Nitin Nohria Comments at HBS Gender and Work Conference March 1, 2013

Nitin Nohria, Dean of the Harvard Business School, attended the Gender and Work Conference this morning and made some opening comments to its attendees. He opened his remarks with, "It's nice to be a feminist in a room full of feminists."

Nohria explained that he had received many thank you's and expressions of gratitude from the attendees for his support of this conference, but that it was really he who should be thanking us for being "intrepid" explorers of the frontier of studying gender at work.

He reflected on the fact that law schools had made more and earlier progress integrating women into their faculties and student bodies than business schools. Nohria attributed this to the fact that the study of gender was de-marginalized as a topic earlier in law schools, where it has long been considered a legitimate field of study. This is starting to occur in business schools thanks to people like us.

Nohria ended by thanking us, as one feminist to others, for our contributions to improving our understanding of obstacles to gender equality in the workplace, and thus to the integration of business schools and business more generally.

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