The 'New Girl Network'

Business is no longer exclusively a male domain, and neither is Harvard Business School. Of the 785 first-year MBA candidates at the Business School this year, 175 are women. That's 22 per cent--more than any year in Business School history. "It's the first time that women have critical mass at the school," says Elaine B. Medverd, director of the MBA program. "And it makes a big difference in the classroom."

The jump in the number of women came quickly. The first-year class two years ago was 10 per cent women--ten years ago it was only 5 per cent. The increase came as a result of a rise in the number of women applicants, says Regina E. Herzlinger, associate professor of Business Administration and a member of the Admissions and Financial Aid Policy Committee. Sex-blind admissions at the school have kept the fraction of women in the class approximately the same as that in the applicant pool.

The increase has generated optimism among women at the school about their future role in the business community. Herzlinger believes women in business can attain the goals they set for themselves. Women's lower average salaries, she says, are better explained by their choice of lower-paying fields, such as public-sector jobs, than by discrimination by financial institutions.

Herzlinger adds she has seen women at the Business School grow more confident as their numbers grew. The same pattern appears in the real business world: as the number of women in executive positions continues to rise, "they and their male colleagues stop viewing an influential woman as Woman. Her distinguishing characteristic is no longer the biological characteristic," she says.

Many women at the school look forward to the establishment of a "new girl network" that would serve as "an executive washroom--for women," as Victoria Hamilton '75, a second-year student, describes it. Such a network would ease young women's entrance into an atmosphere wholly different from others in which they have succeeded previously.

A management job may be the first time a woman must work as part of a team in order to thrive, several women business students point out. Few women start their business careers with the teamwork experience that men have received from team sports and other activities.

"It's possible for isolated women to make it on their own," says Linda B. Poor, a second-year student and president of the HBS Women's Student Association (WSA). "But it's a real breakthrough when each of the women in a group can say, 'I need these women and they need me. And I'm confident enough of my own professional ability to take the time to help them."'

Poor says she thinks a network will develop as more women graduates of business schools come to accept a responsibility on their part to provide guidance to other women in their early years with large firms. An encouraging sign, she adds, was the result of a survey the WSA conducted by mail this fall among 1200 HBS alumnae. All of the 300 women who responded said they are interested in helping HBS women to launch their careers.

The WSA hopes to harness this type of willingness to help younger women at the start of their business careers. "Our primary function," Poor explains, "is to see that the women who come here like it and are successful, both while they're here and after they graduate."

Before exams in large first-year courses the WSA runs review sessions which are attended regularly by more than 500 students, both men and women. The sessions are conducted by second-year women students who have received high grades in the course. "It's good for the men who attend to see a woman who's proven her ability to get up and speak in front of such a large group," Poor says.

The WSA also sponsors a series of speeches by women who are "stars in their fields," Poor says. These speakers serve a function the overwhelmingly male HBS faculty cannot serve--that of providing role models for women and suggesting the possibility to male students of "being subordinate to a woman," she adds.

Despite their affirmation of the need for a business-women's network, many HBS women hesitate to call themselves feminists. Some have found identification with the women's movement a drawback in their work experience, especially when they are the first women to hold their positions.

Cathy A. Connett, a second-year MBA candidate, describes her experience as supervisor of a Duncan Hines packing plant. "I had taken great pains to convince the men I was working with that I could do a competent job--I'd specifically requested that the workers train me so that they could get to know me personally and I could earn their respect...One of the women who followed me made a point of correcting the men when they called her a girl instead of a woman. Then when they referred to me as a girl I knew they were using it derogatorily...Why did she have to alienate them that way? It didn't help her image any; it didn't help mine either."

Hamilton also says she has had "very little use for feminist rhetoric. When you have to deal with a man who you think is a sexist, let him do the talking. When he exposes his own illogic, he'll be persuade that you're right. Rhetoric won't persuade anyone."

Hamilton says a woman who seldom makes sexism an issue has more effect when she does make an objection. "I got called the 'prettiest little girl in our class' by a classmate at a job-hunting party. I pointed out to him later that that wasn't a compliment--and he won't do it again. If he had been used to my objecting to his vocabulary, he wouldn't have taken me seriously."

The Business School is "on the whole not a sexist place," Hamilton adds. Most professors, she says, are extremely careful not to make sexist remarks and to give women students an equal opportunity to speak in class. Her one criticism was that the required first-year organizational behavior classes do not adequately cover the problems that arise when businessmen have to work with female colleagues for the first time.

Kate Merritt, a second-year student, echoed this objection. "My human behavior professor was scared to death of the issue...At least one-third of the guys in my section would be impossible for a women to work with. The school is abdicating a responsibility by not making the men realize that they may have to report to a female executive someday."

"It's not just an issue for human behavior classes," she continues. "Not one of the chief executive officers in our case studies has been a woman...The school is not practicing overt sexism, but they're not actively trying to promote women's acceptance either."

Merritt's criticism addresses only one side of the problem a woman faces when she considers a career in management--another concerns the conflicts between rearing a family and having a business career.

Two recent Business School graduates stress the difficulty of doing both things well.

Marilyn G. Breslow, who graduated in 1970, is the administrative manager of a Polaroid research facility and the mother of two small children. Fulfilling the responsibilities of both these jobs is "no mean feat," she says, adding "I have to be in good physical shape for this lifestyle. I can't afford to get sick."

Breslow's burden is eased by her 45-hour-a-week housekeeper, who watches the children while both parents are at work. She and her husband, a professor at the Medical School, came up with this expensive solution to "the dual career problem" by making use of their two professional salaries. She and her husband also share equally in child-rearing tasks.

Diana Barrett, who graduated from the Business School in 1974, says she thinks it is unrealistic to expect most marriages to work out so equitably. An instructor in Management Development in Health Care at the School of Public Health, Barrett is the mother of one child and expects a second. She says she "has structured her family and professional responsibilities so that they dovetail...I still play a much stronger role than my husband when it comes to our child."

Barrett's choice of an academic career has allowed her more flexibility than she would have had in health-care management. She made her choice with that flexibility in mind, but warns business school women of the difficulty in foreseeing the need to make these hard choices when they are still single and in school.

"No one can be super-professional, super-wife, and super-mother all at once. Women who are very good at organizing their time try to do two jobs--and their professional life suffers."

"I've had to make sacrifices in my career," she continues. "I'd love the chance to be a vice president in a major teaching hospital. It's something I don't have the time to do and still fulfill my family responsibilities--and it's the kind of job I won't be offered if I start looking too late."

Women who are concerned with integrating feminist principles into their career plans often reject Business School as "a sell-out." As second-year MBA candidate Anne L. Houden puts it, "Large numbers of women going into management will change business's image. But right now, to get ahead at Harvard Business School you have to adopt business ethics--and those are male ethics."

Houden began college at Wellesley in 1968 and took seven years off before returning as a junior to the University of Wisconsin. She labels herself a feminist, and she, too, sees a conflict between business ethics and feminist principles.

"Whenever I run into the radicals I went to college with in the '60s I'm afraid they're going to accuse me of 'selling out,"' she says. "But the financial world has an important effect on people's lives. I'd like to see more humanistically oriented people go into business and maintain their values...I feel a responsibility to take the skills I've gained at HBS and use them to foment change."

Jo Froman, a second-year student who has been out of college since 1969, takes a similar position. "Men and women have to work together to restructure the business environment," she says. Large numbers of women in responsible positions should give management a more androgynous image, she added.

Froman says she does not consider most of her male colleagues at HBS sexists. Because of this, she says, "ten or 15 years down the line things are going to be much better for women in business. These guys are going to be in a position to hire women as managers--and I think they'll do it."

The few facts available seem to bear Froman out. A recent Fortune survey found all 34 women members of the HBS Class of 1973 working, or looking for work, in such formerly all-male jobs as banking, consulting, sales and marketing, and advertising. Yet whether Herzlinger's prediction, that the next ten years will find a woman in charge of a Fortune 500 firm, will come true remains to be seen.