Harvard Business School's 'Woman Problem'

News of sexual harassment of female students by male classmates surfaced recently at Harvard Business School. Is the HBS administration to blame for not disciplining such behavior in the past?

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Frat-house atmosphere pervades nation's top business school, students say

On June 4, when members of Harvard Business School's class of 1998 file across the platform to receive the Most Powerful Degree in the World, only 24% of the graduates will be female. That's the lowest percentage of women any HBS class has had since the mid-1980s and lower than that of any other leading business school. But the gender imbalance won't be the most glaring manifestation of what has come to be known simply as Harvard Business School's "woman problem." At least one student will also be missing from the procession.

The student, a man, is one of six who were disciplined in early April for harassing their female classmates during their first year at the B-school. All were members of Section G, one of the 80-student units in which first-years take all their classes. Among other infractions, the men were found to have passed women lewd and sexually explicit notes. Some of those were among a packet of notes given to Inc. anonymously. "You look delicious presenting your shareholder argument. Come over here so I can lick you!" one note read.

A second: "Your pants today are hypnotic and I find myself strangely attracted to them. I'm going to pretend to drop my pen to get a closer look. While I'm bent over I'd love for you to rub my bald spot--it would be worth a lot to me."

And another: "I have to admit, I'm having nasty thoughts right now, and you figure prominently in them. What do you say we go and get a stall in the men's bathroom after the session and undertake our own 'review' session?"

Students say that class visitors, such as friends and family members of students, were frequent recipients of such notes. Acknowledges one male student in the section, "If you were attractive and you came to our section, it was pretty likely that you got a note."

On April 7, more than a year after some of the events in question took place, the school handed down sanctions to six of the note writers. (All the disciplined students contacted by Inc. declined to comment.) All six were required to apologize to the HBS community as a condition of graduating. In addition, some were asked to perform community service and to undergo counseling about sexual harassment. At least one of the students was told he wouldn't be allowed to cross the platform at graduation ceremonies, though he would still receive his diploma.

"In the real world, people would be fired for this sort of behavior," says Karin Kissane, a 1997 HBS graduate who was copresident of the Women's Student Association. "You are doing students a disservice not to provide a realistic environment in which men and women can learn about business decorum. We're pleased to see that the administration has taken this to heart."

The episode has thrown the business school into full spin control. On the Thursday before students disbanded for Easter and Passover weekend, HBS dean Kim Clark issued a memo announcing that "a small group of students in the section" were being punished for what he later termed "salacious" behavior. According to the HBS student newspaper, the Harbus News, the memo was released to preempt reporting by Inc., which had been investigating the issue for more than a week at the time. (An administration spokesperson denies that the memo was released for that reason but confirms that the school supplied a copy of it to the Boston Globe, which ran Clark's comments the next day.)

But the "small group of students" story left many insiders shaking their heads, as conversations with dozens of students, alumni, and faculty have made clear. They say that those students' behavior, while certainly inappropriate, was all too typical of the fraternity-house atmosphere that has come to pervade the world's top training ground for business leaders. "They made it sound like it [Section G] was a deviation from the norm, which really made me angry," says one female student. Echoes a woman from that Section G class: "It's not a case of a few bad apples."

Some go so far as to suggest that the six punished students are being made scapegoats by a school administration with a history of unresponsiveness to the harassment issue. "There's a constant blizzard of these notes being passed around every section," says one faculty member. "Punishing these students is like picking six snowflakes out of a snowstorm and prosecuting them for ruining the driveway."

Like one of the business school's famous case studies, the episode has thrown the spotlight on the school's handling of thorny issues of gender and behavioral standards. But more than that, it has raised broader questions about what sort of business leaders are being groomed for tomorrow's boardrooms.

An ivy-covered portal to the upper echelons of the business world, Harvard Business School arguably sets the tone of American business like no other institution. Its alumni account for roughly 20% of the top three officers at Fortune 500 companies, and one-third or so of its graduates are running their own businesses within 15 years of graduation. Because the tenor set within the school's walls has such rippling implications for the business world at large, it's of no small significance when, as one female alum puts it, "word on the street is that Harvard isn't a great place for women."

To wit: a survey conducted last year by a Harvard task force found that HBS women perceived their own school to be less woman-friendly than rival business schools. Behind those findings, some say, isn't so much a sexual-harassment problem per se as a more general decline in standards--the sort of standards that were sorely lacking when students in the class of 1992, at a black-tie HBS event at the New England Aquarium, decided to jump into the penguin pool. Or when students a few years back brought a belly dancer into the classroom. Says one female alum: "Every time I think of HBS, it makes me upset because of that kind of thing."

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