How a Business School Exercise Helped Boost Women’s Grades
- INSEAD creates ‘invisible shield’ for women questioning worth
- Bank to implement for employees, pharma company considering it
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INSEAD Business School had a perennial problem with its MBAs. The grades of female students consistently lagged those of men. So a professor did an experiment: She had all students, male and female, do a written exercise to affirm their core values -- and managed to narrow the grade gap by 89 percent.
While the exercise had no effect on men, grades for women MBAs rose to men’s levels at both campuses, in Singapore and in Fontainebleau, France, according to Zoe Kinias, the professor originally from the U.S. who devised it. The exercise turns out to give women "an invisible shield" against feeling undervalued in environments where there are majority men, Kinias said in an interview at the INSEAD Singapore campus where she teaches organizational behavior.