[corporatejay]

Saw a really interesting interview with the Dean of Harvard Business on gender on Charlie Rose. here is the relevant excerpt.

Charlie Rose: So, on the question of women --

21:55 Nitin Nohria: Yes.

21:59 Charlie Rose: Did you think Harvard was doing a good job both in terms of women as professors, women as graduates and women participating in the academic life of the business school?

22:13 Nitin Nohria: We had been -- we started admitting women at Harvard Business School in 1963 and we took great comfort in the fact that each year from the eight women who we admitted to the first class, we were admitting more women each year and many of these went on to have great careers, and so we were satisfied we had an increasing number of women. But when we looked harder at the numbers we realize that even though we had been increasing the participation of women, not all of them were thriving at Harvard Business School. So for example every year we award graduating students Baker Scholars, these are people who were honors in the both the first year and second year. This is the highest academic honor of our business. We also give people first year honors and second year honors and we found that women were about half as represented in these honors as they should be by the percentage that we admitted. So for example, when we had 30 percent of the women who were a part of the class, only 15 percent were getting honors. So that made us, at least, pause and ask the question why. Why would it be the case that we believe we're admitting equally qualified women. We're not putting the thumb on the scale to admit women who are not as qualified as men, so why would they not do as well as Harvard Business School? It's hard to believe that women don't aspire to get honors at the same rate as men do. And what we learned is that there was nothing deliberate that was going on in our classrooms, so we found for example that some people suspected that maybe male professors were more hostile to women and since we have class participation as 50 percent of the grade, they were just undervaluing the comments of women. But we learned that, no, women were as likely to underperform in classes taught by women professors as by --

24:03 Charlie Rose: So why were they underperforming in classroom participation?

24:07 Nitin Nohria: So what we learned is that they were very subtle things. Women were a little bit more tentative sometimes to get into the classroom discussion. As a result, they might not get called upon at the same rate as men. We learned that women's comments were not as likely to be remembered as men who spoke out. So I was far more likely to, if Charlie spoke, to say Charlie had a great comment. On the other hand, if a woman spoke, I might just ignore that comment and not give it as much attention.


24:37 Charlie Rose: But why?


24:40 Nitin Nohria: I think this is just that we've learned through lots and lots of research that's been done in gender that we're all socialized, all of us, both men and women and it turns out women are as likely to under- represent, undervalue, overlook, not pay as much attention to the comments of a woman who speaks as a man, but once you become conscious of that and this is all we have to do, we actually made people mindful of that, once you become conscious of that, you can correct yourself quite quickly, but you have actually know that that's a bias that we all have and these forms of bias we think is one of the things that is actually getting in the way of women succeeding not just at Harvard Business School but in all organizations.