Business Firms Love Gay MBAs
Financial services firms are making more of an effort to recruit and keep gay employees, and activist groups are helping smooth the way.
Being a gay employee at the PricewaterhouseCoopers office in Tampa wasn’t always easy for Catheryn Sarno.
Four years ago the senior associate, who wasn’t open about her sexual orientation, sat in the accounting firm’s break room listening to caustic remarks made about other gay colleagues. “There’s no way I’m going to come out,” she recalled thinking. She even considered leaving the firm at one point.
Jennifer Krause, a senior manager at PwC, felt the same way at a another financial company where she used to work. There, gay employees could not talk about their personal lives at work, she said, fearing it would affect their career growth or sour relationships with big clients. “After going to a few holiday parties alone, I realized I was not happy, and left,” Krause says.
EMBRACING CHANGE. For gay employees, the financial services world hasn’t always been the most welcoming environment. But the sector—once a stereotypically macho, white male environment—has been changing. And those changes are being reflected not only in the workplace but on B-school campuses.
Major companies like Deloitte, Deutsche Bank (DB ), JPMorgan Chase (JPM ), and Lehman Brothers Holdings (LEH ), have been holding recruiting dinners at B-schools for gay students, and more companies are sponsoring the 9th Annual Reaching Out MBA Conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) students and recent grads.
More than 300 GLBT MBA students, 60 companies, and 300 professionals will attend this year’s conference in New York this October. Gay and lesbian student clubs have been picking up at B-schools as well.
A 2002 study by Jason Lorber, a gay Stanford MBA alumnus, found that 86% of leading business schools had gay student groups, up from 50% in 1995. (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/5/04, “B-Schools Gain a Lavender Tinge”).
(keep reading:Businessweek)
Written by TechStickle on August 14th, 2006 with
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