To transform gendered business environments, women need to be adequately featured in business school teaching material. When I started my master’s at INSEAD business school in 2013 I immediately noticed that women were underrepresented from the student body through to professorial level. I realised this underrepresentation went as far as the teaching material we were working with – none of the business case studies featured women. So, for my master’s thesis topic I decided to research this issue – the first ever study of this kind. My findings revealed the extent to which women were excluded from these crucial course materials. Written by business school faculties, case papers are used to provide MBA students with an insight into real-world business problems and put them in the role of the decision-maker. The case study method is a style of learning that accounts for as much as a third of teaching among today’s top business schools. My research covered 105 different papers between 2009 and 2018 from the Case Centre, an authority in case paper teaching. Here are some of the key findings: More women in papers over time but not always in business roles Between 2009 and 2013, women featured in 55 per cent of cases, which inspired the name of my research Invisible Selves: Writing women into business school case papers . In these cases, women tended to be in subordinate roles or from examples of marginalised communities. Since 2016 women are found in 90 per cent of cases. However, although 67 per cent of the 105 papers had women in them, in 23 or 22 per cent of these papers women could either be missed by the reader or the women were in a non-business-related role (eg the wife of a character). We judged that women are present in a prominent or business-focussed role in only 47 or 45 per cent of papers. Women are also not found at all in a third of papers. We started researching the number of characters across a total of 52 papers between 2015 and 2019 and found that there were 89 female characters – an average of just under two women per paper. Despite disappointing findings, there is a move by schools to add more women characters into papers. Few female leaders and nothing is changing The research shows that despite the increasing number of female characters, the same cannot be said about the number of female leaders. Of the 105 papers only 12 featured a female protagonist. And this figure has not improved over time. I adapted the Bechdel test to use on case studies and called it the “Symons Test”. In order to pass this test, a case paper had to: 1) have a woman in it, who, was 2) in a leadership position (the protagonist in the research) and 3) who spoke to another woman about the business. Over the 10 years, only four papers out of 105 have a women leader speaking to another women about the business, an abysmal four per cent. It is imperative going forward that case papers not only have more women characters but crucially more women leaders, so that female and male business students view women as leaders in business. Leadership descriptors with stereotypically male attributes Men are present in 103 of the 105 papers. 83 of these papers have a male protagonist. In the five years we have been counting characters there are 450 male characters across 52 papers; an average of just under nine characters per paper. Along with the lack of female leaders, the papers also represented leadership using attributes that are stereotypically assigned to men. Virginia Schein conducted seminal research in the 1970s into the way traditionally “male” qualities are associated with leadership, coining the phrase “think manager, think male”. My thesis, taking this into account, found that male protagonists were described using the following kinds of characteristics in case studies: “tough, assertive, results-driven, strong-willed, courageous, energetic and able to see the big picture”. Even in cases where there were female leaders, their male counterparts were described in more detail. This suggested that the correct leadership style being put forward by the papers is one with male attributes. This lack of diverse descriptors stifles discussions about different approaches to leadership and promotes a one-size-fits-all traditionally masculine style. So what does this research tell us about business schools that are purporting to teach us how to lead? Business schools are supposed to prepare students for the modern business world, but their teaching material is outdated and promotes skewed representations of gender. How can we change work environments loaded with unconscious gender bias when the very places in which we learn about business are themselves steeped in such stereotypical bias? A start would be to add more women leaders and characters into case papers. At the same time business schools need to analyse and understand, from the top down, the explicit and implicit messages about gender and leadership that all parts of their organisations and programmes convey to students. Business schools need to recognise the role their institutions play in maintaining this status quo and address how they can change these messages. With relatively few women leading in business, the need for change is urgent. Business schools should be leading by example when it comes to encouraging women in leadership, showing students and the companies that they will eventually work for that they are ahead of the curve and are committed to developing leaders of the future. Lesley Symons is a leadership coach and researcher on women, business schools and case papers at The Case for Women . Donna Keegan is researcher and project manager at The Case for Women . See here for the original article.

This case explores the issues of gender in the workplace, and the deep structures of power that marginalize, oppress, and silence individuals and groups. It helps explore the dark side of the stereotypes, biases, and beliefs in the workplace about women and leadership. The case discusses aspects of the sudden and surprise firing in 2014 of Jill Abramson (Abramson), the first woman executive editor of The New York Times (NYT) in its 160-year-old history. In May 2014, the publisher of the company, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, suddenly announced the unceremonious exit of Abramson without giving any reasons, and thereby attracted a lot of media attention. The abrupt firing raised questions on gender disparity, discrimination in salaries and incentives, sexism, and even non-acceptance of a disapproving look when it came from a woman. The behavior of Abramson, who was known to be aggressive in her communications with her team, her looks, and management style were all called into question; she was even described as having a 'bitchy resting face' and a voice that sounded like a nasal car honk. Abramson did not share a great relationship with the publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, president and CEO Mark Thompson, and her direct report Dean Baquet, who eventually succeeded her. The issue also reignited the debate on whether women in the workforce, even those in high positions, got a raw deal compared to their male counterparts. There were several questions being debated such as: What should female employees do if they are a victim of gender pay inequity? Are female executives disliked, and even fired, for behaving too much like male managers? To purchase this case paper, please visit: The Case Centre

A psychodynamic look at leadership identities and transitions.  The Starting Point The push for more women in business and in leadership positions is ever present. Business schools play a vital role in achieving gender diversity in leadership and on boards. However, if you take a walk around most business school campuses, what you will see is a majority male student cohort, few female students, few female professors and few women protagonists in the MBA/EMBA course material. This bothered me⎯a lot. Idea in Brief The main teaching tool at business schools is the case method approach, lauded as a way of enabling students to learn to lead and connect theory with real-life experiences. For this study, 74 award-winning and bestselling case studies from 2009-2015 were analyzed on how they represent women. Findings show that: There is a systemic lack of female lead protagonists and an overall absence of women in case studies. Case studies portray a “male” model of leadership and perpetrate second-generation gender bias. The lack of women in case studies, as professors or on boards, together with a largely male student cohort at business schools, reinforce the status quo and undermine female managers’ ability to establish their own leadership identity. Idea in Practice Business schools should play a vital role in promoting gender equality in organizational leadership and on executive boards. Although they profess to promote gender balance in organizations, in some ways business schools preserve the status quo. The reality is in the numbers: female professors are few, case protagonists are overwhelmingly men, and in the student body men are almost always in a strong majority. This suggests that stereotypical “male” leadership qualities are reinforced by business schools. The implicit message – for both female and male MBA students – is that to succeed they must conform to the masculine “norm.” For women MBA students, who obviously have much to contribute as future executives, not only are they in the minority, but they are virtually invisible in most of the teaching materials and models of leadership presented. Clearly, business schools need to analyze and understand the explicit and implicit gender messages that all parts of the organization and its programs convey, and what role they play in maintaining the status quo. Current MBA case studies, by their very nature, impede debate about the roles of both women and men in organizations—one would think these are important issues for business schools. For the full publication, please see here .

The case study method is a style of learning that accounts for as much as a third of teaching among today’s top business schools. Written by business school faculty, case studies (or business cases ) provide MBA students with an insight into real-world business problems and put them in the role of the decision-maker. Vital teaching tools Vicky Lester is the deputy director at The Case Centre , an independent not-for-profit organization promoting use of the case study method in business education around the world. She says the method’s key strength as teaching tools comes in getting students engaged and increasing their confidence. The Case Centre also acts as a digital library of business cases for schools, faculty and students, housing approximately 50,000 business cases from the last 40 years. “It’s a safe environment for them where they can put themselves into the position of the protagonist within the case study and make decisions based on the information given,” Lester says, noting how eagerness to adopt the method among business schools in emerging markets is seeing its influence grow on the international stage. Considering the method’s significance, one might expect these teaching tools to provide a fair reflection of the real business world and perhaps even to positively enforce the idea that women in business have been underrepresented for too long. So, the recent revelation at Harvard Business School (which contributes roughly 80% of the world’s supply of business cases) that only about 9% of its case studies currently focus on a female leader (or protagonist) comes as quite a shock. Harvard Business School’s promise on business cases The revelation from Harvard also came with a promise to act on this gender inequality and double the school’s number of female protagonists in its case studies to 20% over the next five years. While recognition of the problem and a commitment to improve is commendable, that’s aspiring to just 20% when MBA classes are commonly made up of student bodies that are over 30% female. Wharton MBA alumna and writer, Phyllis Zimbler Miller, was suitably unimpressed, writing in her blog ; “how magnanimous of the Harvard Business School dean to state that the future case studies would have 20% of women ‘protagonists’...Why not 50%?” INSEAD graduate, Lesley Symons has been exploring this conundrum. Indeed, her thesis - written as part of her Master’s in Consulting and Coaching for Change – serves as a damning indictment of gender inequality in business case studies. Symons, who traded a management career with multi-national corporations for coaching ten years ago, became interested in the topic after noticing a disproportionate number of female faculty, as well as presence in teaching tools, on an INSEAD program that was almost an equal split between men and women. “I thought, well, if we’re trying to get women into leadership and onto boards doesn’t a business school need to have a role in this?” she recalls. A Catalyst report at the end of 2013 certainly highlighted the need to do more by revealing little improvement in female representation among the Fortune 500’s top earners over the past five years. Only 16.9% of corporate board seats at these companies were held by women in 2013. The results of Symons’ thesis, ‘Where are the women leaders?’, confirms that the number of cases prominently featuring women in leadership positions is currently lower even than this – and considerably lower than the number of female students commonly found on MBA courses. INSEAD graduate highlights extent of problem The INSEAD graduate’s data came from a study of award-winning business school cases from 2009-2013, as well as The Case Centre's top 3 best-sellers in each of those years. Across the five years and 53 different case studies, Symons found that women in leadership positions made no more than a minimal appearance in 73% of them and featured as a protagonist just seven times - or in 12.5% of the business cases analyzed. Plus, on realizing that three of the award-winning cases featuring a female protagonist were written by the same author, Harvard Business School professor Christopher Bartlett, Symons got in touch only for Bartlett to confess that he had simply changed two male characters to female because he was aware that Harvard’s teaching tools lacked sufficient female role models. “That has a knock-down effect for women, and for men, in learning about leadership,” Symons says, explaining that it doesn’t give women sufficient female role models to encourage them to believe there’s any way to reach leadership positions, other than by subconsciously adopting male leadership attributes. “If you’re on an MBA program and you’re in a low minority and there are no women in the papers or in the teaching, you’re actually highly visible because you’re highly different. So, what that often means is that women try to become invisible by taking on similar traits as men,” Symons expands, adding that, “For men, it reiterates, or re-embeds, that leadership is male.” Unfortunately, women in leadership positions who display ‘male-like’ leadership attributes have been known to become decidedly unpopular. This is an underlying reason why Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and author of Lean In, created the campaign to Ban Bossy . Are business schools failing women in leadership? Business schools should be leading by example when it comes to encouraging women in leadership and preparing them to join the next generation of senior managers. However, in this, it seems they still have a lot of ground to make up. “What business schools need to be doing is a little bit of what organizations are doing. Big organizations are having a debate around what gender means for them and their leadership. I think business schools have started to look at gender in the classroom because it’s a bit of a hot topic, but I’m not sure they’re looking at themselves, and at the whole institution.” It’s underwhelming to hear that business schools could learn a thing or two from corporate culture when many would argue that it’s supposed to be the other way round – that business schools could and should be challenging and informing corporate culture. As Symons surmises, “if they profess to be teaching about leading or cutting edge theory then why aren’t they doing this as well?” Systematic changes needed in case studies’ production She believes the problem afflicting business cases may stem from the current system whereby the gender of characters portrayed is not tracked along their way to publication, meaning that you only really know how many women in leadership positions feature by reading the finished article. “My understanding is when people hand in a new case paper there isn’t any coding on whether it’s got a male or female protagonist, so part of the problem is changing that,” she says indicating that this difficulty might explain why Harvard Business School has its sights set seemingly low. In a situation where case studies are the intellectual property of the professor, rather than the school, looking at an entire MBA program’s teaching tools would be the best place to start to redress the balance, something Symons isn’t convinced has been done before. Working with The Case Centre and business schools to increase awareness Symons hasn’t finished looking into the extent of gender inequality in business school cases now that she’s graduated from INSEAD. She wants to go further and look at The Case Centre’s 40 best-selling business cases collated in the 40 years since its inception, as well as to try and find a way to explore a school’s entire catalogue of cases used so that she can see the range available to students on a specific MBA program. She’s already had a conversation with Harvard and is hopeful that she can add a bit of perspective to their attempts to look at the problem of gender inequality in their case studies. “What I’ve said to them is it’s not just about the women protagonists, it’s how many women are in the papers and how they’re described,” she says, having constructed a system in her own work that judges the level of participation from female leaders, taking inspiration from The Bechdel Test often applied to movies. What drives Symons to go further in her research is being able to help both women and men reassess the way they look at leadership identities and how teaching tools, such as case studies, can have a strong impact on how people view women in leadership. Education is the first step, she says, and opening the debate is reward enough. What remains to be seen is how far business schools are prepared to go to change the troubling gender inequality in business case studies used in the world’s leading MBA programs – now that it has finally come to light. See here for the original article.

You might expect organizations that teach the latest in leadership theory to practice what they preach. It ain’t happening. There is a raft of research showing that improving gender balance leads to enhanced business performance. But business schools, which serve as talent pools for companies that are working on their own gender balance, seem stuck in yesterday’s statistics. Women make up 60% of university graduates, but that number falls precipitously at business schools. Female faculty are in even shorter supply. Our Gender Balance Scorecard on Business Schools , the first scorecard we’ve done for B-schools , gives an overview of the top 100 schools (Financial Times ranking, 2015). It also takes an in-depth look at the top 12 business schools and how they have evolved since 2010. Based on research by one of us (Lesley), it focuses on the gender balance achieved at two levels: among MBA students and among faculty. Key findings: Better MBA balance : Most of the Top 100 business schools show some improvement in the gender balance of the MBA student body since 2010. Static faculty balance : Gender balance on the faculty side, however, seems more challenging. Most balanced : Star performing schools with female student numbers over 40% and female faculty numbers over 30% include the University of Hong Kong, Imperial College, Lancaster, Bath, Queens, Birmingham, and Fudan business schools. Two have a female Dean. None are in the FT’s “Top 12 tier” of schools. Some of the best are most balanced in MBAs… : Four of the top 12 schools now have student participation at 40% and above: Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, and University of California at Berkeley. …and least balanced in faculty : Only one school in the top 12 has female faculty numbers above 30% (IE Business School) and fully one-third of them have lower than 20%: INSEAD, Columbia Business School, University of Chicago Booth, and CEIBS. MBA programs attract the future leaders of the world’s largest companies—of the 500 largest public companies worldwide, 31% are led by an MBA graduate. Over the past decade, significant efforts have been made to gender balance the world’s best MBA programs. Depending on where you look, those efforts have been more or less successful. We’ve observed that having an MBA gives neither men nor women the skills they need to build and lead gender-balanced teams. No wonder. As Lesley has shown in her research on business school case studies , the learning tools used in MBA programs feature case studies dominated by men. The faculty are mostly men (tenured faculty even more so). And executive programs are even more male-dominated than MBA classes. If you add all this up, neither women nor men are getting much experience of gender balance at the world’s top business schools. Business schools could play a crucial role in educating both men and women about gender-balanced companies and leadership. They are an ideal place to develop talent that is twenty-first-century-ready—i.e., that is both meritocratic and “gender bilingual.” How seriously have these schools embedded this culture change themselves? Have they created balanced learning environments? And how attractive are their rather masculine cultures to today’s more female-dominated pools of college graduates? 36.4% of MBA degrees awarded in the U.S. in 2012–2013 were awarded to women . The balance improves slightly outside the U.S. (38.1%). But the number of students earning MBA degrees is actually declining across the globe, and that should alert business schools that they need to urgently adapt to the needs and expectations of today’s talent. The first phase of this transformation seems fragilely underway, with schools recognizing the need to attract more female students. But Phase 2, creating balanced organizations and addressing the cultures and styles that dominate in most leading schools, has hardly begun. Even schools that have managed to improve their faculty balance discover that the balance is limited to certain disciplines , like organizational behavior. Is this really serving the companies, most of whom are trying to improve their gender balance, that are the key customers of these schools? As Harvard has courageously confessed , even when gender ratios improve, cultures don’t automatically become more gender bilingual. There is still a lot of work to be done in this area, and it will take leadership. It’s time for business schools to deliver on their purpose—access to the world’s best talent. All the talent. See here for the original article.

When it comes to gender equality at business schools, it’s not just about the percentage of female students. What exactly those students are learning is also vitally important. A new analysis published in Harvard Business Review finds that, from 2009 to 2015, just eight of 74 best-selling case studies--the primary teaching tool in many schools--featured a female protagonist. A full 62 had male protagonists, while four had no clear central character. Drill down, and the numbers get even worse. Of the 21 cases published in the last two years, just a single one included a female lead. Altogether, the 21 cases from 2014 and 2015 feature 222 characters, only 21 of whom are women. Business schools have come under increasing pressure to become more female-friendly. While enrolment has been a big focus--women now make up an average 36% of full-time students at 36 of the big b-schools--the institutions are also beginning to pay more attention to the way gender plays out in their curriculums. Indeed, at a White House event last summer 45 schools committed to a best practices document vowing to include more women in teaching materials like cases studies, according to HBR. Clearly, they still have a long way to go. Leadership coach and study author Lesley Symons offers three suggestions: Start in the classroom. Professors must address gender issues in cases head-on, talking openly with students about how women are portrayed--are they shown as business leaders? As customers? Do they talk to other women about business? Since professors often teach their own cases, schools should encourage their faculty to write cases that include female protagonists. Get clearing houses involved. Case clearing houses, which distribute the materials to business schools, should begin gathering data on how many of their cases feature women and make that information easily accessible on their websites. They might also create special awards for female-driven cases. Pressure from employers. Companies that hire from business schools should ask questions about teaching materials and how gender is discussed in classes. See here for original article.

Last August the White House hosted an event with a lengthy title: “ Business School Deans and the Business Community on Expanding Opportunities for Women in Business .” As part of the summit, 45 business schools committed to a best practice document that offers concrete examples to help women succeed at their institutions. Among the recommendations is to make case studies, a dominant teaching method at some schools, more representative of today’s modern workplace: Showing diversity in leaders solving a wide range of problems is important to illustrate the wide range of diversity in the business community. This includes showing women and minorities in more significant line management roles and/or as the main protagonist in the case. Our research shows that the cases widely used by business schools today do not represent this sentiment — far from it. During the seven-year period from 2009–2015, we find that while women are included in 41 of 74 award-winning and best-selling cases, men are in a full 73. Men are the protagonist in 62 ; women are the protagonist in just eight. (A remaining four cases are without a clear protagonist.) When you view this through the lens of what we refer to as the “Symons Test” — a take on the famous Bechdel Test , which measures how women are depicted in movies — the gender gap looks even worse. Before recommending ways to remedy this gap, a little background on how we came up with these numbers. In 2014, we published an analysis of 53 award-winning and best-selling cases between 2009 and 2013, based on data from The Case Centre . The Case Centre is one of the main distributors of case studies, articles, and books on behalf of business schools. We recently added 21 more cases from the 2015 and 2016 Case Centre awards to the list. These awards went to outstanding cases published in 2014 and 2015 that have been used across the largest number of establishments globally over the past two years. Each year, one case in each of nine management categories is recognized, as is one overall winner. We also added one case from the top three best-selling cases to the list because the most popular are already represented in our analysis from past years. Disappointingly but perhaps not surprisingly, only a single paper among the 21 new award-winning case papers of the past two years features a female protagonist. Only 12 of the 21 papers has a woman in it at all, and only seven papers have a woman “present” — in other words, she plays a noteworthy role within the account and cannot be easily missed. In total, out of 222 characters featured across the 21 papers, only 21 are women. There is, however, a small silver lining: the single female protagonist that is found among these 21 papers is employed as an analyst for a petroleum industry, not an industry usually associated with women. Our older research has typically shown that women are associated with traditionally “pink topics” such as food, family, furniture, and fashion, as well as gender-specific subjects such as women’s health issues. While our analysis doesn’t take into account the full range of cases taught in business schools, it does indicate that those most commonly used don’t go a long way in advancing the White House goals that business schools have signed on to. So what needs to change? And who should play a role? Here are three possibilities: Clearing houses should publicize and reward cases with diverse characters. If you can measure it, you can start to change it. Data in this area is crucial. Case clearing houses, such as the Case Centre or Harvard, can assist by actively bringing the topic into the open. They could start by tracking the gender — and ethnicity — of the protagonist and making this information visible on their websites. In addition to knowing how many cases are written with a female lead, clearing houses should also give awards for women-led cases. Many have already had awards for best-selling cases, case by topic, field of education, etc., and the recipients of these are sometimes given an elevated status by the clearing houses in their online libraries. Clearing houses could also sponsor new female-led cases and promote those with female protagonists. Business school professors can speak to the issue directly. Aside from being careful about how cases are chosen, professors can be transparent about each case by simply noting the gender of the protagonist, the industries that women protagonists are found in, and how women are represented. (Do they talk to other women about business, for example, or are they merely a customer?) That said, we believe there’s an underlying issue that’s harder to remedy: Professors often use their own cases to teach — and the majority of professors at business schools are men and write about other men. Best-selling and award-winning cases are reused and reused, creating a legacy system of male protagonists. Encouraging professors to write papers with women in them is part of the systemic change we need. Cases need to serve the audience they are teaching, which is one that includes women. Business schools need to show their students (and the companies these students will eventually work for) that they are ahead of the curve and are committed to the leaders of the future. Harvard, for one, has pledged to double the number of women in case studies by 2019 . Companies should weigh in too. Today’s businesses, many of which are looking to address gender balance on their staffs, need to start asking questions. What kind of schools are their students studying at, and is gender equality being taught or acknowledged? Do they know — or want to know — what business examples their future employees are studying? And do they want potential employees to be comfortable with and versed in women as senior executives? If the White House summit is any indication, the topic of gender and business schools is in the zeitgeist right now. Awareness and change is beginning to happen. However, as this data shows, the need for case papers to be more gender inclusive is woefully behind the times. Women and men who are poised to lead the companies of the future are still not reading about women as business leaders, to their own detriment. See here for the original article.