Harvard's Gender Bender

I am apparently the perfect person to commentate on Jodi Kantor's piece in the New York Times about Harvard Business School's attempt to promote gender equality. I say this because any number of people have asked "Are you going to write about this?" or simply issued the second-person imperative: "You should write about this!" You see, I have an MBA from the University of Chicago. Also I have two X chromosomes.

As it happens, I have read the piece. And as it happens, I have a lot of thoughts about the piece. Some of it accorded with my own memories of school -- the alcohol-soaked social life, for example. Some of it was very far from my own recollection, in part, I think, because Chicago does not have the same attraction for international jet setters. I don't recall a huge class divide between the folks who were popping off to Gstaad for the weekend, and the folks who were staying home with a couple of beers. We'd all worked for an average of five years before going to school; we all had credit cards and generous student loans. Most of us traveled and had a perfectly good time -- too good, for those of us who ended up making $40,000 a year as journalists after graduation. But there was no obvious gap between mind-bogglingly rich and merely upper middle class.