Post: #1

What a bizarre little world at HBS. Very long but interesting article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/educat...ef=general

Quote:One of the Baker scholars was Ms. Boyarsky, the classroom truth-teller.

“I entered H.B.S. as a truly ‘untraditional applicant’: morbidly obese,” she said.

And, Ms. Boyarsky continued, she had lost more than 100 pounds during her final year at Harvard.

Even before she finished, her phone was buzzing with e-mails and texts from classmates. She was the girl everyone wished they had gotten to know better, the graduation-week equivalent of the person whose obituary made you wish you had followed her work.



.....

Nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 2011, Neda Navab sat in a class participation workshop, incredulous. The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Ms. Navab had been the president of her class at Columbia, advised chief executives as a McKinsey & Company consultant and trained women as entrepreneurs in Rwanda. Yet now that she had arrived at the business school at age 25, she was being taught how to raise her hand.

One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product. Did Ms. Navab want to come? “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. Like other students, she had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others, she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.

The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel.

Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women (“She’s kind of hot, but she’s so assertive”), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her “social cap,” referring to capitalization.

“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?”

As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the test hung over, her performance a “disaster,” she joked.

The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. “We cannot have it both ways,” said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program. “We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we don’t care what goes on outside the classroom.”

But Harvard Business students were unusually powerful, the school’s products and also its customers, paying more than $50,000 in tuition per year. They were professionals, not undergraduates. One member of the class had played professional football; others had served in Afghanistan or had last names like Blankfein (Alexander, son of Lloyd, chief executive of Goldman Sachs). They had little knowledge of the institutional history; the deans talked less about the depressing record on women than vague concepts like “culture” and “community” and “inclusion.”

Post: #2

HBS is a fascinating place, good and bad.

Good article, definitely worth having a look.

Post: #3

Quote:Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found.

Took her 2 Ivy League degrees to figure that one out.

Post: #4

I nearly puked several times whilst reading that. Beyond fucked

(09-08-2013 12:34 PM)Soma Wrote:  Took her 2 Ivy League degrees to figure that one out.

This is the reason why there are so few females in those areas...

Post: #5

As expected, terrible article.

If women keep trying to deny they don't collectively suffer from strains of Histrionic Personality Disorder it gets real tough after these sorts of articles. Complete lack of personal insight, lack of understanding personal intentions and obsession with looks. Look at the only startup by women mentioned - essentially sharing clothes. Women already do that with other for free!

Men don't want women around because all they do is bitch AND never actually act. They need constant prodding and encouragement to "do what they want."

Face it ladies, if you take these sorts of articles seriously, you don't want do whatever. People do what they want - if you need all these bullshit to "lean in," you don't want to lean it, you want to lean out.

Post: #6

(09-08-2013 12:02 PM)Hencredible Casanova Wrote:  What a bizarre little world at HBS. Very long but interesting article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/educat...ef=general

Quote:

She could stand to lose another 30 pounds

Post: #7

(09-08-2013 01:12 PM)master_thespian Wrote:  [quote='Hencredible Casanova' pid='529648' dateline='1378659753']
What a bizarre little world at HBS. Very long but interesting article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/educat...ef=general

Quote:

[/quote

She could stand to lose another 30 pounds

Not only that:

1. she needs braces - ugly smile

2. has a manly/masculine body and body language

-could be taken for a lesbian

Post: #8

Look, while I'm as red pill as the next guy... It was obvious that there was a culture of discrimination against women in the HBC program. They were working on improving it in some of the wrong ways, but the end results show much improvement for the women.

And yes, it does sound like there was some very backward feminist thinking going on in changing the culture, but come on. This is the 21st century, not the 1940s anymore. The women were saying that they had a much harder time networking, due to their male peers obsession with their looks. The women and less affluent students were torn between partying to make connections, or their grades and standing in the program. That is a dysfunctional program.

Post: #9

(09-08-2013 01:45 PM)Tytalus Wrote:  The women were saying that they had a much harder time networking, due to their male peers obsession with their looks. The women and less affluent students were torn between partying to make connections, or their grades and standing in the program. That is a dysfunctional program.

Real life works like that. You bring value and get value(i.e networking opportunities).

If you're an ugly women you better bring value in some other forms. Some of the best club promoters out there are mediocre looking women who are socially savvy and know how to network.

Same if you're a broke man.

Post: #10

This is one of the best examples of the absolute destruction that feminism (and progressivism in general) can wreak on an organization if allowed to take root. In this case we have Harvard Business School, one of the premier schools of business in the country, and indeed the entire world. The purpose of a business school is to prepare its graduates for the rigors of managing businesses in the real world. For this reason, the cutthroat, winner takes all nature of business school is by design. Businesses do not make money by catering to the feelings of everyone present and ensuring that their female workers are fulfilled in their work. They make money by beating their competition. Business is inherently competitive. Losers get left behind. Being assertive all the time and aggressive when called for is a requirement. These attitudes are what get drilled into students' heads at business school. But apparently all that goes out the window for women.

Once feminists take control of any organization, as they apparently now have at HBS, the mission of the organization changes. Rather than being focused on accomplishing whatever its original goals were (in this case, providing a world class business management education), the organization instead focuses on catering to the needs of women within its ranks. Their comfort, success and general satisfaction become the overriding concern that takes precedence over everything else. The entire organization can and will be turned upside down in the name of this goal.

And so we now have the most brazen and shameless feminist social engineering at HBS:

Quote:He and his team tried to change how students spoke, studied and socialized. The administrators installed stenographers in the classroom to guard against biased grading, provided secret coaching — for some, after every class — for untenured female professors, and even departed from the hallowed case-study method.

The administrators of the school are flat out admitting they are trying to change the way that students speak, study and socialize in order to give more advantage to women. This is literally Orwellian. It's totalitarian heavy-handedness at its worst. "I'm sorry, but your assertive and blunt manner of speaking is too masculine. You must tone it down a notch. Furthermore, your new study groups will be pre-assigned to ensure a desirable male to female ratio."

And seriously - fucking stenographers in the classroom? As a male student, wouldn't you be thrilled to know that part of your tuition is going to pay for a goddamned stenographer in every classroom simply to ensure that women are not "unfairly" discriminated against? God forbid that sort of unfair treatment happens. Of course, there is not a whiff of unfairness to the "secret coaching" and other hand-holding provided to the female faculty. As we are all well aware of here, equality to a feminist is a one way street: what's fair is what is good for women, what is unfair is anything that isn't.

The real takeaway from this article is what a total farce and a failure the feminist fantasy really is. Women simply are not men. No matter how hard you try, you cannot make the vast majority of women behave like men. You can't make them take risks like men. You can't make them aggressive like men. You can't make them obsessively focused like men. You can't make them prioritize the mission over personal issues like men. You can't make them naturally form hierarchical teams like men. And on, and on, and on. Feminists have gone to great lengths to try to disprove these facts at HBS, but ultimately all their work has served simply to verify them. If women were truly the same as men, they wouldn't need all this hand holding. They would simply adapt to the existing culture of HBS and begin to compete evenly with the men. But they don't, and they can't. And since they can't compete, the only thing to do is to change the rules and the measurements of success.

Imagine playing in a mixed-sex basketball game. Obviously the women would naturally be at a heavy disadvantage. But no matter, let's just change the rules! We will now award 2 points for any woman who shoots the ball and is able to hit anywhere on the backboard. Men, meanwhile, must continue to put the ball in the basket to earn 2 points. Suddenly, women are able to start "competing" with men. Amazing, right? And all it took was completely re-writing the rules and changing the definition of success. That's exactly what feminists have done here. They've simply changed the rules for what constitutes "success" at HBS in order to be more favorable to women.

And as a sidenote, I found the following picture from the article quite revelatory and amusing. These days in the West, we're constantly besieged with narratives from the media about the pernicious influence of white men: "white privilege" and "toxic masculinity" and other such nonsense. And Harvard, as the most storied and respected Ivy League institution, has historically been held up as a bastion of this sort of WASPy influence (you even get a whiff of it in this article with the mention of the exclusive "Section X" club).

But while Harvard certainly once was a WASPy place, you certainly can't call it that anymore. Look at this collection of Harvard administrators. Can anyone point out the white, male privilege?

Post: #11

My thoughts exactly Scorpion. Really well articulated.

Post: #12

White mal privilege? Yeah, the second from right.

Post: #13

(09-08-2013 01:45 PM)Tytalus Wrote:  Look, while I'm as red pill as the next guy... It was obvious that there was a culture of discrimination against women in the HBC program. They were working on improving it in some of the wrong ways, but the end results show much improvement for the women.

And yes, it does sound like there was some very backward feminist thinking going on in changing the culture, but come on. This is the 21st century, not the 1940s anymore. The women were saying that they had a much harder time networking, due to their male peers obsession with their looks. The women and less affluent students were torn between partying to make connections, or their grades and standing in the program. That is a dysfunctional program.

Dude, that's life.

You took the article way too seriously and failed to note the fact the only perceptions presented were those of women.

These women clearly have little ability to understand their own intentions - why would you trust their perceptions of other's intentions?

Post: #14

Business school is basically the graduate school for the untalented, and HBS is a place for the rich untalented kids of the world. They learn nothing in these schools. It is 100% garbage. I encourage anyone here to look at the average business student's syllubus.

Personally, if I was hiring, I would throw out any applicants with a business school degree.

Post: #15

(09-08-2013 02:13 PM)void Wrote:  White mal privilege? Yeah, the second from right.

I honestly thought that was a Feminist. He / She / It has tits.

Post: #16

(09-08-2013 03:14 PM)Samseau Wrote:  Business school is basically the graduate school for the untalented, and HBS is a place for the rich untalented kids of the world. They learn nothing in these schools. It is 100% garbage. I encourage anyone here to look at the average business student's syllubus.

Personally, if I was hiring, I would throw out any applicants with a business school degree.

I presume you mean untalented versus their graduate counterparts in STEM sciences, Law, etc.

Business school students at top schools are still, on average, highly gifted compared to laymen.

I went to an undergraduate business school, and the professors loved mocking the MBA students for always lagging behind PhD, masters, and the undergraduate students.

MBA degrees are perhaps the paradigm example of educational attainment as signaling.

Post: #17

(09-08-2013 03:14 PM)Samseau Wrote:  Business school is basically the graduate school for the untalented, and HBS is a place for the rich untalented kids of the world. They learn nothing in these schools. It is 100% garbage. I encourage anyone here to look at the average business student's syllubus.

Personally, if I was hiring, I would throw out any applicants with a business school degree.

The use of B-School, at least in the echelon of HBS, Yale, Stanford, Stern or Wharton is the unparalleled ability to network with wealthy and powerful individuals.

Post: #18

Holy shit, Robert Paulson is that you?

Post: #19

Pretty much all MBA programs are nothing but massive fuckfests. I have a couple of friends who did MBA's at Ivy League schools and they used to tell some real crazy drinking/partying/fucking stories. It's like a second college for the privileged kids and by the time they start it(usually mid-late 20s) they've lost all inhibitions about partying and sex, and many of them are "overachievers"/former nerds who didn't have enough fun during undergrad so are in many ways making up for the lost opportunities.

Post: #20

I would have preferred an account from the men as well. It was a fairly one sided articles with statements that left you wondering about how they suddenly started getting results. But I still think it's pretty obvious there was a culture of prejudice and contempt towards women from the faculty and students that needed a correction. Did they go about it the right way? I'm not really sure. Was it at the expense of the male students? Maybe?

I don't think the stenographer is a joke, people really are quite biased in what they remember.

I read through the comments, found this little gem:

Quote:As an HBS Class of 2013, I have to admit that this article puts a magnifying glass on the gender issue. Yes, class discrimination was a pervasive problem (this can be attributed to what was a small group of privileged kids and their minions) but gender was nowhere as much of an issue in day to day interactions or in class as this article makes it out to be. So, why has women's performance trailed men's in the past? Well, HBS has this grading system in which 50% of your grade is determined by your class participation. The teachers (who are mostly male) get to decide who speaks when (and for how long) in class and also determine the student's grade. This system of grading is highly subjective and it is not farfetched to think that the hidden biases of the professors can determine how they distribute grades.

and this one:

Quote:Rebecca G San Francisco Harvard Business School

As a member of the HBS class of 2013, I found this article's point of view overwhelmingly negative, and not at all representative of my experience. I never felt like I was at a disadvantage as a woman, nor that I was a guinea pig in a negative sense of the word. And the fact that the administration succeeded in closing the gender grade gap is presented almost as an afterthought, with the author instead preferring to pile on every possible complaint about HBS: class, gender, drinking, you name it. PS. show me another place that brings together 1800 ambitious young people (avg. age 26) that doesn't have issues with gender, class and drinking.

Post: #21

Absolutely disgusting. I was considering Business School for a while and then put the idea on hold. Now its definitely out of the loop. Problem is that other Ivies and most other B-Schools will copy this strategy of making B-School 'Female Friendly'. Good luck having crappy graduates.

Post: #22

I never did understand the point of encouraging people that aren't actually fit for a position to try get it. I wonder how many of these graduates actually pulled better jobs out of this than they would have otherwise... I'm guessing none. Those that did? The same thing will happen in the workplace that would have happened anyway - the guys will work hard, achieving similar results to what they would have anyway, whilst the women will cruise along, doing the minimum until they fall pregnant...

Any guesses as to what comes next?

Post: #23

Quote:Professor Frei's administrative style might be called "jackboot helicopter mentoring." She uses loaded feminist terminology such as the purported "incredibly hostile environment" to justify an authority profile in which she literally controls faculty outcomes herself, from "watching virtually every minute of every class" to barring "other professors" from giving advice to female faculty members, lest they be "confused" by their mansplaining troglodyte colleagues. (And I love how she considers herself a "guardian," an image of control that could be ripped perfectly from the totalitarian system of Plato's "Republic.")

http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/20...rvard.html

Post: #24

1. Go to Darden
2. Be functional, as opposed to outputs of shitholes like hbs have become
3. Profit!!!

Post: #25

Making the school more friendly to female students doesn't mean anything when there are more women in college than men. Making the school more friendly to women faculty is the baseline. But you'll know that they're really serious when they take steps at the company that manages their $30B endowment to recruit and retain women.