By: Yilu Zhao

November 7, 2004, New York Times

From the article:

M.B.A.'s: Bonding Over More Than Beer

After a flurry of stressful exams in May, Liliahn Johnson, then a first-year student at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, organized a potluck dinner at a friend's apartment for the school's Black Management Association. Women brought jambalaya, jerk chicken, lasagna, macaroni and cheese. Men brought store-bought desserts and wine. Jazz played in the background, and students chatted about their plans for the summer.

One of a group of women who organize such events, Ms. Johnson explained: ''Our mentality is, 'Let's change the social life from just beer drinking to something more diverse.'

Carmita Burnette, then a second-year Kellogg student, put it more bluntly. ''We like cooking,'' she said. ''And, hey, it's O.K.''

Potluck parties, picnics, afternoon teas and theater outings are a far cry from what Edmund Wilson, former dean of admissions and student affairs at Kellogg, saw in 1972 when he arrived at the school. Back then, 7 percent of the students were women; today, 29 percent are. ''It was an environment bereft of any activity for women,'' he recalls. ''Most men went to bars to socialize, and it seemed they just didn't want to have anything to do with women, because, I think, they were afraid of them.'' There were simply not enough women to create a social scene of their own, he says, and the isolation hampered the women's education. Learning to network has long been an essential part of the schooling.

Start-ups are still hatched at bars around the Kellogg campus, but they are also concocted in other settings. ''You have to have a mix of all social activities,'' says Thane Gauthier, one of the men who attended Ms. Johnson's potluck. ''You might not want to discuss philosophical issues at a bar, but you might get into deeper conversations at potlucks.'' Even though Ms. Burnette participated in traditional activities as a student, she has refused to learn that essential networking sport: golf.

Male students seem to be taking it all in stride; of dozens of men interviewed at professional schools, few objected to the changes. Some even expressed gratitude to female students for giving new legitimacy to issues of work-life balance.

Indeed, though women are still in the minority at business schools, they sometimes have a presence on campus that belies that status. ''At many schools, women seem to be more active in extracurriculars and assume more leadership positions,'' says Elissa Ellis, executive director of the Forte Foundation, which aims to increase women's enrollment at business schools. ''A lot of the guys we talk to are more interested in getting the homework done,'' she adds, ''but the women, for some reason, seem more interested in building the communities.''

Still, numbers matter for the foundation, which has long searched for reasons that female enrollment has remained so low. One new Kellogg graduate, Kim Matthews, has a theory. Almost half of entering classes at law and medical schools are fresh out of college, but most first-year business students have had three to five years of work experience. By age 27 or 28, Ms. Matthews says, many women ''feel their biological clocks are ticking if they want to start a family.'' At that point, a prospective student ''starts to wonder whether she will get the return back on her expensive business education.''

Christine Nordhielm, a [former] Kellogg marketing professor, says she thinks women are discouraged by the shortage of female role models in the corporate world and in textbook cases. ''If you are a woman sitting through two years of school, and all you do is read cases with male protagonists,'' she says, ''I am sure that won't have the most empowering effect on you.'' Recently, with the help of Vicki Medvec, another member of the Kellogg faculty, Professor Nordhielm wrote a case about the revitalization of the Quaker Oats brand by Polly Kawalek, currently president of Quaker Foods.

''When you only have cases with men,'' Professor Medvec says, ''you are sending a message about who the leader is. Our message is that both men and women are in charge.''

Yilu Zhao is a first-year law student at Harvard and a former education reporter at The Times.