Celebrating 50 Years of Female MBAs at Harvard Business School
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Harvard Business School (HBS)’s first female class of MBAs, and students earlier this month kicked off a yearlong celebration with an event sponsored by the HBS Women’s Student Association (WSA). Among the things to celebrate, according to an article recounting the event in Harvard Gazette, is the fact that women have grown from a mere eight members of that initial co-ed class to represent 40 percent of the current MBA program.
Speakers at the October 9th kickoff event included Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, and Youngme Moon, Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration and chair of the HBS MBA program. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who recently wrote “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” for the Atlantic, was scheduled for a second event on October 11th as part of a yearlong speaker series organized by the WSA.
Moon noted that the school will mark the milestone “not by congratulating ourselves on a job well done, but rather by using the opportunity to explore the issues and challenges that women continue to face in business and in the world at large,” according to the Harvard Gazette article. “The truth is we’ve come a long way, but we are not by any measure where we need to be,” she added.
Spar, a former junior faculty member at HBS, addressed a crowd made up largely of women, sharing her perspective of modern feminism. “We inherited a set of expectations that, at the moment, are actually dooming us to failure,” she said. In addition to her time at HBS and now as head of an all-female college, she also serves as a board member for investment firm Goldman Sachs, experiences she drew on for her speech, as well as a recent Newsweek cover story and a new book she is writing due out next fall.
Read the Harvard Gazette article about Spar’s October 9th address to the HBS WSA.
Learn more about events planned to mark 50 years of female MBAs at HBS.
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