If you’ve ever taken a business class at Marshall before, you might have noticed a change in the demographics of the students sitting beside you this semester. Jose Romo has the story.
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The incoming class of 2025 at the USC Marshall School of Business looks slightly different as its undergraduate business administration program has reached gender parity for the first time.
Dean Garrett says that gender parity in the undergraduate program represents a real milestone on our path to giving women access to skills, networks, and opportunities they need to realize their highest aspirations as business leaders. Here’s Vaanyasri Goel, a senior at the Marshall School of Business and president of Marshall Women’s Leadership.
VAANYASRI GOEL: I think it’s a very, very positive step towards a big change, and I feel like organizations and schools like USC Marshall are trying to create a parity and set an example for other organizations on campus, for other universities like USC Marshall, and for even companies in the corporate world to know that such a milestone can be achieved if we create a strategy towards it. I feel like diversity, inclusion, and equity have become such a strong model, especially ever since the whole quarantine happened and so many movements started happening.
Colleen Ammerman, the director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, speaks on the problems women encounter in the business workforce and how to move forward.
COLLEEN AMMERMAN: Since there are lots of ways in which language that you use to describe a role and a job description can kind of subtly, you know, inadvertently skew the pool of people who are applying, so you might be missing out on women who are qualified and would be great in this role, but they’re not even applying because of just subtle signals they’re getting in the language that you use. So you’ve got to kind of start all the way there, and that’s just one example. There’s all kinds of things that you can do throughout the rest of the process in terms of interviewing and in terms of onboarding and in terms of performance, evaluation and promotion and compensation to kind of take the bias out of those systems.
Back at USC, we also heard from alumni and Marshall Class of ‘91 valedictorian Ramona L. Cappello about what this change means for incoming MBA students.
RAMONA CAPPELLO: You know, there’s a philosophy that if you don’t see yourself in the room, you don’t see yourself achieving at that level or you don’t feel your sense of belonging. But a lot of women need to see that they belong to feel that they belong. And I think that’s just that’s still a big step forward we need to make. Women in business have made huge strides but they are not yet where they need to be in the most senior executive levels of management, and that’s going to require us doing a hand out to help give them a hand up.
And that’s what Dean Garrett is hoping to achieve, as he says that women are essential to fulfilling the unlimited potential and unprecedented responsibility that businesses face in the future. This is just the beginning for the women in Mashall.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Jose Romo.