Inside the GSB bubble: A case for more female role models in the classroom

I’m sitting in class hearing a male classmate argue that “maybe Uber’s culture was necessary” for the success the company has had in such a short time. Our professor responds that toxic cultures aren’t necessary to build great companies. I’m on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to say that Uber’s culture of sexism and harassment is unacceptable, regardless of business outcomes. He never does, and the discussion moves on.

At the end of the session the professor asks for feedback on the class so far. A female classmate says she particularly liked hearing from a woman founder because this guest speaker was especially thoughtful, and because she was the only woman among the ten guests who had visited. My classmate says she would like to hear from more female entrepreneurs. The professor says he’d tried to find more women, but it just hadn’t worked out.

My hand shot up. I told the professor that trying wasn’t enough. I said I was disappointed to see such a homogeneous group of founders. I told him I appreciated his efforts, but the results were just too skewed. I explained that I have a hard time seeing myself in the success stories we see in class. Our professor responded, “No one has tried harder than I have to bring in female guest speakers. I’ve invited quite a few, and if they couldn’t come, that is just not my fault.”

While my experience in this class was particularly striking, it is unfortunately not unique among classes at the GSB. The vast majority of the professors and guest speakers are men. In the 15 classes I am taking in my second year of the MBA program, I have 29 lecturers — successful people from the “real world” who come back to teach as practitioners — and 26 are men. Our guest speakers in class follow a similar pattern: typically, about 80 percent or more of these visitors are men (and the numbers are even worse for other types of diversity, like race and sexual orientation).

The #MeToo movement has brought to light a seemingly never-ending series of horrific discrimination, harassment, and assault stories, many of them based in the workplace. The experiences women have been dealing with for decades are finally getting the attention they deserve.

I believe we need to do more than expose stories from the past. We need to ensure the next generation of leaders will put an end to this pattern. The GSB is not and cannot operate as a bubble, protected from these issues. We need our professors to take a stand on discrimination and harassment, as well as equity and inclusion, in the workplace when these issues come up in class discussions. We hear too often that these topics are “gray areas” or “not part of the curriculum” for a given class. We look up to our professors as role models, and we need them to be willing to address important issues head on, even if the discussion is challenging or contentious.

We need to ensure that GSB students — male and female — are exposed to a wide range of role models. We need more diversity in the examples we see, so we can all imagine ourselves in their shoes someday, and so we don’t equate leadership with a singular mental image. This diversity cannot be constrained to classes like “Women and Leadership” or “Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspectives” and the students who self-select to take these courses.

And as students, we need to keep speaking up. Just this year, classmates created a new honor called the Amplifier Award to recognize the professors that work towards inclusive environments in the classroom. Others have developed independent study projects to highlight improvements that would lead to more diverse models of leadership at GSB.

Each of these efforts goes a long way in both enacting change and showing the administration how much we care. For me, speaking up in class had a noticeable impact. While one professor dismissed our feedback, another took us seriously. He pulled me aside after class and promised he would do his part to share more examples of female role models.

He stuck to his word. Less than a week after the incident in class, he had scheduled dinners with three successful Silicon Valley women. Each event was oversubscribed with students from our class. I was blown away. When I saw that this professor was teaching a class the following quarter, I immediately signed up. He debuted a case he had written since the feedback we gave a few months back: the protagonist was a woman he described as the best marketer in all of Silicon Valley. There are plenty of examples of amazing women we can learn from — we just need the administration and our teachers to understand the importance of finding them.