The Numbers

Between 1915 and 1968, a total of forty-two black students graduated from HBS.⁶ The representation of blacks at HBS took a major turn in spring 1968 when Clifford E. Darden, Lillian Lincoln Lambert, E. Theodore Lewis Jr., George R. Price, and A. Leroy Willis formed the AASU. Recalling his initial impressions of HBS, Darden wrote, “Imagine a Fall 1967 MBA entering class of some 700 persons of whom the overwhelming majority are white males—with a sprinkling of white females of US citizenship (approximately 38 students in total), some 45 international students and six—yes six—African Americans. Imagine a campus so monochromatic that none of the seven first-year sections that Fall could boast more than a lone student of color, and where one section was as lily-white as a debutante ball in the ante-bellum South” (African-American Student Union of the Harvard Business School, 1997, p. 13).

With the encouragement and determination of the AASU, the number of black graduates increased from five in 1969 to twenty-seven in 1970 to fifty-eight in 1971 (figure 3-1). The class of 2009 included seventy-four black graduates (about 8 percent of the overall class), which was the largest total in any graduating year in the school’s history.

The mean number of black graduates has increased from thirty-seven in the 1970s to fifty-eight in the 2010s. Over the past twenty-five years, the percentage of black graduates in the MBA program has been relatively flat at about 6 percent.⁷

Women represent 35 percent of all black graduates between 1969 and 2017. While women represented only 14 percent of black graduates in the 1970s, the number of women graduates increased to 43 percent by the 2010s. In comparison, women represent 27 percent of all graduates of HBS during this same time period. The higher representation of black women compared to black men in the HBS classroom is consistent with the overall trends in higher education. According to Okahana and Zhou (2017), 69 percent of blacks enrolled in all graduate programs are women.

The vast majority of black graduates (90 percent) with known countries of origin were born in the United States.⁸ The percentage of black graduates from the United States has decreased from 94 percent in the 1980s to 86 percent in the 2010s, while the percentage of graduates from Africa has increased from 3 percent in the 1980s to 10 percent in the 2010s.

Educational Path before HBS

In building the database of black graduates, we were interested in the educational paths that they pursued before matriculation at HBS. To that end, we were able to gather information about undergraduate colleges for 96 percent of graduates from 1969 through 2015.⁹

Undergraduate College

Over this time period, 32 percent of black graduates attended a top-one-hundred national university before coming to HBS. The next-largest concentration is graduates of Ivy League institutions, which accounts for 26 percent of all black graduates. The percentage breakdowns for black men and women are similar, though black women were more likely to attend an Ivy League college, top-one-hundred national university, or top-one-hundred liberal arts college than their male counterparts. Black men were more represented in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), military colleges, and other public universities.

Reflecting the initial outreach efforts of HBS, 21 percent of the graduates from the 1970s attended HBCUs (figure 3-2). In the 1980s, there was an increase in graduates from top liberal arts institutions and a corresponding decrease in graduates who had attended HBCUs (down to 8 percent of graduates). Those trends reversed in the 1990s. Graduates’ educational backgrounds have been far less diverse in the past twenty years than they were in the 1970s, as a greater percentage of recent alumni attended elite undergraduate institutions. In the 1970s, Ivy League colleges, HBCUs, and top-one-hundred national universities accounted for 65 percent of all incoming students. That number increased to 82 percent by the 2010s. In addition, we see far fewer graduates from other public and private universities by the 2010s.

One Ivy League–educated alumna, reflecting on the educational credentials of her coworkers, stated, “You look around at the education of black folks versus white folks [at work]. You start to notice a pattern that all the black folks are superbly educated. The black folks went to Ivy League schools. The white folks went to possibly whatever schools they wanted to go, and so you start to see that black folks are screened much more.”

Targeting alumni of HBCUs has been a part of the outreach strategy for HBS admissions since the initial request by the five founders of the AASU to expand the number of black students in the MBA program. HBCUs such as Howard, Morehouse, Florida A&M, and Spelman were top feeder colleges for HBS in the 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s. In fact, Howard and Morehouse are included among the top ten undergraduate feeder schools for black students over the past forty years. In the accompanying sidebar, Melissa E. Wooten discusses the critical role that HBCUs play in the educational landscape, as well as the significant challenges they face in sustaining respect and legitimacy in the traditional white academy.

COMMENTARY

Melissa E. Wooten, The Struggle Is Real: Black Colleges, Resources, and Respect

Presented at the March 2018 Academic Symposium on Race, Work, and Leadership at Harvard Business School

Black colleges exist within an institutional framework that privileges white sensitivities and logics. By understanding that this framework disadvantages black colleges in similar ways across very different time periods, we can learn much about the nature and shape of white supremacy. That is, as black colleges adapt, as they push back, fight for more resources, and demand recognition for their achievements, these schools reveal how racism operates at the institutional level to consistently advantage traditionally white educational spaces.

The markers of legitimacy (e.g., endowment, enrollment, graduation rate) within higher education disadvantage black colleges. This did not happen by chance. It reflects the racially segregated institutional environment in which higher education emerged, a racially segregated system designed to favor and reward traditionally white colleges for their efforts, including those that exclude black students, intentionally or not. For instance, knowing that, on average, black students had lower ACT scores, the State of Mississippi required higher ACT scores for admission to its traditionally white colleges than it did for admission to its historically black ones (Taylor & Olswang, 1999). Despite such a dubious past, we still use average standardized test scores of first-year students to rank colleges and universities.

In response, in an environment that privileges such metrics, black college advocates find themselves pointing out the dangers of their application. Black college advocates highlight the inconsistencies in these metrics to show that no matter what, black colleges cannot win in this game, historically and contemporarily.

W. E. B. Du Bois, a graduate of Fisk University and a onetime faculty member at Atlanta University, engaged this strategy when he responded to Thomas Jesse Jones’s assertion that private, black colleges provided a woefully inadequate education and produced inferior students. In assessing curriculum at black colleges, Jones criticized the schools for not abandoning classical studies in Greek and Latin. Du Bois pointed out that few white colleges had abandoned these disciplines, yet they did not stand accused of inferiority (Watkins, 2001).

Jones would have preferred that black colleges replace those disciplines and incorporate courses in economics and sociology. Du Bois pointed out the resource constraints facing black colleges as they tried to transform their curriculums to include burgeoning disciplines (Watkins, 2001). Du Bois might have also pointed out that few even recognized black colleges as the spaces where these new disciplines emerged. He established the first empirically driven department of sociology at Atlanta University, a black college. Yet the University of Chicago received credit for doing what he had already done (Morris, 2015).

One of the more recent attempts to call out the application of white logics to black colleges happened in January 2018 (Toldson, 2018). When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the six-year graduation rate at many black colleges was low, Toldson noted that the article referred to only a small proportion of black colleges. He noted how easily he identified predominantly white colleges with similarly low six-year graduation rates. He explained why graduation rates were the wrong metric for comparisons methodologically and theoretically. The small size of the black colleges highlighted in the article made “numeric calculations of their graduation rates very volatile.” Moreover, the students attending those colleges, as well as those attending the predominantly white ones with similar graduations rates, most likely work full time to pay tuition and therefore would not complete college at the same rate as students who receive financial support from parents.

As the institutional environment surrounding higher education abandoned its outwardly race-conscious framework, society did not challenge the metrics associated with this system. We did not have a moment where education or legal scholars stopped to question the racially encoded assumptions baked into these metrics. Nor did we debate whether we should come up with new metrics altogether. Instead, as the institutional environment for higher education moved to an allegedly color-blind or race-neutral system, we continued to apply these metrics indiscriminately and sloppily to black colleges.

Because of this, we should understand black colleges as a case study in how white supremacy operates in higher education. As Palmer (2013) reminds us, “White supremacy is not a person or group of people, it’s an ideology.… [W]hite supremacy encourages us to value white people, white culture, and everything associated with whiteness above the people, culture, and everything associated with people of color.”

If we weren’t so tethered to an institutional framework that privileged white educational spaces, we would have to continually contemplate the failures of these schools, especially as it relates to the education of black students. An analysis by the Atlantic showed that between 1994 and 2014, the percentage of black undergraduates at top-tier universities held flat at 6 percent (McGill, 2015). No one labels top-tier traditionally white colleges as “failing” because, more than sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the percentage of black students enrolled remains well below 10 percent.

Comparatively, according to the Pew Research Center, black colleges accounted for 9 percent of all black students enrolled in higher education in 2015 (Anderson, 2017). These institutions, which make up a mere 3 percent of all colleges and universities, accounted for 15 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded to black students in 2015. They had more diversity on their campuses than many traditionally white colleges when you consider that 17 percent of students enrolled identified as something other than black in 2015.

A quick search online for “historically black colleges” will lead to more pages questioning the necessity of these schools than pointing out the foregoing realities. It does not matter that, as a group, black colleges continue to enroll a larger proportion of black students than many top-tier traditionally white colleges and have far more racially diverse campuses than many of their white counterparts. The lack of respect black colleges get for such accomplishments will remain until we change the institutional framework and force it to abandon the white logic to which it so desperately clings.

REFERENCES

Anderson, M. (2017, February 28). A look at historically black colleges and universities as Howard turns 150. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/28/a-look-at-historically-black-colleges-and-universities-as-howard-turns-150/

McGill, A. (2015, November 23). The missing black students at elite universities. Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/black-college-student-body/417189/

Morris, A. D. (2015). The scholar denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology. Oakland: University of California Press.

Palmer, N. (2013, April 8). White supremacy: Not just Neo Nazis. Sociology in Focus. Retrieved from http://sociologyinfocus.com/2013/04/white-supremacy-not-just-neo-nazis/

Taylor, E., & Olswang, S. (1999). Peril or promise: The effect of desegregation litigation on historically black colleges. Western Journal of Black Studies 23, 73–82.

Toldson, I. A. (2018, January 31). Low graduation rates aren’t an HBCU thing. The Root. Retrieved from https://www.theroot.com/low-graduation-rates-isn-t-an-hbcu-thing-1822593343

Watkins, W. H. (2001). The white architects of black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865–1954. New York: Teachers College Press.

Career Path after HBS

To better understand the career trajectories of black alumni, we examined the career choices for alumni from the classes of 1977 through 2015. The total number of alumni for this thirty-eight-year period is 1,821, and we were able to capture full employment data for approximately 1,400. We coded the industry, title, and function of every position that was held, including different positions within the same company.¹⁰

Industry Concentrations

Approximately 35 percent of black alumni are currently working in the finance sector (figure 3-3).¹¹ The next-largest concentration of black alumni is those working in various professional services industries, including consulting, advertising, and legal services (18 percent).¹² Black alumni are more concentrated in these two industries relative to all HBS alumni. A comparable 2014 survey of all HBS alumni from the classes of 1982 to 2012 revealed that 27 percent and 13 percent were currently working in finance and consulting, respectively.

TABLE 3-2
Top first employers post-HBS
		1970s		1980s		1990s		2000s		2010s
1		IBM		IBM; Morgan Stanley		McKinsey & Company		Goldman Sachs		McKinsey & Company
2		General Motors		McKinsey & Company		Goldman Sachs		McKinsey & Company		Deloitte
3				Booz Allen Hamilton; Goldman Sachs; Kraft Foods		Merrill Lynch		Bain & Company		Bain & Company
4				JP Morgan; Procter & Gamble		Bain & Company; Morgan Stanley		Boston Consulting Group		Morgan Stanley
5						Booz Allen Hamilton		Procter & Gamble		JP Morgan
6						Accenture; Boston Consulting Group; Citi		Citi; JP Morgan		Boston Consulting Group
7						Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; PWC		American Express Company; Merrill Lynch

The finance industry sector is currently the top industry sector for black graduates of all decades except the 1970s (figure 3-4). Currently employed black graduates from the 1970s are more likely to work in professional services than in any other sector. The concentration of black graduates currently working in the top two industry sectors (finance and professional services) is similar for most graduating classes, though black graduates from 2010 to 2015 are more likely to work in a broader array of industry sectors, including a larger group working in media, information technology, and telecommunications.

The concentration of black HBS alumni in finance is consistent with the analysis of black business leaders in Paths to Power (Mayo et al., 2007, pp. 187–220). Historically, black business leaders were heavily concentrated in the insurance and banking sectors. More recently, black HBS alumni have focused their financial careers in investment management, private equity, and real estate. The paths to success for black alumni are far broader than in the past, as demonstrated by the large numbers of alumni in professional services. We see far fewer graduates focused on the publishing and entertainment sectors, and even fewer focused on the creation of black businesses for the black community. In this sense, the opportunity spectrum is much wider today for aspiring black business leaders.

While it was not surprising to find that most black alumni are currently employed in finance or professional services, we wondered whether there were specific companies that stood out as top employers. We examined the current employers for 1,700 black alumni for which we had information; the top ten current employers of black alumni are shown in table 3-3.¹³

No one company stands out as a major employer, especially given the overall size of nine of the top ten companies on the list. However, we were intrigued to see that the top current employer is self-employed. Of this group, approximately 55 percent are working as independent consultants and 25 percent are working as financial advisers or real estate investors. Of the 92 black alumni that are currently self-employed, 69 percent are graduates from the 1990s through the 2010s.

One executive explained why he left Wall Street: “I was tired. I was tired of having bosses. I was tired of what I considered to be unfair evaluation of performance of an African American in the professional services industry. In professional services, you are sort of good because someone says you are good.… African Americans never really fare well in that process.”

Reflecting on her decision to leave corporate America, a self-employed consultant said, “It was quite frustrating when I was told that I needed to have more seasoning before I could get promoted. I just created a business that is $100M even though I was younger than some of the other VPs who had done it! So why can’t I get promoted? I did not appreciate what the structure said I had to go through.”

TABLE 3-3
Top ten current employers of black HBS alumni
Rank		Company		Number of alumni
1		Self-employed/sole proprietor		92
2		Morgan Stanley		28
3		McKinsey & Company		27
4		Google		25
5		Boston Consulting Group		13
6		Goldman Sachs		12
7		American Express Company		11
8		Bain & Company		11
9		JP Morgan		10
10		Wells Fargo		10

Self-employment is a relatively common choice for black alumni at some point in their careers. For instance, 39 percent of all graduates from the 1970s pursued a self-employment opportunity during the course of their careers. The average duration of these self-employment positions was 11.6 years. Similarly, approximately 35 percent of graduates from the 1980s were self-employed for an average of 10.5 years, and almost one-quarter of 1990s graduates have been self-employed for an average of 7.6 years.

Functional Concentrations

Some interesting patterns emerged when we explored the functional paths that black alumni pursued in their careers. We assessed every job position to determine the primary functional concentration for each graduate. Men were more likely to pursue a functional career path in finance, and women were more likely to pursue a path in strategy or marketing.

Figure 3-5, which shows the changes in functional concentration by decade, highlights the increase and subsequent decrease in careers in finance. This figure also showcases the drop in black MBAs pursuing careers in operations or manufacturing. While 30 percent of graduates in the 1970s pursued careers in operations, that number dropped to 9 percent by the last decade of the study. Besides strategy and consulting, the fastest-growing functional areas over time are sales or business development and product management.

Within these functional concentrations, about 38 percent of black alumni reported primarily being in a line function during their careers, and 27 percent reported being in a predominantly staff function. The other 35 percent indicated a career that included a balance of line and staff functions.¹⁴

Career Satisfaction

Through a series of surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews, we were able to gain insight into satisfaction about career progression and the factors that have contributed to or detracted from that progression for black alumni.¹⁵ We learned that the majority of black HBS alumni are overall very satisfied or extremely satisfied with multiple facets of their careers and lives (figure 3-6). However, they reported less satisfaction with certain aspects of their careers than their white counterparts. Specifically, we found a statistically significant racial disparity (even after controlling for gender, age, marital status, parental status, industry, and firm size), such that blacks were less satisfied than whites with opportunities to do meaningful work, to realize professional accomplishments, and to combine career with personal and family life.

One alumna explained, “I have to work harder than some of my counterparts to prove myself every single day. I do benefit from the Harvard Business School brand, but I still have to overcome people’s stereotypes about me, and I am not always given the benefit that white males are given, and … I have to prove myself before I am given trust and confidence.”

Alumni were asked to reflect on the role that race and gender played in their careers. Did they consider their race an advantage, a disadvantage, or neither? Alumni answered this question from two vantage points: (1) anticipatory, when they started their post-HBS career; and (2) reflective, looking back on their actual career experiences (figures 3-7, 3-8, 3-9, and 3-10).

There were significant disparities between black and white alumni in regard to both gender and race. Similarly small percentages of black and white women expected their gender to be an advantage (about 12 percent) at the start of their careers. Black women, however, were more likely to expect their gender to be a disadvantage—62 percent for black women and 46 percent for white women.

While their responses on gender aligned with white men’s, black men were even more likely to believe that their gender would be an advantage in their careers—55 percent for black men compared with 40 percent for white men. This expectation of an advantage directly contrasted with their expectations about race.

Black women expected to confront a double disadvantage in their careers—barriers based on both gender and race. A black woman described having to be cognizant to avoid stereotypes: “I think being a black woman, I feel like we’re always trying to walk the line of not being too assertive, and not coming across angry.… Being one of the only black people, much less black women, and being as outspoken as I think I am, I always felt pressured to dial it back.”

In contrast, black men did not expect to experience any disadvantages based on their gender (and some thought it would be an advantage), but the vast majority expected their race to be a disadvantage. A black alumnus described how he navigated his career: “In part to avoid prejudice, I opted to stay with one company so that my networks and reputation accumulated. Being presumed less competent due to ethnicity is a major startup cost that I paid once, and my networks and reputation mitigated ongoing prejudice for the most part.”

Black women’s expectations about their gender and race being a disadvantage seemed to be consistent with their lived experiences. They expected both to be a disadvantage and they experienced them that way. That was not the case for black men. While 86 percent of black men expected race to be a disadvantage in their careers, only 59 percent experienced it that way.

In the accompanying sidebar, Arthur P. Brief explores some of the trends in explicit and subtle racism. He further explores the impact that these forms of racism have had on the opportunity landscape for black professionals.

COMMENTARY

Arthur P. Brief, Back to the Future: A Strategy for Studying Racism in Organizations

Presented at the March 2018 Academic Symposium on Race, Work, and Leadership at Harvard Business School

What is the status of black business leadership in America? With blacks forming 12.1 percent of the labor force, the data in table C3-1 is not very comforting, with the exception of that pertaining to human resources managers.

One of several plausible explanations for the relative scarcity of black leaders is racism. The term racism is confusing, in part because it has changed over time and, at least theoretically, comes in an assortment of forms. First, there is the familiar old-fashioned racism, whose adherents believe in the biological inferiority of blacks and support strict segregation. Their number appears to have been declining steadily since the 1960s. Figures C3-1 and C3-2 depict this trend from 1972 to 2008.

TABLE C3-1
Black-white differences in managerial employment (%)
Roles		Black		White
Chief executives		3.8		90.0
General and operations managers		8.3		85.0
Marketing and sales managers		6.0		86.4
Financial managers		6.7		83.5
Human resources managers		12.3		81.7
Industrial production managers		3.8		89.5
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018).

a. “Do you think white students and (Negro/Black) students should go to the same schools or separate schools?” (“Separate schools” coded as agreeing.)

b. “Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African Americans) and whites?” (“Yes” coded as agreeing.)

c. “White people have a right to keep (Negroes/Blacks/African Americas) out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and (Negroes/Blacks/African Americans) should respect that right.” (“Agree strongly” and “agree slightly” coded as agreeing.)

d. “Suppose there is a community-wide vote on the general housing issue. There are two possible laws to vote on. One law says that a homeowner can decide for himself whom to sell his house to, even if he prefers not to sell to (Negroes/Blacks/African Americans). The second law says that a homeowner cannot refuse to sell to someone because of their race or color. Which law would you vote for?” (“Owner decides” coded as agreeing.)

“The second set of characteristics asks if people in the group tend to be hardworking or if they tend to be lazy. Where would you rate whites on this scale? Blacks?”

“Do people in these groups tend to be unintelligent or tend to be intelligent? Where would you rate whites in general on this scale? Blacks?”

The figure plots percentages of whites who rated whites higher than blacks on a given trait (industriousness or intelligence). Seven percent of whites rated blacks as more hardworking than whites, and six percent rated blacks as more intelligent.

Data from the 2016 General Social Science Survey noted that 39.8 percent of nonblack respondents reported that racial differences in inequality are due to blacks’ lack of will and 6.8 percent reported that inequalities are due to the inborn disabilities of blacks. So old-fashioned racists are out there but not necessarily the problem they were.

But old-fashioned racists likely have been replaced by subtle racists. According to Dovidio, Gaertner, and their colleagues (e.g., Dovidio, Gaertner, & Pearson, 2017), racism has mutated in America since the 1960s, prompted by changes in law and social norms regarding the affirmation of egalitarian values. For many whites, not only do their stated racial attitudes appear less racist, they also have developed a private self-concept of being nonracist. Social psychologists in the 1980s began studying several forms of this new subtle racism: “symbolic racism” (Sears & Henry, 2005), “ambivalent racism” (Katz, 1981), “adverse racism” (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004), and my personal favorite, McConahay’s (1986) “modern racism,” whose tenets include “discrimination is a thing of the past because Blacks now have the freedom to compete in the marketplace and enjoy the things they can afford and blacks are pushing too hard, too fast into places they are not wanted.”

Now let me share with you a piece of research my colleagues and I published in 2000 (Brief, Dietz, Cohen, Pugh, & Vaslow, 2000) focusing on modern racism. The research was inspired by the case of Shoney’s, a restaurant chain in the 1990s with 1,800 units in thirty-six states that was forced to pay $132.5 million for discrimination against its employees. The company from the top down believed it was good business to racially match its customer-contact employees to the customers they serve. For instance, when a store was performing under par, managers were told to “lighten up” the unit and hire “attractive white girls.” Such tactics resulted in 1.8 percent of Shoney’s restaurant managers being black and 75 percent of its black restaurant employees holding jobs in low paying, non-customer-contact positions (e.g., dishwasher).

We conducted two laboratory experiments using an in-basket methodology with participants playing the role of an organizational decision maker required to screen a set of job applicants’ résumés and make a hiring recommendation. The participants’ levels of modern racism were measured one month before the experiments in a mass testing context. In one experiment, the business justification hypothesized to release the beast of modern racism was that since the vast majority of the organization’s workforce was white, so should be the new human resources manager; in the other, participants were selecting a customer representative to join a team whose members were all white, as were the team’s customers. In both studies, we observed a statistical interaction between modern racism and business justifications of discrimination against black job applicants, supporting the idea that the beast of modern racism is behaviorally released by business justifications to discriminate. Importantly, these findings were constructively replicated using the IAT, an important measure of unconscious prejudice, not the modern racism scale, by Ziegert and Hanges (2005).

To me, the business justifications my colleagues and I studied represent one of likely many organizational mechanisms that link prejudice to negative outcomes (figure C3-3). I use the term mechanism in a way similar to how Barbara Reskin did in her 2002 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, when she spoke about ascriptive inequality. Perhaps by identifying those organizational mechanisms we can seek to modify or eliminate them, thereby allowing black leaders to blossom and flourish.

I will now move on to a second research example of organizational mechanisms. In this study, we (Roberson, Deitch, Brief, & Block, 2003) surveyed the members of a national association of black professionals employed in utilities industries to measure their solo status, experienced stereotype threat, and feedback-seeking behaviors. Let me digress a little about our sample. I have learned, after studying race for more than forty-five years, employing organizations very rarely warmly embrace race researchers for a variety of legitimate and perhaps illegitimate reasons. So, in this case, we turned to an association of black executives for our data. There are dozens of these black associations, including alumni associations from predominantly white elite universities (e.g., Harvard’s and Stanford’s business schools) and historically black colleges and universities (e.g., Morehouse).

Roberson et al. (2003) reasoned that black executives working as the sole (i.e., token) blacks in their work groups will experience stereotype threat and, correspondingly, engage in dysfunctional feedback-seeking behavior (e.g., indirectly seeking feedback rather than asking directly for it and discounting feedback). Stereotype threat is the fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group through one’s own behavior (Steele & Aronson, 1995). It is activated in situations where the stereotype is perceived as relevant to one’s performance. In fact, Roberson et al.’s reasoning was confirmed by the data they observed, thereby providing another example of an organizational mechanism, tokenism, that ties prejudice to negative outcomes.

I share this particular piece of research because I believe it demonstrates the value of getting outside the social psychological laboratory. The laboratory simply is not a rich enough context to confidently identify the relationships we did between token status, stereotype threat, and the dysfunctional feedback-seeking behaviors required of real workers in real jobs.

In some ways, the current climate in the United States is a harking back to the past. According to Bobo (2017) and others, Donald J. Trump’s campaign and presidency have unleashed forces that were previously marginalized and shrinking in influence. The evidence he cites for this is drawn from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which reported that during the Trump era, the number of hate groups and hate crimes has increased dramatically. For example, hate groups during the Trump era have increased from 17 percent to 91 percent. Trump’s words and deeds may be once again transforming racial attitudes in America, away from subtle racism and back to the old-fashioned kind.

REFERENCES

Bobo, L. D. (2017). Racism in Trump’s America: Reflections on culture, sociology, and the 2016 US presidential election. British Journal of Sociology, 68(S1), S85–S104.

Bobo, L. D., Charles, C. Z., Krysan, M., Simmons, A. D., & Fredrickson, G. M. (2012). The real record on racial attitudes. In P. V. Marsden (Ed.), Social trends in American life: Findings from the general social survey since 1972 (pp. 38–83). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Brief, A. P., Dietz, J., Cohen, R. R., Pugh, S. D., & Vaslow, J. B. (2000). Just doing business: Modern racism and obedience to authority as explanations for employment discrimination. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 81(1), 72–97.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2018). Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity [Data file]. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2004). Aversive racism. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 36, pp. 1–51). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., & Pearson, A. R. (2017). Aversive racism and contemporary bias. In C. G. Sibley & F. K. Barlow (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of the psychology of prejudice (pp. 267–294). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Katz, I. (1981). Stigma: A social psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

McConahay, J. B. (1986). Modern racism, ambivalence, and the modern racism scale. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 91–125). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

Roberson, L., Deitch, E. A., Brief, A. P., & Block, C. J. (2003). Stereotype threat and feedback seeking in the workplace. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 62(1), 176–188.

Sears, D. O., & Henry, P. J. (2005). Over thirty years later: A contemporary look at symbolic racism. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 37, pp. 95–150). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811.

Ziegert, J. C., & Hanges, P. J. (2005). Employment discrimination: The role of implicit attitudes, motivation, and a climate for racial bias. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(3), 553–562.

Making It to the Top

Over the thirty-eight-year time frame of this study, 13 percent of black women (67) and 19 percent of black men (161) reached upper management (table 3-6).¹⁶

In analyzing the factors that contributed to success, three key areas stood out: (1) access to significant line or general management experiences, (2) global assignments, and (3) internal support systems (figure 3-11). A number of studies have shown the importance of these factors in enabling career advancement and enhancing satisfaction, as well as the detrimental impact of a lack of such factors (Bell & Nkomo, 2001; Thomas & Gabarro, 1999). Reaching the top requires access to assignments and opportunities that serve as proving grounds for increased responsibility. Black and white alumni see the tremendous potential of being tapped for positions that are considered critical in the organization. As the numbers indicate, black alumni are less likely to have been tapped for these types of assignments (especially black women), and this may contribute to a lower level of satisfaction regarding the opportunity to do meaningful work.

Equally important are global assignments, which less than 40 percent of all survey respondents received. About 26 percent of black women and 36 percent of black men had received a global assignment in their careers. The average duration of the global assignment was eighteen months for black women and twenty-eight months for black men. The majority of black men (61 percent) and black women (56 percent) believed that a global assignment improved their position in the firm. To that end, a similar percentage of black men and black women (approximately 40 percent) noted that their most recent global assignment constituted a promotion.

Black men and women were more likely to have had a formally assigned mentor than their white counterparts, but they perceived relatively less value from these organizationally imposed relationships. In contrast, informal mentorship was deemed beneficial by all groups, especially black women. One senior executive said, “A mentor helps you navigate the power structure of the firm, especially when there is no one in senior management who looks like you.” A follow-up analysis of senior executive black women reinforced the importance of both key managerial assignments and the need for influential sponsors who recognize that potential and are willing to back it up (Roberts, Mayo, Ely, & Thomas, 2018).

So what has changed? In many ways, the paths of black alumni of HBS mirror the paths of the outsiders who were analyzed in Paths to Power. Professional credentials, personal relationships, and perseverance are still essential elements of outsiders’ stories—even for Harvard MBAs. In terms of professional credentials, the majority of black alumni attended elite undergraduate institutions and majored in quantitative fields, and nearly 20 percent pursued an additional advanced degree. The importance of personal relationships is borne out in the surveys, as well as the in-depth study of senior black women executives. And finally, perseverance was deemed essential to both forge new opportunities (self-employment, entrepreneurship) and confront the systemic bias in business and society. Our interviews with senior black women pointed to resilience as an essential ingredient in their path to the executive level (Roberts et al., 2018).

While most contemporary research on diversity employs a multicultural lens, this study of black MBA alumni showcases the critical importance of examining race-specific experiences and the need for organizations to be transparent about their racial compositions. Race cannot be relegated to the periphery; it matters in access to opportunities and support, even for individuals who seemingly have every conceivable credential for success. One recent alumna noted, “Perhaps it sounds naïve, but [coming out of HBS] I did not expect race to have any bearing in my career. I was wrong.” We hope that our initial research efforts will encourage other scholars to explore the personal and professional experiences of black leaders, and other underrepresented groups, and that the research will result in actions that ensure greater access to opportunities and wider paths to power.

NOTES

1. Throughout this chapter, we use the term black alumni to refer to alumni who are African American or of African descent.

2. The total alumni population, including DBA and PhD graduates and executive education graduates, living and deceased, is 113,000.

3. Gender and country of origin were also coded for the alumni of 2016 and 2017.

4. We concluded the career data analysis with the class of 2015 so that we could examine at least two years of employment post-HBS.

5. For more on the Great American Business Leaders project, see http://www.hbs.edu/leadership and the methodology chapter from Mayo and Nohria (2005, pp. 365–372).

6. The data for this chapter is drawn from an internal HBS report (Mayo & Roberts, 2018).

7. The HBS entering class size has grown from an average of 818 in the 1990s to 914 in the 2010s.

8. We were able to identify country of origin for 84 percent of all black graduates from 1969 through 2017.

9. The categories of “top one hundred national universities” and “top one hundred liberal arts colleges” were drawn from historical rankings produced by the U.S. News & World Report.

10. As a point of reference, when comparisons across decades are shown in this section, the 1970s includes three class years (1977 through 1979), and the 2010s includes six class years (2010 through 2015).

11. Current position is defined as the position that the alumnus held as of December 2017.

12. Excluding advertising and legal services, the percentage working in consulting is 16 percent.

13. While we have full employment history for 1,381 black alumni, we were able to code current employment for 1,700 of the 1,821 alumni from 1977 through 2015. This data is based on a snapshot of black HBS MBA alumni as of December 2017.

14. Data on staff versus line function is drawn from an analysis of 496 responses to a survey that that was administered to 2,000 black alumni in August 2017.

15. Survey respondents were asked to identify their race and ethnicity, and we analyzed the survey responses based on these self-selected criteria. Of the approximately 5,300 alumni who completed the survey, 4,000, or 78 percent, identified as white and 240, or 4 percent, of the respondents identified as black. Given the sample size and diversity in country of origin, we did not include comparisons between black alumni and other nonwhite alumni.

16. For this analysis, upper management is defined as including chairperson, CEO, president, founder, and other C-level positions (e.g., CMO, CIO, CTO, etc.). In addition, upper management also includes managing director and managing partner.

REFERENCES

African-American Student Union of the Harvard Business School. (1997). The 25th Annual Career/Alumni Conference: Our silver past and golden future. Boston, MA: African-American Student Union.

Bell, E. L. J. E., & Nkomo, S. M. (2001). Our separate ways: Black and white women and the struggle for professional identity. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Catalyst. (1991). Women entrepreneurs: Why companies lose female talent and what they can do about it. New York, NY: Catalyst.

Catalyst. (2001). The next generation: Today’s professionals, tomorrow’s leaders. New York, NY: Catalyst.

Feyerherm, A., & Vick, Y. H. (2005). Generation X women in high technology: Overcoming gender and generational challenges to succeed in the corporate environment. Career Development International, 10(3), 216–227.

Hipple, S. F., & E. Sok. (2013). Tenure of American workers (Research report). Washington, DC: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mayo, A. J., & Nohria, N. (2005). In their time: The greatest business leaders of the twentieth century. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

Mayo, A. J., Nohria, N., & Singleton, L. G. (2007). Paths to power: How insiders and outsiders shaped American business leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Mayo, A. J., & Roberts, L. M. (2018, April). Spheres of influence: A portrait of black MBA program alumni (Internal research report). Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

Okahana, H., & Zhou, E. (2017). Graduate enrollment and degrees: 2006 to 2016 (Research report). Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools, 2017.

Orc International (2014). “Career Pathways Survey 2014.” Internal presentation prepared by Orc International for Harvard Business School.

Roberts, L. M., Mayo, A., Ely, R., & Thomas, D. (2018, March–April). Beating the odds: Leadership lessons from senior African-American women. Harvard Business Review.

Thomas, D. A., & Gabarro, J. J. (1999). Breaking through: The making of minority executives in corporate America. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Walker, J. E. K. (1998). The history of black business in America: Capitalism, race, and entrepreneurship. New York, NY: Twayne.