Gender

Women make up 80% of RC Section Presidents; Poorvi Vijay (MBA ’21) and Anoothi (MBA ’21) discuss the importance of having women in leadership positions. Before many of us could even figure out the blistering pace of RC year, someone posted on Slack, “8/10 section presidents are women this year,” and suddenly everything from to filled the “#womenathbs” Slack channel. This makes 2019 a historic year for Harvard Business School since for the first time in our institution’s 111-year-old history, we have seen such an overwhelming majority of women in section presidency. We want to take this moment to congratulate all the women who stepped up for this responsibility and to all the male allies and sectionmates who supported their leadership.

Extending beyond the numbers, the positive impact the program has on the community can be seen most vibrantly through its mentors and mentees. Astride Lisenby, associate director for Enterprise Systems and Services at Harvard Business School, and her mentee, Nancy Jagaselvan, senior business systems analyst for HUIT, talked about how their partnership through the program has been beneficial.

As a highly successful woman in New York’s male-dominated development arena, MaryAnne Gilmartin has a “mini-obsession”: She wants to oversee a commercial real estate project in which every part of the process is headed by a woman.