Gender

• 2018

Advancing African American Business Leadership

The 50th anniversary of the founding of the African American Student Union (AASU) in 2018 is a key inflection point in our history. With this milestone, HBS celebrates the vibrant and important role that African Americans have played in shaping our institution, the business world, and society at large.

More on the AASU

• Dec 2017
• Article

Why Sexual Harassment Persists and What Organizations Can Do to Stop It

By: Boris Groysberg and Colleen Ammerman

The sheer volume of sexual harassment allegations against public figures reveals just how entrenched such abuses of power are. They’ve forced us to acknowledge that many men in leadership roles marginalize and intimidate colleagues (usually, but not always, women) of lower status both verbally and physically. Sexual harassment is not a women’s issue but a leadership one. Women do not need to be “protected” from the misbehavior of men in their workplaces. They need their managers to foster cultures in which sexual bullying is treated as the threat to the organization it is.

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• Dec 2017
• Teaching Note

Vicki Fuller: Chief Investment Officer of New York State's $150+ Billion Employee Pension Fund

By: Steven S. Rogers and Valerie Mosley

Fuller traveled from a four-room tenement bordering Chicago's infamous Cabrini-Green Housing projects to speaking at conferences around the world and typically holding court wherever she went. As a teenager, she helped raise her siblings. As a Wall Street executive, she navigated the investment management world to generate attractive investment results for clients. And as the Chief Investment Officer of New York State Employees' Common Retirement Fund (CRF), she helped manage the third largest state pension fund in the United States.

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• 2017
• Article

New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member

By: Alicia DeSantola, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Julie Battilana

We explore the antecedents of the addition of the first woman to the boards of directors of entrepreneurial ventures. Building on research on resource dependency, we propose that new ventures are most likely to add the first woman to their boards at three developmental moments– board founding, fundraising, and the IPO– as a consequence of shifting alignments of resource control. A critical contingency to changes at the time of these milestones is the presence of resource holders who value the inclusion of women. We draw on an extensive handcrafted dataset on the boards of 2,425 U.S.-based new ventures to test these predictions.

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