The Woke Glass Ceiling

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on what political correctness costs the people it was meant to protect

My father has worked in finance for as long as I can remember. I grew up overhearing his phone calls, absorbing his stories, and learning early on that the industry had its own register: direct, irreverent, and unbothered by the occasional remark that lands wrong but gets laughed off and forgotten. By the time I entered the workforce, I thought I had a reasonable sense of what professional culture looked like.

The workplace I actually found bore little resemblance to my expectations. At most of my jobs prior to HBS, conversations came to me pre-edited and sanded down, and I would often watch my male colleagues recalibrate mid-sentence when I walked into a room, as though my arrival had tripped some invisible wire. I told them I had grown up around this—that I had heard everything before and that my father’s world had prepared me for theirs. It made no difference. As I later realized, what I couldn’t give my colleagues, regardless of anything I said, was a guarantee that I wouldn’t someday take offense, that the joke that resonated today wouldn’t look different in writing tomorrow, that my presence in the room wasn’t a burden they had already been trained to manage.

Now, this is not a piece about rolling anything back. The changes in workplace culture over the past decade have been necessary and, in many cases, overdue. The behavior that the #MeToo movement brought to light was systemic, pervasive, and corrosive in ways our society had spent far too long refusing to acknowledge. But overcorrection has its own casualties, and they tend to be more diffuse, more deniable, and far harder to name than the harm that produced them. That is where we have found ourselves today.

The numbers should chasten anyone who cares about gender equality. According to a Lean In survey, sixty percent of male managers say they feel uncomfortable participating in job-related activities with women, representing a thirty-two percent year-over-year increase. Senior-level men report being twelve times more likely to hesitate before taking a one-on-one meeting with a junior woman and nine times more likely to hesitate before traveling with a woman for work. Thirty-six percent of male respondents have avoided mentoring or socializing with a woman because of concerns about how it might look. The reasons behind each of these decisions are, no doubt, varied, but their cumulative effect is not: a generation of women navigating professional environments in which the men with the most power to advance their careers have decided that engagement itself is a liability.

Mentorship and sponsorship are among the most reliably documented mechanisms by which employees advance, particularly those already navigating environments in which they are underrepresented. The relationships built in closed-door meetings, cross-country business trips, and late-night dinners are the architecture of a career. When those interactions are avoided wholesale, what gets called caution is, in its consequences, indistinguishable from discrimination. A movement that began with the sensible premise that women deserve protection from harassment has yielded a secondary effect in which women are excluded from the informal structures through which power and opportunity actually move.

The impulse to err on the side of distance is one I recognize well. When my male colleagues filtered what they said around me, they were trying to be considerate. But consideration that takes the form of withholding rests on the presumption that women require preservation from the ordinary friction of professional life and that the appropriate response is to preemptively remove them from the rooms in which such friction renders something of use. Deference and respect may look similar from a distance, but up close, one of them treats women as colleagues and the other treats them as a category of risk around which to be managed.

What is true of the workplace is equally true of our own classrooms at HBS. There is a particular irony in watching this dynamic take hold at a place whose pedagogy was designed specifically to resist it. The case method asks students to commit to an answer, defend it under pressure, and update it when the evidence demands—a sequence that requires, at every stage, a willingness to be wrong in public. What self-censorship cultivates in place of such willingness is a room full of people who have become very good at the first step and increasingly reluctant to brave the rest. Positions are staked out carefully, hedged thoroughly, and abandoned at the first sign of contention—which is to say that the method is being run in reverse, entrenching the uncontested opinions it was devised to challenge.

Cancel culture—understood as the excess of accountability rather than accountability itself—exiles difficult conversations from the rooms in which they are supposed to happen. When the cost of saying the “wrong” thing is high enough, candor migrates to smaller and more homogeneous chambers, assembled along lines of affinity and existing social capital. The people outside those rooms, in turn, lose access to the real debate by the same logic as the women excluded from mentorship opportunities and late-night dinners in the workplace.

Herein lies an individual calculation as understandable as its workplace counterpart. A student who puts forth an unpopular position puts at risk the cohesion of a section he will inhabit for two years, the professional relationships he is actively establishing, and the reputation he will bear in industries where memories are long and tolerances are short. Every institutional incentive points toward safety, and no single person is necessarily wrong to feel that pull. However, while such choices appear reasonable in isolation, they, in aggregate, deliver an unreasonable result: a room that may satisfy the formal requirements of participation while failing, at a more fundamental level, to constitute deliberation at all. In other words, an education whose value proposition rests on the quality of its discourse cannot selectively excise honesty from the process and remain what it claims to be.

Every professional culture was forged by people who were, at some earlier point, in rooms resembling the ones we occupy now. The habits formed at HBS—what to say, what to withhold, which positions are worth defending and which are better left unvoiced—will travel into the organizations we will run, the cultures we will instantiate, the conditions under which other people will work and be heard. A culture fluent in the language of inclusion but organized around the practice of exclusion carries that contradiction forward, with its costs settling, as they always have, on the people least positioned to deflect them.

The institutions we inherit were built by people willing to say uncomfortable things to each other. It is worth asking whether the ones we build will be too.

Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.