Celebrating Success: Dr Emily Yarrow

Congratulations to Dr Emily Yarrow and her co-author Julie Davies (UCL Global Business School for Health) for their paper entitled “A Typology of Sexism in Contemporary Business Schools: Belligerent, benevolent, ambivalent, and oblivious sexism” accepted in Gender, Work and Organization.

Abstract

The legitimacy of business schools is based on rankings, revenues, branding, and opportunities to support staff and students ‘to make a difference in the world’. Yet sexism in business schools is endemic. Drawing on Acker’s inequality regimes framework and a thematic analysis of reports in Poets&Quants, EFMD’s Global Focus and AACSB International’s BizEd/AACSB Insights over a decade, this study explores how business schools are dealing (or not) with sexism. We propose a typology of four categories of sexism in business schools: belligerent, benevolent, ambivalent, and oblivious sexism. Our findings contribute to understandings of institutional theory and the institutional development of business schools as important sites of (sexist and gendered) knowledge production and dissemination and entrenched inequalities. We posit that media constructions of sexism may better inform individual decisions, organizational development, and governance about the imperative to eliminate sexist behaviours and discrimination. We argue that business schools need to gain substantive legitimacy as effective role models by reforming themselves. They must actively tackle institutional and cultural sexism from within. Implications for practice include effective inclusion of mandatory sexism reporting in international business school accreditation standards and rankings criteria as well as requirements for research funding.