Commerce

That’s “Frances” With an “e”

September 11, 2013

Multiple Pages
That’s “Frances” With an “e”

A striking feature of post-1968 liberalism is its obsession with the problems of people who don’t really have major problems. While activists of the past worried about the fate of coal miners or the unemployed, contemporary activists find more galvanizing the troubles, such as they are, of female students at the Harvard Business School.

I never went to Harvard, but my impression from attending a decent public B-School is that elite MBA students, male or female, have perhaps the fewest significant problems of any category of people imaginable. Still, since we’re living in the fallout of Team Obama’s decision to revive feminist resentments to turn out the vote, attention must be paid to HBS women’s oppression.

Thus, in “Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity,” Jodi Kantor, a New York Times reporter and author of The Obamas, reports at length on the school administration’s experiment in micromanaging the social lives of Harvard MBA students to overcome that most pressing problem of our day: Women at HBS average lower grades than their male colleagues.

Of course, HBS grads receive a median starting salary of $120,000, with three quarters of them earning starting bonuses averaging an additional $25,000.

Moreover, it’s not clear that B-School grades matter, except to business academics, such as the most intense of Harvard’s social engineer deans, Frances Frei, a physically imposing former college basketball player whose gender is most readily ascertained from there being an “e” rather than an “i” in “Frances.”

“A striking feature of post-1968 liberalism is its obsession with the problems of people who don’t really have major problems.”

It’s been over three decades since I earned an MBA (UCLA, ’82), so don’t rely upon my advice, but job interviewers back then quickly got the message across that boasting about grades was bumptious. (And when you finally get a job, it turns out your boss isn’t interested in your GPA at all.)

In my experience, B-School was a blast. While college demands much solitary study in the library, MBA programs emphasize teamwork. And your fellow students aren’t overgrown high-schoolers, but adults in their primes.

These six-figure starting salaries aren’t quite as bizarre as they may seem, since B-Schools, unlike law schools, seldom admit students straight out of college. I entered UCLA at 21 in 1980, but soon afterwards most MBA programs figured out that the easiest way to inflate the number by which their prestige is most evaluated—their graduates’ starting salaries—was to accept only students who were already making large chunks of money. That’s why the median age of students admitted to Harvard’s two-year program is 27.

And that’s important for understanding the subtext of Kantor’s long article. In modern America, ages 27 to 29 are prime time to get engaged.

Kantor, a psychologically astute observer who sometimes pecks gently at the weakest points in current thinking’s superstructure, can’t quite come out and say what she thinks is going on, but she weaves in enough anecdotal details to get across her apparent surmise. For example, she tells of Neda Navab, a 25-year-old female student who flunks a test because she was hung over from a dinner party with some entrepreneurs the night before:

“If I were in college, I would have said let’s do this after the midterm,” she said later. But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and other students feared could be their “last chance among cream-of-the-crop-type people,” as she put it.

Navab has mastered feminist jargon’s passive voice:

“I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus,” she said later. Were her priorities “purely professional, were they academic, were they to start dating someone?”

Of course, having the opportunity to choose among glittering professional, academic, and sexual opportunities is a good thing. (Later we learn that “Ms. Navab, who had started dating one of the men—with an M.D. and an M.B.A.—from the Ethiopian dinner, had felt freer to focus on her career once she was paired off.” So her fate turns out less tragic than it had seemed.)

The roots of the Harvard B-School plan to purge sexism go back to Larry Summers’s 2005 gaffe in which the then-Harvard president offered three sophisticated explanations of why tenured women professors were scarce in the Harvard math, science, and engineering departments:

• Raising children is generally more work for mothers than for fathers.

• There are more males at both the low end and the high end of the IQ bell curve, but only high-IQ people are candidates for Harvard professorships.

• Women tend to prefer humanistic subjects over, say, mechanical engineering.

As reparations for his crimethink, Summers offered $50 million to Harvard’s Head Feminist in Charge, Drew Gilpin Faust of the Radcliffe Institute. Summers was then forced out of office for this and other more interesting scandals. Unsurprisingly, his replacement was Dr. Faust. (Fifty million dollars can buy you a lot of popularity).

Unlike Dean Frei, who is gay-married to a former HBS student named Anne Morriss, Dr. Faust is a practicing heterosexual. In fact, there’s an instructive tale in how as a history grad student at Penn she divorced her medical student husband and married her department chairman. This not-terribly feminist adventure doesn’t seem to have hindered her academic career, to say the least. But I’ve never noticed much interest in this story.

The current wave of feminist excitement, much like the last major outbreak (the 1992 Year of the Woman), was launched by Democrats for short-term political advantage. In contrast to Bill Clinton, who really liked women, the latest beneficiary, Barack Obama, can barely muster the energy to pretend he cares about feminist concerns. Obama’s first memoir makes clear that he preferred his deadbeat dad to his Ph.D. mother (who dumped him on his grandparents) and his deadbeat grandfather to his grandmother, a pioneering female bank executive.

Ironically, Obama revived Larry Summers’s career, and after some heavy male bonding now hopes to appoint him chairman of the Federal Reserve rather than the worthy female contender, despite Larry’s track record of being more trouble than he’s worth.

So what’s the real story about women at Harvard Business School?

As women have come to outnumber men in most fields of higher education, top MBA schools such as Harvard, where there are three men for every two women, are among the last academic outposts of eligible bachelors. The Harvard MBA might be the ultimate MRS degree. Thus, according to Kantor, “Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class.” (That represents a sizable change from my day, when MBA students dressed nondescriptly.)

This is rational behavior on the part of HBS women. According to a chart of U. of Chicago MBA salaries that Kantor asserts is comparable to the Harvard numbers, starting salaries for men are only about $10,000 higher, but by nine years out, men outearn women $400,000 to $260,000. Hence, the gender gap in GPA that so agitates the Faust-Frei axis cannot explain why the income gaps get larger, not smaller, the more sexist Harvard men’s malign effect wears off.

And that $140,000 difference is just for those still employed. It’s not uncommon for corporate executive couples to jointly decide they have enough money for the wife to stay home with the children. My son earned a scholarship to a Pasadena-area private high school where the volunteer moms tended to be MBAs or lawyers who had retired because their husbands were making so much money. (As you might expect, school activities were superbly organized.)

Conversely, more than a few HBS men aspire to act like the Big Swinging Dicks notorious from Tom Wolfe and Michael Lewis books about Wall Street. Contrary to feminist theory, the alpha male’s acts don’t alienate many young women. As Matthew Weiner explained about why women love his Mad Men televisionshow: “What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.”

Not surprisingly, all this rampant heterosexuality at HBS drives lesbian Dean Frei into a frenzy of micromanaging future captains and captainesses of industry:

As Halloween approached, some students planned to wear costumes to class, but at the last minute Ms. Frei, who wanted to set a serious tone and head off the potential for sexy pirate costumes, sent a note out prohibiting it.…

This strong differentiation of gender affects in the 21st century is a striking change from the early 1980s’ more feminist and restrained yuppie culture. Slutty Halloween, for instance, was not a major occasion back then. My recollection of the essential 1982 yuppie experience was going to a restaurant for lunch with coworker MBAs, male and female, and talking about other restaurants. Discussing food was a polite compromise between the male desire to talk about sports and the female desire to talk about fashion.

Why were sex differences more muted among MBAs three decades ago?

First, until August 1982, the Dow Jones average was under 1,000, so Wall Street’s style of crass behavior wasn’t as nationally influential as it became when the markets rose and rose. The corporate cultural role models in that distant era tended to be buttoned-down institutions such as Procter & Gamble.

Second, we early yuppies were simply poorer. Thirty years ago, young MBAs didn’t have the money for today’s strip clubs for men and spa days for women. As people get richer, their behavior normally doesn’t become more gender neutral. Instead, they can afford to act out their identities.

 

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