A Pair of Photographs to Mark Fifty Years
As of this September, fifty years have passed since the first two female INSEAD MBA candidates set foot on INSEAD’s Fontainebleau campus in the fall of 1967. See here for a video interview with Hélène Ploix, MBA’68, one of these two courageous women.
INSEAD Women in Business chose to mark the anniversary with a pair of photographs to document the progress that INSEAD has made on the gender diversity front. From just two women in 1967 to hundreds in 2017, INSEAD, and society in general, have truly come a long way in terms of acceptance and encouragement of women in the business world.
What you don’t see in the photos, however, are the countless other women whose pioneering efforts in their respective fields have paved the way for so many of us to appear in these photos. Each woman pictured represents a web of others stretching back through the years; their years of “firsts” the stepping stones for those of us who have followed.
But what the photos also omit is that we have a long way left to go, with many “firsts” still to come. These two photos, representing the hundreds of female MBA candidates across INSEAD’s two campuses, don’t depict that we are still just 34% of a student body of over a thousand. They do not visually convey that while many of us in these photos will go on to successful careers, worrisome trends such as a decline in appointments of female Fortune 500 board members in 2016 suggest that we’ll need to work hard to maintain our forward momentum in the corporate world. And those of us pursuing entrepreneurship as a career are faced with equally worrisome reports of a fundraising environment plagued by bias and harassment.
That being said, one final omission of these photos are the many strong male allies we are fortunate to count among our classmates, partners, faculty, and administrators at INSEAD and beyond. And there are many — from the men in our class who actively organize and participate in IWiB events to the professors working tirelessly to educate others on how they can help champion the cause of gender diversity, from the fathers who have believed in us since we were little to our partners who are supporting us in all our endeavors, including this INSEAD adventure. We are looking forward to continuing the journey towards true gender diversity together.
