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New Study: Few Black Female Harvard MBAs Reach Top Corporate Roles

Corporate America is actually getting less diverse when it comes to African Americans in leadership roles.

New research by the Harvard Business Review finds that only 12.6% of African American women who graduated from HBS went on to attain CEO or executive positions at corporations. Compare that to the 40% of non-African American Harvard MBAs who went on to executive corporate ranks, according to The Washington Post.

“This group is very highly credentialed, and given those particular assumptions, they should rise at the same level,” Anthony Mayo, a co-author and professor at Harvard Business School, tells The Washington Post. “There is not an indication there is a drop-off in desire.”

The research studied the careers of 2,300 HBS alumni of African descent who graduated since 1908—the founding year of the African-American Student Union at Harvard Business School. Among the group, the study focused on 532 African American women who graduated between 1977 and 2015.

Visibility/Invisibility Conundrum

The study cites an idea of visibility/invisibility conundrum as one of the biggest challenges faced by women studied in the research.

On one hand, African-American women have a unique benefit to their hypervisibility since, more often than not, they are the only black person at a firm.

“There are so many rooms I’ve gone into in my life where I was the only black person, and I immediately started to see that as an advantage,” the vice chair of an investment firm said in the study. “Because they’re going to look, they’re going to listen….They’re wondering how I got into the room, so I have an opportunity to get their attention. All I have to do is deliver into that space.”

On the other hand, according to the study, there is also a sense of invisibility that comes with that. Many of those interviewed by Harvard Business Review report awkward scenarios where they are often mistaken for secretaries or members of the wait staff.

“Navigating between the extremes of hypervisibility and invisibility can feel traumatic,” the study reads. “One is either performing under a microscope or being ignored, and self-esteem can take a hit in either scenario. Having built the capacity for resilience, however, the women we studied were consistently able to maneuver around this paradox, often turning the obstacles it posed into opportunities.”

Failure to Provide Equal Opportunities for Growth

The study alludes to a bigger, more organizational issue at hand: the failure for a workplace organization to provide equal opportunities for growth. For the minority of African American women who have reached top ranks in their organization, the authors say, it requires an “extraordinary ability, perseverance, and support to transcend it.”

“The insights gleaned in our study are important not just for African-Americans and women,” the authors write. “They’re essential for any manager who recognizes what research has shown over and over again—that an organization’s diversity is its strength.”

Sources: Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post