A Better World in the Making: Smarter Together

ISSUE 05

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A Better World i n the Making Smarter Together

ILLUSTRATION FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: RAY REAGANS, BRYAN THOMAS JR., FIONA MURRAY, ELISABETH PAULSON, PHD ’21, OMOLARA AJELE, SF ’22, YU-TING KUO, SM ’94, STEPHANIE LAMPKIN, MBA ’13. COPYRIGHT©2021 BY JOHNALYNN HOLLAND. GRANTED WITH PERMISSION FROM PIPPIN PROPERTIES, INC.

Smarter Together At MIT Sloan, we are smart enough to know we are smarter together. The school finds its greatest strength in the diversity of its students, faculty, staff, and alumni, who hail from across the country and around the world.

So, in the spirit of the Institute motto—“mens et manus,” or “mind and hand”—the global MIT Sloan community is working tirelessly to address issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus and beyond.

By acknowledging these problems and exploring novel solutions to them, we can foster real, everyday impacts capable of making a better world.

The first step is to uncover existing disparities and recognize the severity of their effects. Only then can we create a constructive culture of conscious inclusion across organizations like MIT Sloan—and this is precisely what the people highlighted in this newsletter are doing.

They are engineering social change across all career levels and creating a more inclusive innovation economy; uncovering hiring biases and developing new platforms to overcome them; nurturing students and entrepreneurs from overlooked and underinvested communities; and shaping a more inclusive future of work capable of creating and maintaining better jobs.

The next generation of principled, innovative leaders is here at MIT Sloan, and they are already hard at work on transforming their ideas for building more inclusive organizations into a reality. They have adopted the school’s

improving diversity, equity, and inclusion—and they are doing it together.

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recognizing and addressing the complex challenges associated with

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mission to advance management practice and make a better world by

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Recognizing the Issues Creating a culture of conscious inclusion requires introspection. Once individuals and organizations begin to account for their own personal and systemic biases, they can recognize any and all disparities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—and do something about them.

In response to the recommendations outlined by the Diversity & Inclusion Task Force in early 2020, the MIT Sloan community has implemented—and will continue to effect—significant cultural changes on campus and across the globe. Before these changes can be achieved, however, we must first recognize the issues.

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M Instead, she saw it as an Y PA opportunity to strengthen her LU CH mission of delivering equitable EdTech services. The company is one of ten in Beta Boom’s current portfolio. Promoting pathways for female, Black, and Latinx founders is critical to defining an inclusive future for venture capital. “As a founder, I don’t think I dreamed big enough, because I didn’t see myself represented,” says Paluch, who worked in product development in the Bay Area before relocating to Salt Lake City and shifting her focus to supporting underserved founders.

“Venture capital lets us scale businesses and have greater outcomes. Why not let that align with the things we want to solve in the world?”

Paluch has leveraged her community of MIT Sloan peers during her own career trajectory, saying, “I could not have done this without the power of the network of MIT. As MIT Sloan alumni, we stand for something.” MIT Sloan is also where she became inspired to create lasting impact in her work. “It opened my eyes to see that you can do well and make good in the world. We can solve the problems we want to while everybody rises.”

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Kimmy Paluch, MBA ’11, started the pre-seed venture capital firm Beta Boom to address the stark lack of funding awarded to tech companies founded by women and people of color. A Crunchbase report showed that Black and Latinx founders received only 2.6 percent of overall funding in 2020. While that figure was on the rise for female founders, it dropped from 2.8 to 2.3 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research also shows that funding alone is not correlated to a startup’s success. To confront access gaps in underrepresented groups, Paluch and co-founder Sergio Paluch developed a hands-on coaching program. “We don’t tell our founders what to do,” she says. “It’s about guiding them so they can set their own practices.”

The Beta Boom team looks for drive when identifying partner companies. “Grit is that ability to persevere. You want to solve a problem so badly that you keep going.” It’s an attitude embodied by Fiveable, a social education platform that offers a comprehensive library for high school students preparing for AP tests. Fiveable CEO and co-founder Amanda DoAmaral was not deterred by the pandemic.

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Investing with Impact: Beta Boom Builds the Future of Equitable Tech

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“If there’s one thing that stands out to me after three years here, it’s that institutions like MIT Sloan really do make the world go round because of students like Nwanacho and alumni like Stephanie,” says Austin Ashe (Senior Associate Director for Culture and Belonging), who worked in the Office of Undergraduate Education before joining the MIT Sloan Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

“When we asked Stephanie and other Sloanies for help, they all said yes. They were so incredible to our students.

It’s because of them that I remain hopeful about the trajectory of our country and our ability to advance racial, gender, and socioeconomic equities.”

Nwana, Ashe, and their colleagues will continue to organize and host additional ESC virtual panels covering topics related to accomplishing social change in the workplace. They are even hoping to host a few in-person iterations of the discussion series as well, for as Nwana explains, this kind of innovation is now more important than ever.

“I love entrepreneurship. I think there’s a vital role for it in our economy, but there are other important things, too,” he says. “As Sloanies, we can create a lot of different things—not just companies. We are smart, passionate, and innovative. Though I believe we should continue creating new businesses, we should also create new initiatives like ESC that bring people together to figure out how to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

That is real impact.”

NWANACHO NWANA

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“ People often feel alone when it comes to experiencing workplace inequities like racial and gender discrimination— but if you can connect them with people at the highest levels of industry who have had the same experiences, that can be very impactful and powerful.”

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After graduating amid the arrival of COVID-19 and ongoing protests of racial inequities in the United States, Nwanacho Nwana, SB ’20, reached out to the MIT Sloan Office of Undergraduate Education. The former MIT senior class president was eager to remain involved with the school. So after some back-and-forth, they co-founded Engineering Social Change (ESC)—a virtual panel series designed to connect students with alumni and industry professionals to brainstorm the best ways to achieve social change in the workplace.

“As the protests continued throughout the summer, I realized we needed to have a more in-depth discussion about how to effectively make these changes in our workplaces,” says Nwana. “People often feel alone when it comes to experiencing workplace inequities like racial and gender discrimination—but if you can connect them with people at the highest levels of industry who have had the same experiences, that can be very impactful and powerful.”

Nwana and the Office of Undergraduate Education began laying the groundwork for ESC in fall 2020. Hosted

by Nwana in early February 2021, the first panel featured an interactive discussion of “Racial Equity in the Workplace” among the participants, then-MIT Sloan undergraduate student William Little, SB ’21, MIT Sloan alumna Stephanie Preston, MBA ’08, and others.

A month later, a second panel on “Women Leading in Industry and Inclusion” was hosted by Kerry James, SB ’95, MBA ’01, and featured Kristen Robinson Darcy, EMBA ’13, Andrea Gutierrez Marty, SB ’14, Sanjana Shukla, SB ’21, and Julia Wada, SM ’90.

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Engineering Social Change in the Workplace and Beyond

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Standing Together as One MIT Sloan In early 2020, after extensive input from MIT Sloan students, faculty, staff, and alumni, Dean David Schmittlein (John C Head III Dean; Professor of Marketing) appointed Ray Reagans (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management; Professor, Work and Organization Studies) to Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Fiona Murray (William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship; Co-Director, MIT Innovation Initiative; Faculty Director, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship) to Associate Dean for Innovation and Inclusion. Along with the rest of the school’s leadership, Reagans and Murray were tasked with positively impacting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across the MIT Sloan community.

“We view our new platform as an opportunity to give voice to members of our community who want to be heard and who wish to share in a conversation,” Reagans and Murray said in a joint statement to the school following their appointment. “We do not presume to be the voice for any one community at MIT Sloan. We have a megaphone, we want you to use it, and you should know we stand by you. We listen to your advice and act on your behalf.”

The pair immediately began working to expand the admissions pipeline for students, faculty, and staff; foster a climate of conscious inclusion both in and outside the classroom; and broaden the curricular materials utilized by faculty in core programs to encourage diversity.

Underpinning these efforts was the creation of the MIT Sloan Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, for which the dean announced the formation of a brand-new leadership position. After a nationwide search, Bryan Thomas Jr. joined MIT Sloan in August 2021 as Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Two months later, Austin Ashe left the Office of Undergraduate Education—where he served as associate director for three years—to become the inaugural Senior Associate Director for Culture and Belonging.

“ It is important to our community, and to me

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diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment here at MIT Sloan. Only then can we make a meaningful, long-lasting impact on the culture, community, and learnings of the school and in the world.”

David Schmittlein, John C Head III Dean

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accelerate our efforts to create a more

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personally, that we continue to expand and

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is not a zero-sum proposition. We will achieve this by continuing to support

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inclusive, equitable, and just community

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and trust one another.”

Bryan Thomas Jr., Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

WORKING ACROSS ALL DIMENSIONS

• Launched the MIT Sloan Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion to help fund fellowships, curricula, and programming that promote DEI at MIT Sloan and beyond. MIT Sloan will match donor funds to help attract and retain highly qualified candidates from historically underrepresented groups in graduate education. Similar initiatives include the MIT Sloan Ally Pledge, the MIT Sloan Annual Fund Fellowships for Inclusion impact area, and pre-MBA micro-scholarships for applicants.

• Assisted task force members Sam Epee-Bounya, MBA ’03, and Celi Khanyile-Lynch, MBA ’20, with launching the MIT Sloan Affinity Group Alumni Council to connect alumni across multiple generations and serve the needs of underrepresented communities. Inaugural members included Kerry Bowie, SB ’94, MBA ’06, Dela Gbordzoe, MBA ’19, Zimako Ibe, MBA ’01, Yscaira Jimenez, MBA ’14, Andrew Mairena, MBA ’19, Asia Stuerznickel, MBA ’20, and Philip Javier Zakahi, MBA ’15.

PURSUING NEW AVENUES FOR POSITIVE CHANGE

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These significant innovations represent only a selection of the many active steps MIT Sloan has taken—and is still taking—toward positively impacting DEI. For the 2021–2022 academic year, the school added new training on racial dialogue and cross-cultural communication to all program orientations for incoming students and integrated additional elements of DEI into the MBA core. MIT Sloan has also extended its outreach to alumni on DEI matters as they relate to the larger community.

The ultimate hope is that these continued efforts will foster a culture of conscious inclusion that will help bolster DEI not only at MIT Sloan but also throughout the school’s global community of alumni and friends.

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Beyond these important and necessary high-level appointments, the MIT Sloan community has worked tirelessly to adopt, implement, and expand the task force’s recommendations across the board. In particular, the school has: • Created a more inclusive admissions process by relying on behavior-based interviewing techniques and comprehensive data collection—methods that can limit the potential for bias from a single individual in the interview process and ameliorate the additional concerns of candidates from historically underrepresented populations.

• Improved the new graduate student and faculty pipelines by partnering with the MIT School of Engineering to develop an early admissions program that targets undergraduates from historically underrepresented groups; creating predoctoral research assistant positions to provide undergraduates with relevant experience; and collaborating with peer business schools to launch the Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers (PREDOC) consortium.

• Introduced pre-orientation programming for MBA program students focusing on DEI in the community, held orientation sessions to engage students in dialogues about conscious inclusion, and examined implicit bias in MBA core classes.

• Encouraged new and ongoing faculty research grounded in data that, when applied to the school and the world, will make an impact. The topics of study include bias, inclusion, microaggressions, worker voices, compensation, and more.

• Facilitated programming like the Inclusive Innovation Economy series with Malia Lazu (Lecturer, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management) and the Office of External Relations to engage the MIT Sloan community in conversations with leaders from business, the public sector, and nonprofits.

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MALIA LAZU

How to Create an Inclusive Innovation Economy Innovation is far from a novel topic at MIT Sloan, but there are always ways to expand the conversation. The Inclusive Innovation Economy: Ideas + Actions conversation series explores equity within innovation by engaging community leaders who are creating cultural change and promoting inclusion. True to the MIT motto “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” the interactive webinars provide participants with palpable action steps for making a difference.

“These intentional conversations each end with the panelists providing their insights on what institutions like MIT Sloan can do to advance inclusivity and innovation,” says Malia Lazu (Lecturer, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management). Lazu serves as series co-facilitator alongside Fiona Murray (Associate Dean of Innovation and Inclusion; William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship; Co-Director, MIT Innovation Initiative; Faculty Director, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship) and Ray Reagans (Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management; Professor, Work and Organization Studies).

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“ Investing in Black and brown founders is not charity. There isn’t a lack of talent, only a lack of opportunity and resources.”

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KERRY BOWIE

MIT Sloan is committed to fostering inclusivity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted various forms of inequality. “We need to build back a recovery that looks and feels different.

It needs to be more inclusive, more integrated, and with more widespread opportunities,” said Murray during a

conversation around creating opportunities for underrepresented entrepreneurs. “It’s extremely important to us that we focus our learning journey on the forces that shape that innovation economy.”

Such as access to venture capital, a topic that panelist Kerry Bowie, SB ’94, MBA ’06, weighed in on. “Investing in Black and brown founders is not charity,” said Bowie.

“There isn’t a lack of talent, only a lack of opportunity and resources.” Bowie is a leader in clean energy and was recently appointed to the MIT Alumni Association’s Board of Directors.

“My favorite conversation was with San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and then Boston Mayor Kim Janey,” says Lazu. “The discussion was wide-ranging and included both reflections on history and going-forward solutions to the most pressing challenges of today.”

All three panelists are the first Black women to hold the mayoral position in their respective cities, and Lightfoot is the first openly lesbian Black woman to be elected mayor of a major city in the United States. On creating local change, Janey commented, “There’s so much innovation here in Boston and so many companies want to locate here, which is great. But we need to make sure that this city is working for everyone.”

The Inclusive Innovation Economy: Ideas + Actions conversation series returned with new guests and topics in fall 2021. “The conversations will center on following the money and identifying the best ways to institutionalize an inclusive innovation economy,” says Lazu. “The dialogue will pick up on key threads from our previous series, including concepts of reparative capital and stronger mechanisms for corporate accountability.”

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interface that could quickly narrow candidate searches based on several factors, including desired salary and skill set.

The market-exchange approach also used an algorithm that predicted people’s race, even if candidates did not self-identify on their applications. ShopCo executives and hiring managers disliked this technique, with some likening the process to “shopping for diversity,” Jackson says.

Vendors that offered the same market-exchange approach, but did not focus specifically on recruitment based on race, elicited no objections from ShopCo leaders.

“It was only once race was made salient for them that they started to feel uncomfortable,” notes Jackson.

Vendors offering a developmental approach used a more time-consuming tactic. To create a large multiracial pool of tech workers, these vendors established relationships with affinity groups and historically Black colleges and universities. ShopCo leaders preferred this method and hired a vendor that offered a developmental approach. They would later discover that this approach attracted entry-level candidates, not managerial ones.

The market-exchange model, when applied to diversity recruitment, was morphing into a repugnant market.

(Financial exchanges that society finds unpleasant or immoral are known as repugnant markets.) ShopCo leaders were willing to slow their diversity efforts and concentrate their diversity hiring to early-career positions if it meant that they could avoid making market-exchange transactions. Eighteen months after ShopCo hired its new vendor, underrepresented ShopCo tech workers rose from 8 percent to only 10 percent.

Jackson’s ShopCo study continues to inform her research as a faculty member at Harvard Business School.

Her unique insights will help business leaders who are ready to take on the hard work of achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

SUMMER JACKSON

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“ When you are faced with a universe of options, paralysis can set in. It’s easy to write off setbacks as failures and think nothing can be done. I want my research to help decisionmakers overcome these challenges.”

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Sophisticated algorithms can help companies achieve workplace diversity with just a few clicks of a mouse.

New research from Summer Jackson, SM ’18, PhD ’21, reveals what happens when hiring managers find these advancements more distasteful than helpful.

From September 2018 to April 2020, Jackson followed a tech startup that was undergoing both exponential growth and calls within the rank and file for greater racial representation. To address both issues, leaders from ShopCo, a pseudonym, needed a new recruiting platform.

Jackson immersed herself in ShopCo’s work culture as decision-makers selected a new vendor for the recruiting platform. The process tested the company’s stakeholders as they dealt with issues of objectification, exploitation, and the specter of affirmative action. Their decisions illuminate how even well-meaning companies can undermine diversity efforts and reinforce inequality within their power structure.

“I had an amazing opportunity to be on the ground with employees and observe in real time their own sensemaking about diversity issues,” says Jackson, who is revising and resubmitting her ShopCo study for publication. During her time at MIT Sloan, she was advised by Kate Kellogg, PhD ’05 (David J. McGrath jr. (1959) Professor of Management and Innovation; Professor, Work and Organization Studies), Ray Reagans (Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management; Professor, Work and Organization Studies), and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan (Former Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning; Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy; Professor, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management and Work and Organization Studies).

Jackson found that vendors offering recruiting platforms that specialized in the recruitment of underrepresented minority candidates employed either a market-exchange or developmental approach for company hiring managers. The former offered an e-commerce

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Beyond Bias: Improving Workplace Diversity in the Age of Algorithms

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A Blueprint for Equitable Homeownership

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“It is time to make our financial systems more democratic and serve a broader population,” Edward Golding (Senior Lecturer; Executive Director, MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy) says while discussing the paper he co-authored with Michelle Aronowitz and Jung Hyun Choi last year. “It is time we start asking the hard questions.”

In “The Unequal Costs of Black Homeownership,” Golding and his colleagues examined current lending practices in the United States that account for a loss of $67,320 in retirement savings for Black homeowners and posed potential solutions to these problems. They found that Black homeowners pay higher interest rates both pre- and post-origination, in addition to paying more insurance premiums and higher property taxes. These disparities were driven by a host of factors, which include a reliance on risk-based pricing rather than pooled-risk pricing, lower rates of refinancing among Black borrowers, and other systemic issues.

Since the paper’s publication in October 2020, the housing industry has begun to acknowledge and address these disparities. For example, Freddie Mac published research validating these findings in early 2021. However, there is still progress to be made.

To facilitate further progress, Golding believes greater representation is essential. “It is important that we increase diversity and inclusion in the financial markets, and that those individuals feel empowered to express their views,” he says. “Small decisions on risk-based price and other related matters get made every day. Those decisions add up, and we need to have people with different life experiences in the room making them.”

$67,320 IN LOST RETIREMENT SAVINGS FOR BLACK HOMEOWNERS IN THE UNITED STATES

EDWARD GOLDING

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Golding also sees this as an area that is ripe for the kind of innovations for which MIT Sloan is known. “One area where MIT Sloan alumni can help—both on the technology side and on the financing side—is in building the technology,” he explains. Golding is especially concerned with what he calls the “durable pipes”—the technology needed for collecting and assessing housing data that could replace current outdated methods. For example, better use of rent payment data could reduce evictions and promote homeownership.

“What we need is a technology solution: How do we build this? How do we make it work?” says Golding. “It’s a really difficult problem, and it hasn’t received the attention that it needs.”

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“ Small decisions on risk-based price and other related matters get made every day. Those decisions add up, and we need to have people with different life experiences in the room making them.”

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Taking Action The Institute motto, “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), has always served as a guiding principle at MIT Sloan, where actions speak louder than words. That is why the MIT Sloan community is working tirelessly to make immediate, sustainable improvements to diversity, equity, and inclusion through research and the actions that result. From ongoing efforts to understand the future of work and food to new investments in students and entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities, our students, faculty, staff, and alumni are leading the charge.

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How can a company and its leaders ensure that their organizational processes are fair and equitable? And how can organizations use data about their talent management processes to increase diversity and eliminate bias? Many companies have been grappling with these questions recently, while doubling down on their commitment to increasing inclusion on the organizational level. But for Emilio J. Castilla (Nanyang Technological University Professor of Management; Professor of Work and Organization Studies; Co-Director, MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research), such questions have been at the core of his research for over 20 years.

In conducting his research, Castilla partners with companies to systematically and analytically review the processes and routines that drive key employment outcomes, such as recruitment and hiring as well as employee promotion and compensation. While his research projects focus on addressing key challenges for the organizations he works with, there is a common theme: It is paramount that the processes and data used to evaluate applicants, employees, and managers are clearly defined and carefully analyzed.

In a recent article, “The Production of Merit: How Managers Understand and Apply Merit in the Workplace, ” Castilla and co-author Aruna Ranganathan, SM ’13, PhD ’14, interviewed a

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Building a Fairer Workplace—Know Your Processes, Know Your Data, Know Your Bias

sample of managers and also worked with a Silicon Valley tech company to study merit-based promotion systems and their limits. The researchers found that managers’ own past evaluation experiences as employees—be they positive or negative—are highly influential in determining the process that the managers use to evaluate employee performance. As a result, managers’ criteria for measuring merit can be highly subjective and vary from one person to another.

More specifically, when evaluating employees, managers tend to include or exclude certain factors based on their perception of how those factors affected their own career trajectory. Castilla and Ranganathan also found that most managers tend to follow one of two approaches when assessing employees for advancement and rewards: focused or diffuse. Managers using a focused approach to evaluation emphasize the individual and quantitative elements of performance, while those using a diffuse approach assess the employee more generally, for not only individual and team contributions but also work actions and personal characteristics.

Strikingly, the researchers found that managers who were women and/or nonwhite were more likely to use a focused approach to employee evaluation, in part because these managers generally reported having had more negative evaluation experiences in the past (as employees) than did the white male managers in the

“ My hope is to continue working with many more organizations to help create successful experiences for all their key stakeholders, including applicants, employees, managers, customers, and top executives.”

This analytical framework aligns with Castilla’s research into talent or people analytics, which he defines as a “data-driven approach to improving people-related decisions for the purpose of advancing the success of not only the organization but also of individual employees.”

Castilla explains that not all organizations understand how to do talent analytics effectively. He cited one large organization that pre-pandemic had already collected high-quality and comprehensive data about the skills, capabilities, and knowledge of its employees and managers, encompassing metrics from their entire tenure within the organization.

Through his analysis of the company’s work distribution before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Castilla found that such a robust database was critical to the company’s being able to successfully redistribute work in a time of crisis, keeping customer satisfaction high while retaining top talent and maintaining employees’ engagement.

However, Castilla notes, employers need to be conscious of what data they are collecting and be careful and responsible when using such data to make peoplerelated decisions. By focusing on too narrow a scope of data, organizations leave a door open for focusing on the wrong metrics or, even worse, activating biases in their workplaces. This is why Castilla enjoys collaborating with organizations and their leaders to help them be strategic and successful in talent management.

“My team and I enjoy working with real companies to identify opportunities and address challenges concerning the management of employees and managers,” he says. “For example, I am currently collaborating with a company to experiment with new approaches to recruiting and hiring talented and diverse candidates. Some of these interventions are surprisingly low cost, with fast returns. My hope is to continue working with many more organizations to help create successful experiences for all their key stakeholders, including applicants, employees, managers, customers, and top executives.”

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study; the female and nonwhite managers saw the focused approach as a way to avoid the unfairness they had experienced.

Castilla and Ranganathan’s findings are an important addition to the conversation around talent management and merit-based evaluation, since they highlight the fact that, even within one organization, merit is a subjective concept. If organizations want to build successful and fair evaluation, promotion, and reward practices for an increasingly diverse workforce, Castilla argues that their leaders, managers, and employees must have a collective understanding of what merit means in the context of their organization. In order to form this definition, Castilla advises leaders to “think about what type of organization you want to build and what type of professionals you want to attract and retain. Then start putting in place methods that will allow you to develop and apply a clear, fair, and valid definition of merit. Only when employees, managers, and executives all share a common understanding of what ‘merit’ actually is (and how to measure it) can we hope that the same standards will be applied consistently to all, regardless of demographic factors.

This can help make your workplace more equitable, fair, and diverse.”

This process, Castilla explains, can be achieved successfully through using precise and concrete criteria when refining your organization’s definition of merit.

For example, it is not enough to say that an employee should demonstrate “initiative” or “a good attitude”; these terms may be far too subjective in practice and thus are likely to result in bias and misalignment with key organizational goals. Instead, it is up to leadership to precisely define and measure those qualities objectively, so that decision-makers throughout the organization are able to more consistently evaluate employees based on progress made toward organizational goals.

The work does not stop there, however. Defining and identifying the measurements of merit is just the beginning. The next step, Castilla explains, is to determine “whether the measure is really relevant and valid, and that it is not biased.”

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EMILIO CASTILLA

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Shaping the Future of Inclusive Work Thomas Kochan (George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management; Professor Post-Tenure of Work and Employment Research) has dedicated his career to studying America’s changing workforce and the employment policies and practices that help—and hinder—workers. For decades, he has thought about the social contract and how it is applied to the American workforce. What rights do workers have? What responsibilities do they have to their employers and organizations? What benefits are employers responsible for providing their workers in return? And, importantly, how can working families find balance and meet the sometimes-

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conflicting responsibilities they face at work, at home, and in their communities?

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At a time when organizations and employers are being called out and called to action, the social contract between workers and institutions is changing. Today, Kochan, who is part of the faculty of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, examines what that new social contract is, how workers can use it to do their best work for their organizations, and how workers and employers alike can use it to shape the future of work and forge a landscape that is more inclusive, equitable, and diverse. In his recently updated book, Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract, Kochan and his co-author, Lee Dyer, Emeritus Professor of Human Resource Studies and Research Fellow at Cornell University, pursue this line of inquiry even further.

Published in November 2020, the book explores the roles that workers and leaders in business, education, government, and labor play in the effort to build a new social contract that ensures all parties prosper. It explores what “prosper” means: for workers, that high-quality jobs are available; for businesses, that they remain successful; and for all of the individuals and organizations that make up the American workforce, that the social and economic divisions apparent in society can be overcome. Today, a prosperous workplace should also be an equitable one, where every worker can find a sense of belonging, fulfillment, and growth.

Among the recommendations put forth in the book, Kochan and Dyer suggest that the future of work is not predetermined. The workforce can and should influence what it holds while overhauling the current social contract that set America up with one of the most disproportionately distributed systems

of income and wealth in the developed world. Key tenets of forging a better social contract include upskilling workers at the same rate that technology evolves; ensuring workplace equity; and keeping lines of communication open between workers and organizations, so that every voice is represented.

“The creative spirit that I believe we have in this country allows us to meet any challenge when we collaborate,” says Kochan. “But if we don’t trust each other, and if we think that only one group has the solution—whether it is management or a labor group or an individual—then we get into trouble, because we don’t all see the picture with the same lens, and we can’t anticipate everyone else’s concerns and interests.”

Shaping the Future of Work encourages people to sit down together not only in their individual organizations but also in their communities. The book also encourages national leaders to reach out to business, to labor, to people of color in their communities, and to all those who do not have a seat at the table to find solutions.

In Kochan’s view, the path to a new social contract between workers and organizations has been accelerated by the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Though the pandemic has opened up all kinds of innovations and new opportunities to shape the future of work, we must be wary,” he says. “These new opportunities affect only some workers—most essential workers, for example, do not have the opportunity to work remotely—and this has the potential to create a two-tier society.”

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regions with the goal of strengthening the social and economic fabric in those communities.

Examining contemporary issues through both a historic lens and on-the-ground experiences of people at work in host communities, USA Lab students are working on projects that include finding ways to bring previously incarcerated people back into the workforce; helping businesses work with immigrant communities to find better ways to serve their needs; and addressing how rural communities can find new opportunities for residents who may not have equitable access to broadband internet and are facing declining employment options as a result.

From immersing students in projects that will help them forge a more equitable social contract to implementing bystander intervention training into workplace and educational settings, Kochan is encouraged by the school’s response to increasing equity on campus and across the nation. He is also proud of the school’s willingness to listen to and learn from its community, which he has witnessed in his tenure.

“This also is due in large part to the broadening of representation of people of color and women among our staff and faculty,” he adds. “There are still deep divisions and distrust of institutions in this country; we are still in perilous times. My continued message is that we can address these issues if we talk to each other, listen to each other, and respect each other’s different interests and views. Out of that, there will be stronger businesses, stronger communities, and stronger societies, and we will individually be more secure and satisfied with our own employment situations. It just takes effort.”

HA

THOMAS KOCHAN

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“ It is great to see that we put our research findings to work at MIT Sloan; bystander training has improved our workplace and spread the capacity to engage diversity effectively across our student body, our staff, and our faculty.”

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To avoid this, he advises broadening what workplace flexibility encompasses, including the possibility for fewer, longer shifts, or shifts that begin at hours that better suit workers’ other responsibilities like child- and elder-care. Ensuring that every worker’s voice is part of the conversation is also paramount. “Too often, women and people of color are left to carry the burden of those who have more flexibility in the workplace,” Kochan explains.

“Redoubling efforts to ensure their voices are heard is the only way to increase equity across the American workforce—equity of income, of opportunity, and of the psychological and social features of work that are so important to us.”

Bystander intervention training, Kochan says, is another integral part of institutionalizing equity and inclusion in the workplace. Such training has some research roots at MIT Sloan and has been incorporated at the school for some time. Equipping people with behavioral skills to implement at work has proven effective in both casting light on workplace inequities and educating the perpetrators of those inequities. Providing role-playing training, as well as the tools to diffuse a potentially volatile situation and support a person or group upon whom inequities are being perpetuated, helps individuals understand their own actions and the actions of others.

“These interventions can help us change our behavior in ways that improve our human interactions and our organizational processes,” Kochan adds. “It is great to see that we put our research findings to work at MIT Sloan; bystander training has improved our workplace and spread the capacity to engage diversity effectively across our student body, our staff, and our faculty.”

MIT Sloan students are also studying equity in the American workforce. An Action Learning course, USA Lab: Bridging the American Divides, matches students with innovative nonprofit and government organizations in America’s small cities and rural

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Game Changer: Alumni Gifts Advance Diversity and Inclusion Alumni support for the Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion is helping to build a stronger, more diverse MIT Sloan. Established in 2020, the endowment offers fellowships to underrepresented students who have the talent and drive to succeed in graduate school. To date, these gifts—coupled with the school’s matching funds—have resulted in $14 million in fellowship funding.

MIT Sloan Alumni Board and MIT Sloan Executive Board member Yu-Ting Kuo, SM ’94, gave to the endowment driven by the belief that real change requires intention and hard work. “There are a lot of things that we can and need to work on to make our society a more diverse and inclusive place,” Kuo says.

“But that said, I think education—and especially higher education—could actually play a very fundamental and pivotal role in shaping our next generation of leaders to have a more diverse and inclusive mindset.”

Kuo, who retired from his position as corporate vice president at Microsoft at the end of 2021, has

WHY WE GAVE

“ I would not be here without my education. It was pivotal. Without all the scholarships that I had, I couldn’t have gone to the schools and earned the degrees that I did.”

worked in the United States and abroad. He is also a foreign-born, non-native speaker. These identities have made Kuo feel recognized and represented in some settings, but like an outsider in others. Because of these experiences, he understands the psychic toll of underrepresentation. Kuo recalls feeling out of place as an older male at a Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference for women in computing, and how he felt overwhelmed by the situation.

“That made me realize: For those of us who have the ability to be an ally and to help change things, we should—because this is what some others experience every day,” Kuo says. “How can we actually make it better and easier for them?”

Kuo hopes his gift will inspire alumni at MIT Sloan and other institutions of higher education to champion diversity and work together to close the equity gap. Says Kuo: “When we no longer have to celebrate when underrepresented individuals move into significant roles, that will be real change.”

“ It’s a real credit to MIT Sloan for establishing the Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion and other programs to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I hope that many other alumni will come together to make a difference in this important area.”

DAVID GITLIN, SF ’03

DR. TAMARA (LUCERO) RAJARAM, MBA ’01

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“ There are qualified candidates out there, and I hope they see MIT Sloan as something that they can choose—I want others to have the opportunity I had.”

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“ MIT Sloan, to me, is the best place on earth to learn how to lead through change. So having a broader, more balanced set of voices to help lead through that change will enable our community to do more.”

DAVID LEE, MBA ’04

MINDY HSU, LGO ’06

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in the past, companies should take risks on new groups of people.”

In a study conducted on almost 90,000 applications received for management positions at a Fortune 500 company, Li’s dynamic model generated more than three times as many Black and Latinx candidates compared to traditional models. Furthermore, the model yielded an applicant pool that had greater success in the hiring process. Li analyzed the data around firstround interviews granted to those who applied to positions in consulting, financial analysis, and data science—high-income jobs that have notably low diversity figures. She found that the candidates identified through their model received more interview offers. “There is a lot of scope for algorithms—or any other kind of change in hiring practice—to increase diversity while also increasing the accuracy of candidate assessments,” says Li. Hiring and recruiting tools are critically important for fostering a workplace that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. “I hope this research provides a concrete rationale for why companies should be open to interviewing and hiring from historically underrepresented groups,” says Li. “The smart way to improve one’s hiring process is not to do the same thing over and over, but to try new things and be open to the possibility that you might learn something new.”

DANIELLE LI

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“ We have known for many decades that the best way to approach learning problems—like learning which applicants are the best fit for a company—is to engage in some exploration. This means that instead of hiring people who look exactly like those who have been successful in the past, companies should take risks on new groups of people.”

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LI

Machine learning is becoming increasingly influential in hiring and recruiting. Companies are utilizing algorithms to screen résumés and streamline their search process. But while these tools are efficient, they’re not always inclusive.

Data shows that traditional hiring algorithms are not adaptive enough and are therefore excluding top Black and Latinx candidates.

“I’ve been watching the rise of machine learning in all aspects of modern life, and thinking specifically about its use to evaluate people,” says Danielle Li, PhD ’12 (Class of 1922 Career Development Professor).

“In hiring, the most common way to use machine learning is to train a statistical model to predict who will do well given a historical dataset of who has done well in the past.”

Traditional hiring algorithms are static, meaning they rely on historical datasets as indicators of success.

In response to studying the limitations of these models, Li and her research team have developed an algorithm with an “exploration bonus,” or the ability to identify candidates who have qualifications such as educational backgrounds and demographics that might not match a company’s existing employee data.

“We have known for many decades that the best way to approach learning problems—like learning which applicants are the best fit for a company—is to engage in some exploration,” says Li, who co-authored the paper “Hiring as Exploration” with MIT Sloan PhD candidate Lindsey Raymond, SM ’19, and Peter Bergman. “This means that instead of hiring people who look exactly like those who have been successful

D A N IEL

The Exploration Bonus

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Taking Steps to Create Better Jobs The United States has a problem with bad jobs, and the issue goes beyond low pay and long hours, according to Zeynep Ton (Professor of the Practice, Operations Management).

Employers often create jobs that are not well designed and with fewer opportunities to advance or find purpose.

The problem is not contained to a particular industry, either: from retail workers to health aides, low-paying, menial jobs make workers feel worthless. As Paul Osterman, PhD ’76, (Nanyang Technological University Professor; Professor of Human Resources and Management) wrote in a 2019 Boston Globe op-ed, nearly one in four jobs does not pay enough to support a family.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Ton explained that in the current employment crisis, “Many Americans are losing faith in capitalism and market economies, believing that capitalism inherently drives not only inequality, but also injustice.” Ton’s research with Hazhir Rahmandad, PhD ’05, (Schussel Family Professor of Management Science; Associate Professor, System Dynamics) shows that fulfilling, well-paying jobs are just as profitable, but they are the exception rather than the norm.

A healthy workforce, strong middle class, and robust economy are all at stake. With this in mind, Ton outlined six steps that employers, investors, educators, and stakeholders should follow to make better employment and personnel decisions:

ADVOCATE FOR PRO-WORKER POLICY › Business leaders can advocate for a higher minimum wage, better leave, and tax incentives to invest in wages and benefits. Individual organizations can improve their own policies, but they can also be voices for change in a larger sense.

The most important human capital measures to report are internal promotion, pay distribution, and employee turnover. Companies may balk at disclosing these data by race and gender, but it helps break the cycle of inequality and underemployment by engendering discussion and peer pressure both inside and outside the organization.

BE TRANSPARENT ›

Organizations need to acknowledge the demand side of the jobs equation—there are too few good jobs available. The problem needs to be solved at the systems level, not just the worker level.

COMMIT TO SOLVING THE PROBLEM ›

Workers who use technology know what improves productivity and integrates effectively with workflow. Technology that replaces human workers without improving productivity or service will likely be ineffective.

INVOLVE WORKERS IN TECH “SOLUTIONS” THAT AFFECT THEIR WORK ›

Companies should commit to creating opportunities by promoting frontline managers internally. Promotion decisions should factor in race and gender.

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PROVIDE CAREER PATHS ›

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RAISE WAGES › Companies need to analyze the total take-home pay of their workers, compare that to the living wage, and develop a plan to raise wages. When complemented with other operational changes, these wage increases will improve workers’ ability to focus on the job, reduce turnover costs, and increase productivity and service.

Ton acknowledged that an economic crisis can hinder companies’ ability to implement these employment changes, but noted that making real improvements requires a mindset that is not only focused on shortterm profits. “It is easy to create a job that treats people like robots and justify it with the assumption that workers lack skills and abilities,” wrote Ton. “But as we have seen, that attitude sows social unrest and puts a ceiling on the prospects of hardworking Americans and their communities.”

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NORAMAY CADENA AND SHAYNA HARRIS

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Investing in the Changing Face of Food

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Noramay Cadena, SB ’03, LGO ’11, and Shayna Harris, MBA ’11, have always been deeply committed to paving the path for more women and women of color to launch into management and STEM fields.

The duo met in 2009 at MIT Sloan when they were placed in the same small study cohort. They had different career paths and life experiences, but commonly rooted values. After graduation, the classmates set off on their own career paths, working in industries as varied as food and supply chain operations and aerospace engineering. They later transitioned to venture capital, where their professional trajectories and personal admiration for each other came together in 2020 when they co-founded Supply Change Capital.

The early-stage venture capital firm invests at the intersection of food, culture, and technology to catalyze early-stage sustainable businesses that modernize the food system. Specifically, Supply Change Capital invests in founders who are often from overlooked or underinvested backgrounds in food and technology-focused venture capital.

“We’re often asked if Supply Change Capital is simply investing in ethnic aisles at grocery stores,” says Cadena. “But that’s not what we’re doing at all. We want to eradicate ethnic aisles. We are about redefining and reconceptualizing the food system from farm to fork so that it is more representative, resonant, and relevant for the modern-day consumer.”

Harris and Cadena’s work is the culmination of everything they learned in their system dynamics, sustainability, and leadership courses at MIT Sloan.

It is also a direct result of their shared desire to build a bold, compelling, and unapologetic organization that serves multicultural America—a growing demographic which, according to a 2015 Nielsen report, will become the new majority in 2045.

“Multicultural founders are underrepresented in today’s food system, despite having the fastestgrowing demographic in America. The majority of food brands and food technology founders are not run by female or BIPOC entrepreneurs,” says Harris.

“We believe there is an opportunity to make an impact by investing capital in diverse founders across the supply chain in technology, sustainable ingredients, and culturally-resonant brands.”

With Supply Change Capital, Harris and Cadena set their sights on food trends and food systems. The global food system is an attractive and a critical area to invest in, especially when it comes to investing in founders from underrepresented groups.

“We want to help bring about the next generation of iconic brands that will be authentic to women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, and more cross sections of the U.S. population,” says Cadena.

“Because we believe in a future of food that is better for you, supply chain efficient, sustainability mindful, and culture rich.”

Since its inception, Supply Change Capital has invested in a plethora of early-stage food technology and consumer packaged goods businesses. For instance, AYO Foods is the first national brand bringing West African food, flavors, and ingredients nationwide to grocers like Target and Kroger; Aqua Cultured Foods is a sustainable seafood alternative that uses microbial fermentation to develop fungibased microbes into an alternative protein source; and Agua Bonita produces traditional Mexican aguas frescas without added sugar, using upcycled fruit as a key ingredient. All three of these businesses are women-owned and run, and two of the three are run by women of color.

Harris and Cadena believe emerging food brands and technologies like these will garner greater mainstream appeal as American demographics continue to change. They also think the efforts of these founders to diversify ingredients, technologies,

and supply chains will have the greatest impact on revolutionizing our current food systems—and society at large. As they explain it, these companies are representative of a sustainability-rich, polyculture, polycrop world.

For these reasons, Harris and Cadena suggest that manufacturers, retailers, and other stakeholders in the food industry should put in the work to understand what is happening if they want to win over this growing body of diverse entrepreneurs and consumers. To this end, they launched the New American Table Coalition in 2021 to bring together founders, funders, media, and industry to develop new approaches for a more sustainable and inclusive food system.

If major players take the time to learn about the changing nuances of the American population and its many food cultures, they will possess a significant advantage in the decades to come.

“ We believe there is a meaningful opportunity to make an impact by investing capital in diverse founders across the supply chain in technology, sustainable ingredients, and culturally-resonant brands.”

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SHAYNA HARRIS

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Making an Impact The members of the MIT Sloan community endeavor to transform their ideas into actions in order to have a lasting impact. After all, the school’s mission is to develop principled, innovative leaders who will build a better world—both now and in the future. As such, the work of MIT Sloan students, faculty, alumni, and staff like those highlighted here will last for generations to come. With the generous support of our community, they can immediately enrich diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at the school and in their own organizations,

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and lay the foundation for a better tomorrow.

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Helping Companies Be Accountable “All of these companies made Black Lives Matter statements, but some of them aren’t even measuring the percentage of Black employees in their company.

So, how could you care about something you aren’t tracking?” she asks.

“We don’t really care if your numbers are bad. Most companies’ numbers are bad. We have a lot of social constructs in this country that we’re reckoning with that explain why those numbers are bad. Institutions are not going to solve inequity overnight. But the fact that most public companies aren’t even measuring their diversity speaks volumes. So, at a minimum, public companies should measure and publicly disclose their diversity statistics, because public disclosure at this stage will be the most significant signal that this is something a company cares about.”

In August 2021, the SEC approved new rules about public disclosures around DEI, which means that diversity is now a fiduciary responsibility. Blendoor vocally supports the legislation, and they’ve opened an office in Washington, D.C. Soon, Lampkin hopes that an organization’s corporate social responsibility officer will be as important as a CFO and that Blendoor will become the de facto standard for DEI ratings and governance, potentially as part of an investment tool like Morningstar.

“It’s governance, risk management, and compliance kind of like Sarbanes-Oxley,” she explains. “Staying up to date, de-risking, and ensuring that you aren’t putting your company in a particularly bad position for an adverse event related to pay inequity, sexual harassment, or discrimination.”

STEPHANIE LAMPKIN

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“ All of these companies made Black Lives Matter statements, but some of them aren’t even measuring the percentage of Black employees in their company.

So, how could you care about something you aren’t tracking?”

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What should an organization do when it’s not measuring up on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)? Companies face increased pressure around transparency and accountability in operationalizing their DEI commitments—not just posting on social media or making donations, but also engaging in the long-term, sometimes painful work of applying DEI to all aspects of business.

That’s where Stephanie Lampkin, MBA ’13, comes in. In 2015, she founded Blendoor, a diversity analytics firm that helps companies improve DEI. Most don’t even know where to begin. “The analogy I give is that when we first started Blendoor, it felt like we were selling scuba diving equipment to people who didn’t know how to swim,” she says. “We’ve had to take a step back and really figure out how to give the fundamentals.”

Blendoor recently conducted a “State of DEI in Tech 2021” survey using diversity reports, proxy statements, and organizations’ websites. They found that 240 major tech companies lagged behind their Black Lives Matter pledges. There were significant drop-offs for men and women from underrepresented groups moving into leadership positions. Only 15 percent of named executives were women, who on average were paid 21 percent less than their male counterparts; none of these women were Black.

While the results aren’t promising, Lampkin’s goal is not to shame companies but to work with them.

Blendoor identifies an organization’s public-facing BlendScore—like a FICO score, but for DEI. Using private and public data, the BlendScore measures how a company is faring relative to its peers. Then, Lampkin’s team offers targeted recommendations.

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Unequal Access to Food

From wide-open rural lands to densely built inner cities, low-income Americans in every state struggle to find fresh and healthy food in their communities. But is the obvious

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fix—building more grocery stores—the most effective one?

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New research from Elisabeth Paulson, PhD ’21, offers a different, more nuanced look at the issue.

Paulson’s data-driven mathematical model and accompanying empirical analysis grouped families receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits based on their shopping and nutrition habits and how far they lived from grocery stores.

Households that lived within half a mile of a market and did not appear to value healthy eating significantly benefited from easy access to food, Paulson’s research showed. These families, according to the USDA’s National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, did not follow food pyramid guidelines or frequently read nutrition labels. Still, they bought more produce and shopped more often than other families that shared similar nutrition behaviors but lived over a half-mile from a market.

Yet, Paulson found that distance to a grocery store, whether near or far, only made a marginal difference for people who valued healthy diets. This group, Paulson says, was willing to travel outside their neighborhood to buy fruits and vegetables.

Local and federal governments provide financial incentives for businesses to open grocery stores in enclaves that have limited produce options, known as food deserts. To have the greatest impact, Paulson wrote in her paper, the construction of grocery stores should be in “low-value nutrition” neighborhoods.

While much of her research has focused on access-based interventions, Paulson cautions against taking a single-solution approach to the issue.

“This is not just a problem of access,” says Paulson, whose research is under review. “If our goal is to promote healthy diets, the higher-level question is: What other intervention, or combination of interventions, could be used to achieve that goal?”

Paulson is currently tackling this higher-level problem. She is devising a data-driven model that gives families a personalized set of incentives—access, education, and price—based on their traits, such as nutrition habits or food preferences. This model will enable government agencies to adjust and craft policies at more individualized levels using consumer behavior trends.

She also has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance. Its Healthy Incentives Program offers SNAP rebates on purchases of fruits and vegetables made at participating farmers markets, farm stands, and community-supported agriculture. Paulson will advise policymakers on how to expand the program by applying methods used in her research as well as other principles, including “network effects.”

Then, there was the type of math she performed as a data scientist in her first job after college. While her work helped shape health care policy, computing data summaries and running regressions lacked the intellectual challenge she was craving. She searched for doctoral programs and found the MIT Operations Research Center (ORC), an interdisciplinary graduate program founded in 1953. Paulson saw that ORC students were working on sophisticated, data-driven

“ This is not just a problem of access. If our goal is to promote healthy diets, the higher-level question is: What other intervention, or combination of interventions, could be used to achieve that goal?”

solutions affecting businesses and society, and wanted to be a part of it. During her five years at MIT and ORC, Paulson distinguished herself as a graduate student, earning a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship and receiving several honors for her work.

Paulson is spending the 2021–22 school year as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University’s Immigration Policy Lab. She is doing research and data analysis for GeoMatch, a machine learning tool that pairs immigrants to locations within host countries based on their education, work skills, and personal characteristics. Then, in July 2022, Paulson will resume her food policy research as an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

In the spirit of “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), Paulson aims to strengthen her partnerships with nonprofit and policy groups. She credits Levi and Perakis for reminding her to think outside of the academic world.

“They always kept me working toward impact,” Paulson says. “It has shaped how I view my research going forward.”

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Paulson researched food deserts at the suggestion of her advisors, Retsef Levi (J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Management; Professor, Operations Management; Co-Director, Leaders for Global Operations Program) and Georgia Perakis (William F. Pounds Professor of Management; Professor, Operations Management and Operations Research and Statistics; EMBA Faculty Director; Co-Director, Operations Research Center), who are also co-authors of the study. Paulson had collaborated with Levi and Perakis on making food supply chains more sustainable and reducing waste in the farm supply chain, but knew little about food deserts. Still, the opportunity to work on a critical problem using advanced analytics appealed to her.

The daughter of a statistics professor and a software engineer, Paulson loves the rigors of theoretical math. As an undergraduate student, she immersed herself in game theory, especially strategies about deception. She even dedicated her senior thesis to the topic. “Game theoretic models were fun and interesting to analyze, but the real-world applications were not as straightforward,” she says.

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ELISABETH PAULSON

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Empowering the Next Generation Fellowship Spotlight: Omolara Ajele, SF ’22

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As the inaugural Gitlin Family Sloan Fellow, there’s no clear path for Omolara “Lara” Ajele, SF ’22. No one has come before her and while that gives her freedom to forge ahead, it also leaves questions. “Will they feel good about who they invested in?” she often wondered before starting at MIT Sloan.

Luckily, Ajele has a history of building from the ground up. In her home of Nigeria, one of Ajele’s first jobs was at an e-commerce startup that began with five people. “We quickly grew to 500 employees, and I had to lead and learn in an informal environment. Everything moved very quickly, and I was doing so many jobs.”

Though the change was rapid, it also led to clarity about what Ajele wanted to move forward in as a career. “I realized that I wanted to build for an impact using technology to drive solutions.”

Part of that impact came from moving her young family halfway across the world to Austin, Texas, to work as part of a founding team at Facebook looking at advertiser experience. Though she always wanted to pursue an MBA to become a business and technology leader, Ajele decided to build her professional space before jumping back into academics. After a year and a half at Facebook, she set her sights on MIT Sloan. “It was the right decision at the right time,” she says. Ajele was named the Gitlin Family Sloan Fellow, and with nothing but support, encouragement, and enthusiasm from her husband and fellow tech entrepreneur, she “didn’t think twice about it.”

When she started in June 2021, joining Cambridge classes from Texas, Ajele “wanted to build a network for years to come,” and it seems she’s on the right track. “It wasn’t even a month before it felt like family.” But it’s not just fellow classmates who have made Ajele feel

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welcome. As eager as Ajele was to start this new chapter in her career, Stephanie and David Gitlin, SF ’03, were just as eager to meet their inaugural fellow. Meeting via Zoom in June, Ajele couldn’t have been happier to have the Gitlins in her corner. “They spoke highly of me and provided a warm environment and encouraging words,” she says. “There is nothing more inspiring than to hear that someone believes in you.”

Ajele’s story is similar to that of the Gitlins: a spouse starting at MIT Sloan, building a young family, and staying connected. “They said to call them any time,” Ajele says. “It’s really too good to be true.” But the similarities between the Gitlins and Ajele don’t end there. Seeing as she’s no stranger to the benefits of investing in the people of the future, Ajele plans to make that a pillar of her own philanthropy. She already supports a scholarship in Nigeria for girls who want to get into technology and is thinking about how she wants to give back to MIT Sloan. She knows it is important to “keep giving, no matter how small.”

As for her own post-graduation plans, Ajele hasn’t set anything in stone yet, but she plans on taking the skills and the network she has gained from MIT Sloan back to Nigeria. She already invests in a startup in Lagos working with merchants to provide them with digital commerce infrastructure, and supports the startup with growth strategy, partnerships, and operations. There are many opportunities for development in Nigeria and across the continent, but Ajele has time. “I’m not sure which underdeveloped area to build on, but I’m going to use technology to solve it.” And she already has at least two backers waiting for her. “The Gitlins and I made dinner plans for when my family moves to Cambridge,” she smiles.

MARCUS WILSON

spiral pattern evoking the journey toward a goal, the messiness of the process, and the commitment to work through it. Wilson told the Boston Globe that their work was “humbling and amazing.”

The collection comprises five sneakers and four tops.

Wilson says it was so successful that they’re bringing the collection back this fall and, potentially, again in 2022. All net proceeds go to AFH, America Needs You—which provides career development for firstgeneration college students—and the Majira Project— which works with founders and businesses from underserved communities and is run by Wilson’s friend, Kerry Bowie, SB ’94, MBA ’06.

NOBULL, now title sponsor of the CrossFit Games and official footwear and apparel brand of CrossFit, is doubling down on its commitment to education and service. So is Wilson, who serves as a professional advisor for the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and works with the MIT delta v accelerator, the capstone entrepreneurial experience for MIT students. He wants to get more involved personally and professionally with AFH and MIT mentorships, because providing opportunities isn’t just a business goal.

“My father was part of the first generation in his family to go to college. He put himself through school working nights at a tobacco factory in North Carolina and got a master’s degree from Michigan. Now, my brother has an MBA and an MD from Harvard, and I have an undergraduate degree from Cornell and an MBA from MIT,” says Wilson. “That’s how quickly positive change through education and access can happen. With our initiatives, the entire NOBULL family is looking to further broaden and accelerate this societal progress.”

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Following the social unrest of summer 2020, Marcus Wilson, MBA ’04, and the team at NOBULL realized they needed to contribute more meaningfully. “As entrepreneurs, our heads were down for a long time trying to build something. We finally looked up and realized we were now in a position where we could actually impact things,” he says.

Wilson is a co-founder of NOBULL, a direct-toconsumer footwear and apparel brand that releases special collections inspired by sports-related content like the Olympics and CrossFit Games. But their Artists For Humanity (AFH) collection centers on a deeper societal impact.

NOBULL has had an ongoing commitment to diversity and social responsibility, but their AFH collaboration wasn’t just about addressing the lack of diversity within the footwear and apparel industry. “I’ve seen and experienced that lack of diversity throughout my career,” says Wilson. “During bank and board meetings, I’ve almost always been the only Black man present.” Wilson spoke candidly about his experience to staff in a publicly available video.

Wilson, his co-founder Michael Schaeffer, and the NOBULL team decided they wanted to expose young people at an earlier age to the possibilities in design and help build a pipeline of diverse candidates. Wilson, who previously worked with brands like Reebok, had collaborated with AFH before: They’re the biggest employer of youth in Boston, bringing jobs and opportunities to under-resourced artists and designers.

Six AFH teens worked with NOBULL designers in fall 2020 on a limited-edition sneaker and apparel line.

They collaborated via Zoom, received significant autonomy to craft their vision, and ultimately chose the creative process as inspiration: a yellow, black, and white

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The Opportunity to Put in the Work

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SUNISH GUPTA

Innovating for Inclusivity In 2001, Sunish Gupta, SDM ’12, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa—a degenerative eye disease that causes progressive vision loss. As a process engineer, Gupta’s work was highly visual, so his work—along with his lifestyle—had to change.

It was a difficult prognosis, but Gupta was determined to learn and innovate through it. He started volunteering with the National Federation of the Blind to develop assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Alongside legendary

Gupta enrolled in MIT’s System Design and Management (SDM) master’s program almost a decade after his retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis.

Having ample experience on the design side, he was motivated to address the gap in technological capacity and a designer’s accessibility concerns. “The program provided me with systems design thinking skills. You have to consider the organizational and human aspects of your solution, beyond the technologies involved.”

“ I want to make sure that small and medium businesses can sustain and continue to innovate born-accessible products and services to the broader population, which includes more than one billion people with disabilities worldwide.”

Gupta is recognized as an accessibility expert and has since championed the development and integration of assistive technologies through a variety of roles, including as an advisor to Amazon and IBM. “The mindset is changing,” he says. “Companies and organizations are taking a more proactive approach.

They think, how can we take this design thinking and make sure we are building into the product as opposed to finding out once it’s already built? Accessibility has now become competitive; it’s not just a compliance or diversity and inclusion initiative.”

So what’s next? Gupta is busy expanding the reach of Easy Alliance, an organization he founded that aims to address the long-term challenges of inclusivetechnology design. “I want to make sure that small and medium businesses can sustain and continue to innovate born-accessible products and services to the broader population, which includes more than one billion people with disabilities worldwide.”

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MIT inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, SB ’70, Gupta went on to commercialize the first portable reader for those with vision impairments. “You might be surprised how many technologies first appeared in the disability world, then became popular in the mainstream world,” explains Gupta, who provided predictive-texting technology as such an example.

As a participant in the MIT Media Lab’s Reality Virtually Hackathon, Gupta led a team through the design and construction of an augmented reality app that assists the visually impaired with spatial direction and navigation. The ARound app combines sound, camera, and geolocation data to construct an augmented auditory reality. It functions like a personal pedestrian signal but with wider applicability, alerting the user to the location of places and objects such as post offices and doors. The functionality of ARound expands beyond real-time updates—it also records and tags locations with sounds, which enables the user to retrace their path. The sound tags can be added to a shared library, similar to the way photos can be pinned to a location on Google Maps.

At the 2017 Hackathon, ARound earned the contest’s top honor.

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A better world i s our business.

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