Time for Business Schools To Catch-Up With Their Clients - Building Gender Balanced Business

The Wall Street Journal (of all things) has been wondering if business schools are in part to blame for the current crisis. (Click here for WSJ interview). As usual, gender is not a part of the discussion. Let’s put it into the equation for just a moment.

Male domination
Business schools, like business more generally, has stayed remarkably male-dominated in the past decade or two. As our gender rankings show, only the American business schools have inched past the 30% women MBA level, and only just recently. European schools have long stayed around 20%, despite the 60% of female university graduates across the region (INSEAD last year pushed to 30% for the first time).

The faculty of these schools is even more male dominated. At the big European schools, INSEAD, IMD and LBS, there was until recently only a single female tenured professor at each institution. Today, there are no more than five at each institution. The business schools have not imagined teaching their majority male classes anything about gender, or how to manage a future talent pool largely dominated by women. They prefer running Women’s Leadership programmes, telling women what they are still missing to become real leaders (see the HBR article entitled The Vision Thing).

Women professors reject link between crisis and testosterone
In fact, three B-school women professors (Herminia Ibarra, Lynda Gratton and Martha Maznevski of INSEAD, LBS and IMD respectively), even got together to write a letter to the FT in March objecting to suggestions that the crisis was in any way linked to testosterone (or that women were in any way less risk averse). Always count on the endangered minority to yell loudest that they belong, they really do… it would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Europe’s leading B-school women are both forced to be leaders on the gender issue, and seriously compromised by their colleagues if they actually suggest that it may be time to change.

Were B-schools responsible for the crisis? Only as much as parents are responsible for their children’s career choices. Education is pretty important. Whether it is at home or at school.

The B-Schools staffed the banks
Since I graduated from business school a quarter of a century ago, three quarters of each graduating class from my alma mater has gone either into management consulting or investment banking. My business school has been 80% male for the intervening decades, and those two particular professions have been even more male dominated (consulting and Big Four firms hover around 85%/15% male/female partner ratios).

If we accept that the crisis started somewhere near investment banking, the business schools certainly staffed the banks. What’s the link?

The danger of letting alpha males run the show
Let’s cut to the chase. Business schools are alpha male havens. I have nothing against alpha males. They are often charming, able leaders. But systemically, when organizations favour them over all other personality types, it can create dangerous, risk-loving, ego-enhancing cultures that tend to crash every so often. Read Christopher Flett, author of a new book, What Men Don’t Tell Women About Business, to find out more about the alpha male playbook. In this, Flett, a reformed alpha male, reveals the devious methods by which alpha males set out to destroy the careers of women who they believe have crossed them. In a nod to the Godfather, they bury the women or, as the phrase goes, they “deep-six” them.

Teach the men (and the teachers) about gender
As B-schools scramble to add ethics, environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility and governance to their shareholder-value-leaning curriculum, let us suggest one last subject. Teach the men about gender – how to develop sustainable companies with the best talent from both sexes, led by gender balanced top teams, which are also better able to market their goods and services to the increasingly powerful woman consumer. Teach the teachers too. It’s time for business schools to catch up with their clients…