A recent article in The New York Times provides some interesting insights regarding the quest to revamp campus cultures in the name of gender equality. The recent graduating class of Harvard Business School was subject to an unprecedented experiment that strived to combat troubling disparities in the experiences of male and female students as well as faculty members. Year after year, incoming female students with the same test scores and grades as their male peers fell markedly behind in their studies. It was also a challenge to retain female professors, who only made up a fifth of the tenured faculty. And upon graduation, more male students pursued higher salaried jobs like finance while female students typically ended up in lower-paying fields like marketing.
HBS administrators primarily focused on the fact that female students lagged behind their male peers, especially in class participation. They believed that this trend was largely due to the notion that women had to choose between academic and social success. Indeed, men who speak assertively and frequently in class are often considered to be among the most intelligent students and their participation can only serve to enhance their social capital. Assertive women, on the other hand, are often perceived as belligerent and unattractive. This is because they defy powerful social norms; they fail to adhere to the feminine stereotype of docility and, in doing so, threaten masculine dominance. And so many speak rather timidly or refrain from speaking at all.
In its attempt to encourage confidence in female students, the deans at HBS hosted hand-raising workshops. They went on to add stenographers in every class so that professors would know exactly which student had said what. Professors also had to use grading software tools that tracked their grading patterns by gender. Dartmouth should, without doubt, adopt these reforms, as they help promote a level playing field in the classroom.
Yet HBS's reforms don't cut deep enough. The school took pride in the fact that 40 percent of the Class of 2013's Baker Scholars the students in the top 5 percent were women, a huge improvement over previous years. Of course, this is a rather superficial way of judging progress; surely their professors, to some extent, adhered to the vigilant administration's agenda in order to avoid trouble. The truth is that many at Harvard remained hostile to the goals of the experiment and understandably so, for men and those who seek to appease them stood to gain nothing from the advancement of women and argued that they had not paid to learn about it.
Of course, the belief that one simply comes to college to learn his or her trade without understanding how to include and respect women or minorities is often spouted at Dartmouth. It is also common for Dartmouth students to point out how the school's ailments are simply those of the real world and so nothing can or should be done about them. Some HBS faculty members concurred and insisted that the creation of an extremely gender-sensitive campus culture would fail to prepare students for the dynamics of the real business world. This, however, overlooks the fact that in shaping the minds of the leaders of the future, you also shape the culture of the future, and that culture must not only be tolerant of but also welcoming to everyone. And so campus reforms in the name of gender equality are entirely necessary.
There are many ways to transform the patriarchal mindset of a place like Dartmouth; starting in the classroom is only the beginning. Student organizations with female members must be required to have at least one female in a position of real power. Male-dominated social spaces must be broken down, and the most feasible way to do so is to, at the very least, counterbalance them with more female-dominated spaces like sororities, which should be highly encouraged to go local. It is, admittedly, a struggle to come up with solutions, but one thing is clear: they will be hard. They will feel forced, they will be disliked and they will be rebelled against. Success will be slow and true gender equality will loom in the distance for a while, but it's time for Dartmouth to get going.
