Government Steps Up Campaign Against Business School Diversity
The Trump administration has set its sights on the PhD Project, which points underrepresented students toward business doctorates.
Photo illustration: Oscar Bolton Green; photo: Getty Images
In the mid-1990s, Denise Loyd was a civil engineer and project manager on big construction projects. The work was challenging, but she found herself increasingly fascinated by office dynamics—especially as one of very few women in construction management. “My male colleagues, not in an obnoxious way, mostly interacted with me through the lens in which they were used to interacting with women,” she says. They’d treat her like a secretary or their wife or daughter, “but not as much as a peer.” This was particularly interesting to Loyd, because she’s also Black and, as she puts it, “my race was salient to me coming out of grad school.”
By 1997, Loyd, today a professor at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, decided she wanted to dedicate herself to studying these dynamics in management. “I always kind of wanted to get a Ph.D., mostly because it was as high as you could go in education,” she says. But she didn’t really know what was involved. As far as she knew, no one in her life had a Ph.D. Black people earned just over 3% of all doctorates granted in 1997.