September 09, 2013
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Would you get your MBA from a business school where:
A secret society of ultra-wealthy, mostly male, mostly international students is called Section X and known for decadent parties and travel.
Men commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members. They openly ruminated on whom they would "kill, sleep with or marry" (in cruder terms).
Women were more likely to be sized up on how they look and some dressed up as Playboy bunnies at social parties.
One student lived in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston.
A former female McKinsey consultant publicly admits to taking a mid-tern marketing exam when she was hung over and getting a grade that was a "disaster."
These are just a few of the assertions in a New York Times article published yesterday (Sept. 8) on the Harvard Business School. The lengthy front page story with a jump to two full inside pages by Harvard Law School dropout Jodi Kantor describes what it calls an experiment by Harvard to give itself "a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success." It is based on interviews with "more than 70 professors, administrators and students."
According to the Times reporter, the men at the top of the male hierarchy at Harvard Business School most typically work in finance, drive expensive luxury cars and advertise "lavish weekend getaways on Instagram. Some belong to Section X, an "on-again-off-again secret society of ultra-wealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel. One commenter on the story noted that Section X is largely composed of about 100 MBA students, out of a total enrollment of more than 1,800, and was a group of mainly Princeton undergrads "most of whom were making up for the fact that they did not have a ‘college experience.’"
"Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked," reported the Times. "Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management Class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women (‘She’s kind of hot, but she’s so assertive’,"…some feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her ‘social cap,’ referring to capitalization."
"Someone made the decision for me that I’m not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X," said Brooke Boyarsky, at the time a first-year MBA Class of 2013 MBA at Harvard. She told her classmates this at a discussion about sexual harassment. "Until then, no one else had publicly said ‘Section X."
According to the Times, the room quickly came alive. "The students said they felt overwhelmed by the wealth that coursed through the school, the way it seemed to shape every aspect of social life–who joined activities that cost hundreds of dollars, who was invited to the parties hosted by the student living in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston. Some students would never have to seek work at all–they were at Harvard to learn to invest their families’ fortunes–and others were borrowing thousands of dollars a year just to keep up socially."
The Times reported that one student, Neda Navab, who had been a McKinsey & Co. consultant, admitted to taking a mid-term marketing exam hung over and her score was a disaster. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would "kill, sleep with or marry" (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked social events could be worse."
To help erase the academic gap between men and women at Harvard, female students were taught how to raise their hands more aggressively in class. Professors were made aware of the gap, caused in part by their own calling patterns in courses where half the grade is based on class participation. The school added stenographers to classes so professors would be less biased in calling on students in class discussions and software to show professors the distribution of their grades by gender.
Is this just a Harvard Business School problem, or a problem endemic to all elite MBA programs?
To read more about this, check out PoetsandQuants.com:
Section X: Harvard Business School’s Secret Society
Posted by:John A. Byrne
