Lost Generation

The economic chaos of recent weeks makes it more likely that organizations will cut back on their commitment to nurturing and retaining diverse talent, either out of political concerns (though some companies continue to buck the tide), or because hiring needs diminish in an era of cutbacks. Which puts us at risk of losing an entire generation of talent that would otherwise find opportunities to contribute, hone and extend their skills, and expand the economy.

I was thinking about this while reading “The Lost Generation,” a short essay by Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize- winning former New York Times legal journalist who covered the Supreme Court and now teaches at Yale. The phrase is of course adapted from Hemingway’s famous description of the devastation wrought by the First World War upon those who came of age in that chaotic era.

Greenhouse drew her parallel to the stunning waste of highly educated female talent in the decades after the Second World War, as typified by her undergraduate experience at Radcliffe College. Radcliffe was then known as Harvard’s “sister school.” Admissions were separate, but the campuses were adjacent and men and women shared classes. Women were, however, refused entry in dining halls, clubs, and other campus institutions.

When Greenhouse arrived in the early 60s, for example, women were barred from Lamont Library, which housed the entire undergraduate collection for humanities and social science. Official reasons for the policy included the need to avoid potential overcrowding and concern that women might distract men who were trying to study. But the explanation Greenhouse most often heard was that Harvard students preferred to study with their shoes off, and might feel constrained by the possibility that women could smell their dirty socks.

Greenhouse also noted that Radcliffe students, in contrast to those at Harvard, were assigned tasks in their dorms, such as waiting on tables and serving during dinner. The idea was to prepare them to be gracious wives, homemakers, and hostesses– a more marketable female currency in the 60s than, say, a law degree.

Coincidentally, my close friend and long-time peer coach Elizabeth Bailey recently wrote her own reminiscence of Radcliffe, which she entered in the tumultuous late summer of 1968. It was a season of riots, protests, and assassinations, yet the welcome letter she received suggested that she pack a dress suitable for serving Sunday tea, and a reminder that skirts were required for all classes, even during heavy snows, as well as for biking around the campus.

At the time, the ratio of Harvard men to Radcliffe women was set at 4-1. When asked why the percentage of women was kept so low, Harvard President Nathan Pusey responded, as if it were self-evident, “Because we are educating the future leaders of tomorrow.”

Yet Pusey, considered progressive by the standards of the day, also felt compelled to publicly denounce “the Radcliffe myth” of “unattractive and unmarriageable students” on the grounds that over 60% of “Radcliffe girls” who married chose “Harvard men” as their husbands. Later, Anthony Lewis, an esteemed columnist for the New York Times (and, like Greenhouse, a Pulitzer winner) attributed Harvard’s increasing acceptance of women to the fact that, “everyone agrees that Radcliffe girls are prettier than they used to be.”

What do these tales from the past– ridiculous or enraging, depending on your point of view- have to do with the present moment? Simply this: the decisions now being made risk losing a generation of talent. In part because of the needless tanking of the economy, and in part because those outside the traditional leadership mainstream are having their contributions denigrated as the fruits of minority privilege.

In the decades after World War Two, for every Linda Greenhouse– or Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or Sandra Day O’Connor, or Hilary Clinton– there were countless educated and skilled women who found themselves frustrated, bored, and shut out of public life, a situation that slowly began to reverse in the mid-1970s. The confluence of women’s entry into the workplace and their and slow but steady assumption of leadership roles, combined with an economy increasingly based on knowledge rather than muscle and machine, ushered in an era of increasing opportunity, and organizations thrived by leveraging these transformative trends. But now, just as we’d begun to have a workforce that draws talent from all quarters of society, we’re at the cusp of a backward slide that will bring incalculable loss.

Dismantling systems that ensure people outside the mainstream get a fair shake, or dismissing a qualified person as a DEI hire, will drastically narrow the talent pool and make our society less able to compete in the larger world. It may be less absurd than privileging smelly socks over access to books, but it’s every bit as stupid.

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