All right everybody! Stop thinking about Syria and gas attacks and Iowa issuing gun permits to the blind. WTF, Iowa?!?!?. Hey, what can possibly go wrong?
We have a real problem to tackle today: Harvard MBA ladies suck at competing with Harvard men.
The country’s premier business training ground was trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem. Year after year, women who had arrived with the same test scores and grades as men fell behind.
Oh dear. Well, that’s not very good, is it? What to do, what to do…
[The Harvard MBA class of 2013] have been unwitting guinea pigs in what would have once sounded like a far-fetched feminist fantasy: What if Harvard Business School gave itself a gender makeover, changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success?
Look at that statement carefully. You’ll note that Harvard isn’t interested in fostering the success of ALL their students. Nope. They’re doing a gender makeover than only involves one gender. Success is strictly on the basis of Lawful Possession of Labia. Feminist fantasy indeed.
I suppose Harvard might want to consider changing their motto from Veritas to Vaginatas? Maybe add some teeth to the crest or something? Just a thought.
After reading the Times article, it looks to me like the program to engineer the girl’s success entails the following:
Teach women how to raise their hands.
Ha! You probably think I’m kidding, right? Nope. Not kidding. Some of the most accomplished, educated, ambitious business students in the country had to pay $100,000 to sit in a class and learn how to raise their hands, because the ladies quavered when confronted with hard thinky stuff like math and that’s not fair!
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.
Every year the same hierarchy emerged early on: investment bank and hedge fund veterans, often men, sliced through equations while others — including many women — sat frozen or spoke tentatively.
Since 50% of the marks in courses come from class participation, stenographers were placed in each classroom so that women weren’t accidentally discounted in marks.
Okay, no real problem with this, but when you couple it with this, a problem suddenly appears.
New grading software tools let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender.
Hmmm.
So if professor’s call patterns are now being tracked on the basis of gender, who wants to bet that professors overlook male students whom they KNOW can contribute better, more nuanced and meaningful comments in favor of women who have less to offer, in order to make certain patterns fall into ideological lockstep? The Dean wants equality over quality, so screw both the male students and the whole class?
There’s some genius pedagogy right there. Let’s gather all the best business minds in the country and then make sure half of them don’t get to speak because penis? Very clever.
Had the professors rid themselves of unconscious biases? Were the women performing better because of the improved environment? Or was the faculty easing up in grading women because they knew the desired outcome?
Gee, I wonder. What, exactly, is the value of a grade you only received because the true competitors are being crippled before the starting gun fires? It’s like popping open the champagne to celebrate your gold medal in the 100 yard sprint, and neglecting to mention that you were racing 5-year-olds on crutches.
Yeah, big accomplishment.
The case study method, which relied on cold-calling students about a firm’s predicament, was “rounded out” with a collaborative, time-consuming, cover your ass and spread the blame technique called “Field”.
Obviously, “Field” allows women to access all their male classmate’s strengths and then claim partial credit for them. The “team” worked together to figure the case out. Bullshit, the team did. One guy took a leadership role and everyone else rode his coattails.
Been there. Done that.
True story: In my MBA, I was in a group with a man who had a PhD in Astronomy and another man who was a mechanical engineer. They used to argue about what kind of mathematics to use to solve tricky problems in financial analysis. “Trigonometry is for children”, huffed StarDoctor. He worked at an observatory in South Africa that had amazing facilities but paid him shit money, so he used to run guns for the local guerillas on the side. A very interesting guy.
The other member of my team was a Chinese woman with an undergrad degree in mathematics who barely spoke English, so she basically coasted and got the same marks as the rest of us while doing what amounted to jack shit. I, of course, wrote up all our findings and was the keynote presenter for almost everything.
We played to our strengths. Our team agreed from the get-go that “equality” was fucking dumb. We were supposed to take turns doing analysis, writing, presenting, etc., so we would be well-rounded, but we decided fuck that nonsense.
We played to our strengths.
144 students. Six major case competitions. We won five. Actually, bullshit. We won all six, but the awards committee couldn’t bear that one team would sweep the medals. It was unprecedented.
And StarDoctor was unequivocally our leader. Me and the engineer kept him on his toes, to be certain. I once disagreed with StarDoctor so vehemently he stormed out of a meeting and got in his car and started driving away and I jumped on the hood of his moving car. He got out of the car, physically removed me from the hood, threw me in the grass and drove away, and refused to make the changes I wanted.
Mr. JB took StarDoctor out for a drink and a chat after that episode.
Turns out StarDoctor’s conclusion was right, and we were offered positions at the organization we were analyzing. StarDoctor was unwilling to bow to me to keep the peace and none of us were the slightest bit interested in towing some ideological line about fairness or equality.
We were in it to win.
That’s what kills me about initiatives like Harvard’s that are trying to alter the landscape so that women can succeed. In order to alter the landscape, you are destroying what makes the MEN such formidable competitors. Now, I’m not stupid. I realize that the men who are in the Harvard MBA program are rich, connected and come into the program with advantages most of us can only dream of, but they cannot parlay those advantages into real world rewards without combining them with boldness, confidence, assertiveness and a total unwillingness to kowtow to political correctness.
What are we achieving when we take our best and brightest men and force them to squelch the attributes that ultimately benefit us all so that women can feel like they won the race? What exactly are the women going to do with their glorious credentials?
Ms. Upton decided to take a far lower-risk job managing a wealthy family’s investments in Pittsburgh, where her fiancé lived. “You can either be a frontier charger or have an easier, happier life,” she said.
The reality is that most of the women graduating from the Harvard Business School with MBAs will end up housewives, taking care of children in a luxurious lifestyle funded by the men they secured as a result of their fancy degrees.
A surprising number of highly educated MBAs are dropping out of the labor force. Associate Professor Catherine Wolfram, a member of the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group, studied surveys taken by nearly 1,000 Harvard undergraduate alumni and found, 15 years after graduation, business school graduates are more likely than doctors and lawyers to leave the workforce. The common factors: being married, being female, becoming a mother.
And you know what? Yay! Good for them! I think those are some damn smart ladies. The women in the 2013 class of Harvard MBAs don’t seem to be the slightest bit different. The Dean cancelled the traditional Halloween costumes-in-class extravaganza to prevent the sexy ladies from taking a prime opportunity to market themselves as potential child bearers.
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, provoking more eye rolls.
No matter. The ladies still found time to deck themselves out in Playboy Bunny costumes, seeing no conflict with the institutional gender transformation designed to give them the leg up over their male classmates and their unapologetic pursuit of sexual market value. The administration might think that’s a problem, but the women sure as hell didn’t.
Students were demanding more women on the faculty, a request the deans were struggling to fulfill. And they did not know what to do about developments like female students dressing as Playboy bunnies for parties and taking up the same sexual rating games as men.
Here’s the part that really, really made me giggle. One woman in particular was intimidated at the sexually charged climate that governed social interactions at Harvard.
“Someone made the decision for me that I’m not pretty or wealthy enough to be in Section X,” [Brooke Boyarsky] told her classmates, her voice breaking.
Actually, Brooke, you made that choice yourself when you decided “morbidly obese” was good look for you.
I entered H.B.S. as a truly ‘untraditional applicant’: morbidly obese.
Owing to the new gender environment that promotes the interests of women over men, Brooke managed to graduate in the top of her class, earning a Baker Scholar award. But what was she really excited about? What made her really happy?
She lost 100 lbs and she is dating now!
“I am super excited to go to my 30th reunion…”
So Harvard is basically Weight Watchers for the upwardly mobile?
Fantastic. What a great way to mobilize our intelligentsia. Men: shut up. Women: lose weight and lock down that man.
It truly baffles me that THE single most prestigious university in the world can fall for this.
And it worries me.
When feminists have infiltrated the very best institutions of learning to the point that those institutions are willing to silence their male students so women can feel “good enough”, all the while ignoring the fact that most of the women are there on elaborate missions to nail down their own personal Mr. Darcy, the time for action has come.
I’m all for gender equality in higher education. Any man, or any woman, should be able to pursue their interests and ambitions and passions without facing down socially constructed barriers based on antiquated ideas about how men and women “are”.
But it should also face reality. Our antiquated ideas are based on centuries of lived experience. Most women love babies, family and men far more than they will ever love a Bloomberg Terminal. And most men love their families and babies and women so much they will spend hours chained to a Bloomberg Terminal to provide for them.
Telling men to sit down and shut up, and teaching women how to raise their hands, destroys the ability of both men and women to achieve their dreams.
And really, isn’t that the ultimate goal? We want all humans to be able to achieve their dreams. Most people have dreams that are very simple. Family, home, food, warm water for a bath at the end of the day. Not that difficult.
The interesting thing about prioritizing the “feminist fantasy” of the world is just how little that fantasy represents the reality of what most people want.
The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed. – Maya Angelou
Me neither, Maya.
Why do women go to Harvard in the first place?
To find a husband.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. – Jane Austen
Where to find a single man in possession of a good fortune?
Here’s a good place to start:
Raise your hand when you see one you like!
Lots of love,
JB
