It was a rare act of defiance at a school where most women are chary of taking a stand on gender issues. For one, they're constantly reminded by the administration and fellow students to preserve the school's "brand equity." That means keeping the school's dirty laundry well buried in the hamper, both male and female students say. And having invested close to $80,000 in their degree, many women say they are loath to jeopardize their standing within the powerful HBS alumni network. "You get branded," says a recent graduate, insisting that if she were to be quoted by name, "all 60 men in my section will never return my calls for the next 40 years of my career."
If such fears sound exaggerated, witness the exchange that took place in the student newspaper, the Harbus News, in the spring of 1997. In its April Fools' issue, under the headline "HBS Trying to Get More Chicks," the newspaper reported that the school would be offering more woman-oriented courses, such as "Sleeping Your Way to the Top," "PMS Best Practices Management," and "Addressing the 'Does This Make Me Look Fat?' Question." The article finished with a quote: "Jesus H. Christ--the last thing HBS needs is more whiny, self-absorbed, politically correct, premenstrual prissy cry babies who can't take a friggin' joke even if it is shoved down their friggin' throat!"
In one respect, anyway, the author was right: some women could not take the joke. "The 'parodied' attitudes are very close to 'real' attitudes that women deal with continually here," Karin Kissane and Cynthia Rutherford, then the copresidents of the WSA, shot back in a subsequent issue.
It doesn't help the situation for women at HBS, either, that the WSA resembles more of a business than an advocacy group. The WSA has built a healthy revenue stream printing up "red notes"--faculty-approved crib sheets for first-year courses, so called because of the color of the paper they're printed on--and distributing them to its members. (However, Sarah Di Troia, current copresident, says the WSA will soon stop the practice.) The notes are said to be good, which is why more than 90% of the men on campus pay the $30 fee to become a member of the WSA. As a result, says a former WSA officer, the organization is sometimes wary of taking controversial stands that might alienate its customers--or rather, its members. "The fear is, we get so much money from them [red notes], we can't be too much of a political force on campus," she says. "It's kind of beautifully and bizarrely HBS."
On the day the Boston Globe story ran, Loretto Crane, the B-school's director of communications, was standing in the lobby outside Kim Clark's office. Professor Warren McFarlan, apparently unaware that Crane was standing with an Inc. reporter, seemed to be basking in the glow of a story well spun. "You did a nice job, Loretto," he offered on his way through.
Spin doctoring aside, many are inclined to credit Clark, who has been in his post not yet three years, with a sincere desire to improve the school's climate. "The dean's office had some very lumpy rugs when Kim came into it," says one faculty member, referring to problems inherited from Clark's predecessor, John McArthur, widely viewed as a wily practitioner of realpolitik.
Already, the administration has announced it will start editing the student-produced handbook that the school sends to incoming first-year students, excising references to certain classroom traditions and coarse humor. (The handbook's current version, in a section on campus dating, counsels students to "think globally and penetrate locally.") But as many point out, a culture is a slow thing to change, rooted as it is in the larger business environment. Even female students, many of whom have come from testosterone-filled environments such as Wall Street, seem to propagate the locker-room culture at times: in a stand-up performance at a section Christmas party, one of the woman complainants joked that her accounting professor "still hasn't gotten laid."
In the past, Clark has spoken of making Harvard Business School a "living model" for life in the corporate world. He says he'd now like to apply that principle to the school's culture. And it's precisely that aim that prompts consequential questions: Where does this sort of behavior come from? And more to the point, where will it go when its perpetrators depart campus for the real world?
"The plain fact--and the thing that I apologize for--is that it took us too long to act," concedes Clark. "We should have been much more aggressive."
But perhaps even that apology misses the mark a bit, says one former faculty member. "The real question," that former faculty member notes, "is whether the school is one year late or 15 years late."
Jerry Useem is an associate editor at Inc. Additional reporting was contributed by Inc. reporter Mike Hofman and associate editor Joshua Macht.
