Fern Mandelbaum’s Stanford business school courses fill up quickly. The professor’s two MBA electives on diversity and the “power of inclusion” in start-up culture are so popular, she added a third this year.
On Prof Mandelbaum’s latest course, Equity by Design: Building Diverse and Inclusive Organisations, students learn how to spot and deal with unconscious bias; hire candidates from diverse backgrounds and design systems to support equality at work.
Among Prof Mandelbaum’s MBA students are women who want to work in technology. This is the cohort that will join the sector after a spate of recent gender discrimination cases and sexual harassment scandals, particularly in the US. Yet far from feeling discouraged, women studying at top business schools say they sense an opportunity to fix Silicon Valley’s problem with women.