This post first appeared on Forbes.com
This week’s Sloan Women in Management Conference on ‘Innovating Through
Adversity’ poses tough questions about the systemic gender inequalities that still
exist in business today. Marissa Mayer of Google, Jennifer Siebel Newsom of Miss
Representation, and Fredericka Whitfield of CNN will take the stage to share their
insights on women’s advancement in business. Behind the scenes, a fantastic team
of ambitious MBA women are organizing the conference at one of the nation’s top
business schools.
But do business schools really prepare women for senior leadership roles with
companies?
As a graduate of Wharton’s undergraduate program and an MBA candidate at MIT’s
Sloan School of Management, I’d say no. Here’s why.
Business schools primarily think about female and male students as future
employees rather than as women and men with complex lives for whom
employment is a significant, but not the only, activity. If MBA programs truly want
to develop principled leaders, they need to address the different sets of concerns
students can expect to encounter in the classroom, as well as when they graduate
and enter the workforce.
Women in MBA programs often feel like they have to “do it all”, and that the
frequent tradeoffs inherent in a busy work and family life (often leading to a high
level of stress and anxiety) are something to be overcome, not managed. Imagine
the possibilities if business schools give the private concerns of their students a
genuine place in the planning of work through courses and programs on gender and
life issues, such as a talent management course for both men and women, a case
study in all leadership courses on the impact of diverse groups on career and home
dynamics, and continued support for gender-related conversations and discussions.
“The last frontier for women’s advancement at work is understanding how men
and women re-define roles at home,” says Anne Weisberg, head of Diversity
at Blackrock, a global financial management firm and author of Mass Career
Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce. She
emphasizes that MBAs should be discussing life and home issues as part of the
planning of work at the business school level. Currently there is no place for these
issues, but these topics need to be integrated into the curriculum.
The after-effects are clear. According to Harvard Kennedy School Professors
Barbara Kellerman and Deborah Rhode in their book, Women and Leadership: State
of Play and Strategies for Change, “one in three women with MBAs are not working
full time, compared with one in twenty men. A large portion of these women do,
however, want to return to work, yet generally do not without significant career
costs and difficulties.” Both men and women need to be made aware of these costs
and difficulties starting in business school, they’re going to lose good employees and
face major transition costs.
Aside from future concerns for women, there are many areas in current business
school environments where women face different challenges than men do based
on age, participation, and who they consider role models. The implications of not
addressing gender-specific challenges in the workplace end up hurting both men
and women’s recognition of gender differences in leadership positions.
”On average, women are younger than men in top ten MBA programs,” says MIT
Sloan Dean David Schmittlein. “This may lead to a negative perception of their
experience in the business school environment.” What’s more, he cites research
that “has shown that women aren’t called to participate as proportionally as often in
the classroom. When women are called on, the next person is less inclined to build
on their comments.”
According to a study entitled Wives of the Organizations, by Leipzig Professor Anne
Huff, women tend to volunteer more often for maintenance-level roles such as note-
taking, opportunities that they may not get recognition for. Huff’s research shows
that gender is an area to be further investigated in MBA programs.
There are also clear differences for women in terms of role models and faculty at
business schools. “Some of the most well regarded and least well regarded faculty
are women,” says Schmittlein. Yet women still make up a much smaller proportion
of faculty across business schools.
While I believe hosting women in management conferences at the nation’s top
business programs is an important first step to building a female talent pool,
women senior leaders and business school leadership must recognize how gender
differences in business school play a major role in and out of the classroom as well
in future careers. In today’s age, this issue is not just for women, but is crucial for
both men and women to reach their individual and often shared potential in work
and life. There is a need for new dialogue across MBA programs that address how
gender plays a role in business school environments and subsequently in building a
pipeline of female leaders in companies and on boards.
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