Last spring, when Harvard Business School celebrated the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to our two-year MBA programme, I returned to the classroom to teach a newly written case study on women’s experiences at HBS. I wrote three dates on the board: 1963, the year eight women entered the first-year class; 1988, the midpoint between then and now, and 2013. I have very personal reflections on each of those years.
I was born 50 years ago in India. My mother was 19 years old. She had aspired to be a doctor but instead entered into an arranged marriage with my father. In her lifetime she has never worked outside the home. She has no serious regrets about not becoming a doctor, yet now and then she has wondered what her life might have been like had she come of age in a different generation, when more choices were open to her.
In 1988, 25 years later, I arrived as a faculty member at HBS. At that point, women made up 25 per cent of the student body. During my early years of teaching, I would often seek advice from my wife, who had just earned her MBA and was beginning her professional career. Like my sister, a cardiologist, this generation felt they had professional choices that were much rarer in my mother’s generation.