Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean Nitin Nohria earlier this week acknowledged to an audience of 600 alumni and guests that the business school has at points in the past treated its female students and professors offensively.
There have been times at HBS when women felt “disrespected, left out and unloved by the school. I’m sorry on behalf of the business school,” he said, according to a report in Poets&Quants. “The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better.”
In his address, Nohria pledged to increase the percentage of women who are protagonists in HBS case studies over the next five years to 20 percent, more than double the current level of 9 percent. According to the P&Q report, Nohria shared that he would be meeting with HBS faculty this week to discuss how to meet this objective.
Nohria tackled the topic of the school’s treatment of women as part of a reception by the HBS Association of Northern California to honor more than 100 Harvard alumnae for their impact on business and the community. According to the P&Q report, many of the women in the audience sighed audibly at the 20 percent goal, thinking it not ambitious enough. His remarks come five months after a New York Times article describing HBS’s efforts to address gender inequality.
The impact of Nohria’s goal to increase female representation in case studies would reach well beyond HBS, because the school’s cases account for 80 percent of cases studied at business schools around the world. HBS made a similar effort to make its case studies more global, and today, 57 percent are international in nature, up from less than 5 percent 10 years ago.
In addition to the effort to increase the number of female protagonists in case studies, Nohria also promised to launch a program devoted to helping more women serve on boards of directors and to encourage mentorship of female students and alumni. Nohria did point out that HBS enrolled a record 41 percent women as part of this year’s entering MBA class.
Read the complete P&Q article, “HBS Dean Makes an Unusual Public Apology.”
