HBS Community Defends Campus Culture

In the wake of a controversial portrayal of gender culture by an article in The New York Times, members of the Harvard Business School community criticized the paper’s coverage for representing only a small fraction of student experiences and for misrepresenting gender-related initiatives at HBS.

The article, which was published in The New York Times on Sept. 7, detailed cases of reported gender imbalances at HBS and explored initiatives that the school undertook to correct perceived inequities.

The publication of the article prompted two op-eds in The Arbus, HBS student newspaper, both of which criticized The New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s depiction of students at HBS. Critics focused especially on the depiction of the school as a hostil environment for females.

Assistant professor Pian Shu, who arrived at HBS in 2012, said that her experience at the school does not resemble the one described in the article.

“The article cherry-picks one experience and highlights it. That’s a very particular experience,” Shu said. “The New York Times article implies students are here to be jerks; but that is not true. Everyone is here to have the best time. There is a learning curve for students and faculty, but everyone has the best intentions.”

For Professor Janice H. Hammond, who has been at HBS for 29 years and was involved in changes the school made to address gender inequities, the article’s primary problem was its portrayal of the school’s gender-related initiatives. She criticized the way the article—and subsequent letters to the editor—that The New York Times published implied that the increase in females graduating in the top 5 percent of the class was artificial.

“There is the suggestion that somehow faculty has been told to grade women more easily,” Hammond said. “That is not true. I have been to faculty meetings. I have talked to my colleagues. Those women earned it.”

While Hammond acknowledged that there are some gender imbalances at HBS, she said that those imbalances are not unique to the school.

“I have at times had concerns about the culture for women in our classrooms and schools, but I don’t think we’re unique in having a problem. Society has a problem in recognizing women, and I don’t think it’s surprising that would show up at our institution,” she said. “We are trying to be conscientious of these things, and we are looking at steps we can take, in a very earnest way.”

Eric B. Lonstein, a second-year student at HBS who authored one of the two op-eds in The Arbus about the Times story, acknowledged that the article raised some important challenges that HBS and the business world face, but added that it was ultimately an unfair representation of HBS.

“I also believe that there were important aspects of HBS culture that were not discussed in Ms. Kantor’s piece, and I hoped my article would help create a more complete picture of what the student body is like at HBS,” Lonstein said.

In a letter to the student body at HBS after Kantor’s article was published, Senior Associate Dean Youngme E. Moon encouraged students to take the opportunity to discuss issues of gender and create change in the culture.