MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Gender Discrimination Still Exists - Now What?

Late last fall, after a semester of classes, a young, white, male MBA student came to me and said, “So, I now realize just how badly women still experience gender discrimination, and it makes me really angry. But I have no idea how to stop it or what to do about it.” His words communicated a genuine desire to combat attitudes and treatment that for many women are all too familiar.

I would have been surprised by his comments had I not witnessed a similar reaction months earlier when interviewing seasoned executives who serve on the boards of large, publicly traded U.S. companies.

In both practice and research, we are doing a better job at bringing attention to the problem. But we haven’t established enough tangible suggestions for how to challenge it. One idea I’ve been exploring: Giving people clearer language to use in their day to day encounters with prejudice.