MIT Sloan Student Highlights Gender Inequality in the Workplace

A blog post by second-year MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management highlighting gender inequality in the workplace during her summer internship, and the employer’s response, have created an uproar.

Erica Swallow published her original post on the MIT Sloan Students Blog on July 27 and a first-person account of the firm’s response in the Wall Street Journal on August 22.

Gender inequality in the workplace

In the original post, Swallow says of her time at General Catalyst, “I was consistently reminded of my place as a woman in a man’s world.”  Aside from one full-time female associate on the firm’s investment side, she wrote, the only women were in human resources, marketing, and support staff.

Swallow was critical of the firm for rejecting her proposal for a research project on female company founders.  Among the incidents she recalled which hammered home the issue gender inequality in the workplace was a conversation she overheard between two male employees where one of them said, “We should hire some more girls here.” In a separate incident, a member of the firm’s coed softball team – part of a league that mandates teams maintain minimum female membership – told a female employee she didn’t have to play since “we already have enough women.”

“So the only thing that made her valuable on the team was her gender?” Swallow wrote. “I’m sure that was comforting for her and every other woman in earshot. I, for one, was disturbed.”

Should she have consulted General Catalyst first?

Following the publication of the post, Swallow says General Catalyst “wasn’t exactly ecstatic” about what she wrote on the MIT Sloan blog.  The final week of her internship was marked by multiple lengthy discussions about why she wrote the post and didn’t consult the firm before publishing, including a lengthy reprimand by a partner. 

“He had been standing and pointing furiously at me the entire time, while everyone else was seated,” Swallow wrote. “I stood up, tears falling from my eyes and my breath becoming uncontrollable, and said I wasn’t going to take this treatment. I hadn’t done anything wrong…but I was being treated like a perpetrator. I had broken their trust, they told me. And maybe I had, but I would not be silenced and belittled.”

General Catalyst Managing Director Adam Valkin told the Wall Street Journal that the firm was taken by surprise by the Swallow’s claims about gender inequality in the workplace. “We encourage people to speak their minds, but we appreciate it when they come to us first,” he said. “We engaged immediately with her with a focus on trying to learn how we can do better and also how to improve the internship program.”

Mixed reaction to MIT Sloan student’s post

The MIT Sloan student says she received hundreds of emails, tweets, and notes in response to the original post, including multiple women who have worked for General Catalyst in nonsupport roles and have had similar experiences.

But many commenters on her Wall Street Journal post criticized her for betraying the firm to draw attention to gender inequality in the workplace without discussing it first, with several saying she should have been “fired on the spot”.

“Not even MIT can teach someone about team play,” wrote ‘Duh’. “[General Catalyst] is a private firm, a team you chose to join. You then tried to blow up your team to suit your own sense of equality. You just damaged your own reputation and put a stain on all the hard-working women who will break through this age-old glass ceiling in the VC world as they have in most other parts of corporate America.”

Others, however, applauded Swallow’s courage.  “Keep on challenging the status quo – you have a bright future ahead!” wrote ‘Fellow Proud Sloan Alum!’, adding, “And you’ve made this MIT Alum very proud.”