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is,” Ms.
Frei said.
The
students were fanning out to their new jobs, full of suspense about their
fates. Because of the unique nature of what they had experienced, they knew,
every class alumni magazine update and reunion would be a referendum on how
high the women could climb and what values the graduates instilled — the true
verdict on the experiment in which they had taken part.
As
Ms. Boyarsky glanced around her new job as a consultant at McKinsey in Dallas,
she often noticed that she was outnumbered by men, but she spoke up anyway. She
was dating more than she had at school, she added with shy enthusiasm.
“I
am super excited to go to my 30th reunion,” she said.