It’s a White Man’s World

This chapter focuses on the question of who has, or has not, gotten access to business education. Periodically, at almost regular intervals, a study appears documenting that women and people of color remain woefully underrepresented in the corporate world, particularly in its upper echelons. Those numbers have not gone unnoticed, nor have they gone unremarked; explanations abound. The first most obvious of these is that the isms—sexism and racism—still predominate in the business world. Those attitudes play out in all sorts of ways, large and small, obvious and subtle, but all with the same result: women and African Americans continue to find corporate America a largely inhospitable place, a club largely closed to them. There has been less discussion, however, about the role business schools have and have not played in training women and people of color for the business world. As the chapter explores, business schools, certainly across much of the twentieth century, cared little and mostly did less to attract those kinds of students. By and large, the world inside collegiate business schools mirrored the world of private enterprise: almost entirely white, almost exclusively male.