LGBT & Mainstream At IE Business School - Poets&Quants

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Drag queens and business schools rarely mix. But the annual LGBT@Work event at Madrid’s IE school is not your average business school bash. Among the speakers at this year’s event July 5 were the founder of a nonprofit that pushes for LGBT workplace rights, who described coming out while studying for the Presbyterian ministry in California and founding a group called Seminary Lesbians Under Theological Stress (check out that acronym). Another speaker represents the interests of the UN’s LGBT employees. One worked on both the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns. Another set up a lesbian networking group.

And the guy with the drag act? He’s an entrepreneur from Chicago, and calls his alter-ego Wendy City. He also openly touted for a Spanish husband from the stage. “Like all gay American men at the moment, I’d like a second passport,” he deadpanned. 

Other schools’ LGBT clubs might not all be as fun as IE’s, which was timed to coincide with Madrid’s famously bacchanalian Pride Weekend, but they are a standard part of modern business school life. That the sponsors of IE’s event included the likes of SalesForce, IBM, Google, and LinkedIn, and and that it received strong support from the school’s academic and other staff, shows that IE’s LGBT clubs are well and truly mainstream. This is undoubtedly a reflection of Spanish society: Spain was one of the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage, and Madrid in particular is LGBT-friendly. 

But it is important not to be complacent about the seeming ubiquity of LGBT clubs, or to assume that every school is as welcoming to LGBT people. Indeed, IE’s Out & Allies club might be thriving now, with 340 members, but just two years ago it had only eight. One big reason the Out & Allies club is thriving is its president, an energetic American woman called Michelle Raymond. 

B-SCHOOLS: HUBS FOR EMPOWERMENT AND CHANGE

Selisse Berry, founder, Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, speaks at IE’s LBGT@Work event. Photo by Kerry Parke

Before taking an MBA at IE, Raymond worked on Wall Street. She’s also a singer-songwriter who has opened for Miley Cyrus. She says LGBT clubs are a necessary consequence of the way modern business schools work. “European schools are looking to bring in foreigners to pay the tuition fees, so diversity is baked into their business model. And once you have diversity, you need to manage it, which is where inclusion comes in,” she says. LGBT clubs are an important part of that. 

Business schools are very unusual kinds of communities, hubs where people jet in from all over the world for an intense year or two before scattering to the four corners of the globe again. By design, then, business schools are places where big changes can and do happen. Raymond explains that LGBT people from tolerant countries come out multiple times – every time they start a new job, for instance – and by the time they get to business school they are used to it. 

Additionally, many students who do not come from open cultures are able to come out for the first time at business school. Often, Raymond says, when they arrive they feel shocked that people are openly LGBT, but over time they become more relaxed in the liberal environment. “I have seen people from Saudi Arabia or India who join the club as allies, but later in the year feel comfortable enough to come out,” she says. 

While this is good to see, it can have a sad side, too, if people are compelled to go back to their home countries and then lose the freedom they have tasted. On the other hand, Raymond points out, they sometimes feel empowered to enact change in their own societies and businesses, to make life better for LGBT people. 

LGBT CLUBS: HELPING STUDENTS GET THE MOST OUT OF THER EDUCATION

Business school LGBT clubs can also be repositories of know-how, helping to send ripples out into the wider world. One attendee at IE’s LGBT@Work event was trying to set up an LGBT network in a blue-chip firm where, she said, not a single person had ever come out.

More immediately, LGBT clubs can also help students get the most of out of their education. IE’s club was set up in 2006 by Juan Pablo Ramirez and Jose de Isasa Fereres, because LGBT students who felt unable to come out to their peers had “a deficit of confidence and self-esteem,” as Ramirez puts it. The business school environment is a community, he adds, where students live together intensely for many months. “It is potentially a life-changing experience, but if students feel they cannot be themselves they will not be able to reap all the benefits,” Ramirez adds. 

Business school is also a competitive environment, and those who feel they have to hide a fundamental part of themselves are less competitive than those who were more comfortable, says Ramirez. If an LGBT club can help students flourish, it becomes a necessity, not a nice-to-have. 

Santiago Iñiguez, Executive President, IE University, speaks at the IE LGBT@Work event. Photo by Kerry Parke

It is important, many say, not to be complacent about the growth in LGBT clubs. Even as recently as 2006, there was significant resistance. “When we announced that IE would have an LGBT club there were some articles in the news, and a huge backlash. We launched a newsletter to the IE database and tons of people asked to be removed from the list,” de Isasa Fereres says. However, he and his co-founder were able to continue on their course because they were backed by the school. “They really believed in what we were doing,” de Isasa Fereres adds. (This might be slightly rose-tinted — not all IE staff supported the club at the start.)

Even today, not all schools are entirely comfortable with LGBT groups. Some clubs say that that administrators mysteriously lose the paperwork when asked to sign off their events. Others say that posters for events vanish from notice-boards. Not everybody embraces diversity. Since 2016, students at Barcelona’s IESE school, which is run by the Catholic Opus Dei group, have been trying to set up an LGBT club, so far without success

Early in 2018 a group of LGBT students at IESE sent a petition to students and alumni asking for the school to give way. Although it gained over 500 signatures the official line remains that IESE has a ban on clubs related to personal identity, which covers religion, politics, or sexual identity. Clearly, there is a tension between the diverse student body and generally liberal teaching staff, and the deeply conservative views of the people who run the school. “They have always tried to keep this under the radar, because obviously it is an issue when you are trying to attract a diverse range of students,” says Matthew Gardiner, one of the students behind the petition.

The school has engaged, says Gardiner, “but the progress has been painfully slow.” Having an official club matters because it would help attract sponsors for events, and allows the school to be at the start-of-year club fair. “That would confer legitimacy on the club, and send out the message to LGBT students who have been closeted that it is okay to be out here. Some people still fear that it will harm their prospects. I don’t think that is true, but an official club would clearly signal it,” Gardiner says.  IESE say that they are considering the request, but want to ensure that “the professional character of the clubs is preserved.”

LESS ACTIVISM, MORE NETWORKING

That language might seem a little po-faced, when faced with the slightly raucous feel of IE’s club, but it is perhaps a good indicator of how LGBT clubs will develop. As LGBT people gain legal protection and social acceptance, so the need for campaigning clubs to increase the visibility of LGBT people decreases. But another kind of club might develop in its place. When Javier Arias Brenes arrived at Nyenrode Business School in the Netherlands from Costa Rica to take his MBA in 2012 — a move they made specifically because he and his partner would have more legal protection than in their native country — the school had no LGBT organization. “In the Netherlands they have passed the point where the clubs are vital. As an LGBT student, you are just another student,” he says. 

However, Brenes realized that some LGBT students might benefit from a club. “I thought that, as there is a community of LGBT students and alumni, we could connect them in more of a business network,” says Arias Brenes, who is now the Nyenrode MBA program’s community and marketing manager. Just as people with an interest in entrepreneurship or the automotive industry might get together to share experiences and network, so LGBT people can too. 

“There is no need for activism, but I see especially with younger students who are still discovering themselves but don’t necessarily feel comfortable, the openness of these meetings can be a positive experience for them,” Arias Brenes adds. Also, talking to people who went through the social changes of the 70s and 80s might have lessons for young people who might be facing the same challenges they did, in their home countries, businesses or private lives, now.

‘JUST ANOTHER WAY TO CONNECT TO PEOPLE’

David Ehrich, who attended Tuck business school in the late 1990s, says that he put off business school for a decade because he didn’t feel that he would be safe there, and that the sorts of firms that recruited from business schools wouldn’t hire an openly gay man anyway. While at Tuck, he helped create an informal network of LGBT people because, he says, “the whole point about business school is networking, and you should leverage them wherever you can — whether it’s drinking whisky, fly-fishing, or being LGBT.” Creating an LGBT club is “just another way to connect to people,” he says. 

Times have changed, in the US at least. Now even business schools run by the most conservative groups have LGBT groups. For schools that pride themselves on attracting the brightest and best, it makes sense, because having a visible LGBT club can help with recruitment. It might not be acceptable to ask people if they are LGBT, so one way to increase the chances that your student cohort is diverse is to have a very visible club. “It is a way for institutions to signal to candidates that this is a safe place, and one where they should want to come. Not having one is a really important statement,” Ehrich says. 

Are LGBT clubs really necessary these days? Yes. For a start, they can help students from conservative cultures to be themselves and make the most of their education. And they offer an opportunity to network, which no sensible student ever turns down. Also, they are a very clear signal from a school that it values diversity, and are a mechanism for recruiting LGBT students. Finally, in these febrile times, the degree of enthusiasm a school shows for its LGBT club is a clear sign of its fundamental values. 

All the speakers, from left to right: Luisa Ercoli, Global Diversity & Inclusion Manager, Barilla; Selisse Berry, Founder, Out & Equal Workplace Advocates; Marijn Pijnenburg: Global Business Development Executive IBM (Sponsor); Pedro Pina, VP Global Client & Agency Solutions, Google; Joel Brown, Esq., CLC, Chief Visionary Officer, Pneumos LLC; Charles Myers, Chairman, Signum Global Advisors; Marta Fernández Herraiz, Founder & Co-Director General, LesWorking & REDI; Richard Sypniewski, CEO & Managing Director, SAGIN, LLC; and Hyung Hak Nam, President of UN-GLOBE, United Nations. Photo by Kerry Parke

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