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The Diversity Learning Curve At Business Schools

Some years ago, I was delivering a class on strategy as part of the Global Online MBA at IE Business School when a student, a white British executive in his late thirties, pointed out that all the CEOs of the companies in the case studies I was using were “male and western”. Needless to say, I immediately decided to update the program.

A quick search for case studies on General Management and Strategy with female CEOs yielded interesting yet disconcerting results. At the time, a survey of top business school case studies showed that only 11% featured a female CEO or director, and most of them were about the glass ceiling syndrome. I could only find one recent case that fitted my course, related to Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM.

Since then, there’s been some progress, but there are still far too few case studies, teaching materials, and academic research that reflect diversity in companies. In large part, this is because of the same lack of diversity in companies themselves.

Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University

However, that student’s comment led me to the wider observation that it is important for educators to guide students toward a new model of society and an ideal type of company, one that might not yet exist but that can be built. A lack of case studies, or the unfortunate reality that there are still too few women heading multinationals, does not grant the excuse to forgo teaching the values ​​and principles we want to see in the business leaders of tomorrow. In fact, it makes it all the more necessary.

In my view, the function of business schools must be more than merely descriptive, that of explaining how companies work; they should also take the critical and prescriptive role of developing models that inspire entrepreneurs and serve as a reference for organizations to become not only more effective but also fairer.

Furthermore, the fact that female CEOs are still a minority should motivate business schools to design programs with content that will inspire future generations of women and contribute to achieving a balance in the composition of management cadres. Such an approach can only be better for companies and for society.

For research to move from being descriptive to prescriptive, we need more humanities in management studies.

This more prescriptive approach will require business academics to go beyond merely analyzing how companies function and instead look at how companies can help transform society for the better by becoming organizations that generate sustainable value and promote fairer and more equitable results within communities.