Robin Ely, Dean of Race and Gender Gobbledegook at Harvard Business School

MEN have always outshone women at Harvard Business School. But this past year, a software program was introduced that allowed professors to track grades for men and women separately. Lo and behold, the women started getting better grades. The New York Times describes the sea of feminist flattery and favoritism in which the Harvard female MBA swims. You would think women would be propelled to the top ranks of every company in the world on the currents of so much self-approval, but these currents have yet to reach the required momentum.

In charge of the project to get women faculty and students to perform better (or to be perceived as performing better) is Frances Frei, Harvard Business School’s lesbian du jour. Frei dresses as a man and is “married” to another business celebrity, Anne Morris. Together, these women, who have written a book, say the most stunningly obvious things about company management and yet (could it be their cool lesbianism?) people seem to listen. These two are out of central casting. The postmodern business guru is what would be considered in previous ages a freak.

For another glimpse of the cultural Marxism that prevails at the business school, look at the work of Robin Ely, another of the school’s race and gender commissars. She has produced, among other things, “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender,” a project in which men on offshore oil platforms were pressured to behave in a less masculine way. From an abstract of the “study:”

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for “manly” behavior, prompting them to let go of masculine-image concerns and to behave instead in counter-stereotypical ways. Rather than proving how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they were, as was typical of men in other dangerous workplaces, platform workers readily acknowledged their physical limitations, publicly admitted their mistakes, and openly attended to their own and others’ feelings. More importantly, platform workers did not replace a conventional image of masculinity with an unconventional one and then set out to prove the new image-revealing mistakes strategically, for example, or competing in displays of sensitivity. Instead, the goal of proving one’s masculine credentials, conventional or otherwise, appeared to no longer hold sway in men’s workplace interactions. Building on West and Zimmerman’s (1987) now classic articulation of gender as “the product of social doings,” we describe this organizationally induced behavior as “undoing” gender. We use this case, together with secondary case data drawn from 10 published field studies of men doing dangerous work, to induce a model of how organizational cultures equip men to “do” and “undo” gender at work.

Ely is no different ideologically from the feminists of the 1970s. After decades of affirmative action, she contends that women are still being pushed out of corporate leadership. That’s why it’s important to eradicate all masculine behavior.

You might think this social engineering violates the basic premises of capitalism. How is this good for business? But for the global, nation-less corporation which is made up of people without loyalties of any kind, all forms of normal human identity are threats to business. People like Ely and Frei are useful idiots in the service of a project to eradicate all of human nature in the name of greed.

Asians figure prominently in the administration of the business school too. After all, this is a global institution and it makes big bucks from its Asian student body.

Dean Nitin Nohria, in addressing head-on the School’s gender disparities: “There is so much more work to do.”

 — Comments —

Jane S. writes:

Remember on the brouhaha over Larry Summers’ comment about the possible causes for the shortfall of women in the hard sciences, the one that cost him his job as president of Harvard?

In an attempt to appease the diversity gods, he created a new high-level post at Harvard, someone whose job it is to recruit women faculty in the hard sciences. He also earmarked a seven-figure sum of money for outreach.

That was in 2005. I checked recently and men still outnumber women in the hard sciences at Harvard; in most departments, there are three or four times as many men. In some departments, there are zero women.

Shouldn’t the people in the Department of Bean-Counting or whatever it’s called at Harvard be fired? In the real world, that’s what would happen if someone gave you millions of dollars to do something and, eight years later, you still hadn’t done it.

How is it that the Left gets away with this?

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The photograph of Dean Robin Ely of Harvard’s Business School reminded me of the Joan Allen character in Paul Anderson’s dystopian film Death Race (2008), portions of which I caught last night while watching the ScyFy Channel.  [That’s a big sic, incidentally; it used to call itself the Sci Fi Channel — for science Fiction.]  Allen plays “Henessey,” the producer in charge of a gladiatorial television program, the social function of which is the purposes of pacifying the masses.  It is also a money-maker for the production company, which is indistinguishable from a department of the government.  Allen, about whom otherwise I know nothing, plays Hennessey as sexless, soulless, and ruthless.  Here, here, and here are photo-portrait stills from the film.  Perhaps inadvertently, Anderson’s directorial vision has captured a “type” with which The Thinking Housewife is abundantly familiar.

Eric writes:

Laura’s remark on how Harvard Business School Commissar Frances Frei dresses like a man led me to wonder how many of the women at the top of traditionally male fields are lesbians. For example, competitive contact team sports are traditionally thought of as male oriented, but now have growing numbers of female participants – but it seems that a lot of them are lesbians. Frei’s couture make me wonder to what extent she is emotionally and psychologically female.

What can it mean to have women succeeding in male fields when they must re-engineer themselves so drastically to do so? If a woman cannot form a natural relationship with a man, is she even wholly a woman? Frei seems to want to be treated as a man, because she does indeed dress like one. I noticed that the lesbian muckety-mucks overseeing the changes at HBS really got their panties in a twist over the prospect that their female students might just marry (horrors!) some of their intelligent, success-oriented male students, and drop out of school.

It dawns on me that this practice of counting lesbian she-males (he-girls?) as women is just another kind of statistical fakery, like admitting substandard women students to math programs, walking them to PhD’s, and claiming that women are now succeeding in math. Does a woman prove that women can succeed in a man’s field if she has to become a man to do it?

Laura M. writes:

With regards to Eric’s comment, I agree with everything except his implication that women succeeding in math is somehow masculine or that women are not actually succeeding in math in many cases. I was always at the top of my classes in advanced math and science, above any of the boys. Language and arts classes (especially foreign languages–I was truly awful) were much harder for me, and I didn’t do nearly as well, so clearly my hand was not being held. I understand that this is not the usual way of things, but succeeding in math has helped me be a better wife and manage a budget much more effectively. More women should be taught about finances and mathematics for the purpose of running a household. Math is not inherently masculine…using it for masculine purposes, like taking a career away from other men, is.

 Laura writes:

Math itself is not masculine, but many more men have high aptitude in math than women.

Texanne writes:

As Mark Richardson alerts us to the Brave Girls movement, it begins in childhood:

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