Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett a few weeks ago sent out a briefly worded email with the scintillating subject line “Wharton Facilities Updates” to the Philadelphia business school’s community. Some may have been tempted to delete it without reading. In fact, the updates and the process that helped bring them about offer fascinating insight into efforts at the oldest business school in the country to foster a more welcoming and inclusive community.
Stating simply that the school will be creating a four-room lactation suite for nursing parents and adding gender neutral restrooms in Huntsman Hall—the main business school building—Garrett’s email gave little hint that the changes were the culmination of a multi-year campaign waged by diverse student groups working together as allies. Those groups included Mothers @ Wharton, a subset of Wharton Women in Business; Out for Business (O4B), Wharton’s LGBT MBA student club; Wharton Alliance, the LGBT club for undergraduate business students; Penn NonCis, a group serving transgender students at Penn, and Return on Equality (ROE), a student-led organization launched this year to improve the way students think about diversity at Wharton and beyond.
“Strategically we decided to all work together to present options for gender-neutral restrooms and a lactation room as one proposal,” explains Divinity Matovu, a rising second-year MBA student and president of Mothers @ Wharton, which seeks to provide a supportive community to moms pursuing an MBA.
The student groups thought that the proposal for gender-neutral restrooms—an issue contributing to current national controversy—might meet with administrative pushback. “If we advocated for the facilities separately, it might be easy to dismiss the restrooms,” Matovu says. “Through strategic collaboration, we could underscore the importance of both while working together as allies.”
Multiple Campaigns Combine as One
Wharton faculty first brought a request for a lactation room to Wharton’s dean and deputy dean as far back as 2013, according to Anita Henderson, senior director to the deputy dean. Though there are multiple lactation facilities on the larger Penn campus, having to leave the building and, in many cases, wait for a room elsewhere to be free presented a challenge for faculty and staff. “We felt it was a good idea, but space is kind of the final frontier,” Henderson says, and without an immediate solution for where such a room might be located, the idea languished.
Fast forward a bit to fall 2014, when then-incoming MBA student Gil Kaminski (MBA ’16) found herself facing the same challenges that had prompted the female faculty’s request when she arrived on campus having recently given birth to her second child. One of the founders of Mothers @ Wharton, Kaminski began campaigning for a lactation space on behalf of MBA students who were also nursing.
Meanwhile, the leadership of O4B was championing its own cause—safe spaces for gender non-conforming individuals to use the restroom. “There are people who are genderqueer or non-binary or anywhere on the spectrum of gender expression—we understand that these different identities exist and that not everyone feels comfortable using a single-sex restroom,” explains Jennifer Redmond, a former co-president of O4B. For this reason, campaigning for gender-neutral bathrooms within Huntsman was high on the group’s priority list.
Jennifer Redmond, MBA ’16, former co-president of Out for Business
Redmond herself surveyed the building and identified a space that she thought could serve the purpose. The space was quite large, and because Redmond knew that Mothers @ Wharton was also looking for a lactation space, she reached out to propose that they work together. “We just chatted and it seemed to make sense that if we were asking the administration to do one facility upgrade it would be more efficient to do two at once,” she says.
Timing of Students’ Request Was “Providential”
“The students came along at the absolute perfect time,” says Henderson. “The deans were thrilled because this is something they wanted to do.” Though the school did initially explore having the lactation area and gender-neutral restrooms located next to one another in the large space that had been identified, there were construction issues that prevented that, she says. Ultimately they are separate needs and deserve separate resources anyway, she adds.
The lactation suite will be located on the first floor of Huntsman Hall, at the end of the main corridor just past the undergraduate suite and to the right of the Wharton timeline. It will feature four private rooms with locking doors, running water, comfortable chairs and hospital-grade breast pumps for lactating women to use, Henderson says. Renovations are scheduled to take place over the summer, with the lactation suite expected to be ready for use at the start of the fall semester, she adds. “I know the deans will put in whatever they need to put in to make this a good space for the women,” she says, though she does not know the project’s allocated budget.
“Literally, they could have just taken a room, thrown a chair in there and put a lock on the door, but they went above and beyond, which is great,” Matovu says. The administration does not have statistics on the number of MBA students who are also nursing parents, but Matovu—who also manages the popular blog MBA Mama—estimates that there could be around 10. In fact, one member of the Class of 2016 gave birth last week, the day before graduation, she notes. “It just goes to show that women are having babies in b-school, and it’s not going to stop happening,” she adds.
Henderson notes that the administration was pleased to be able to establish a suite rather than just a single room, since it will serve not only students but also faculty and staff, as well as visitors who come to campus for conferences and other events. The deputy dean, who handles the recruitment of faculty, expects the number of female faculty to only grow over time, Henderson says, which makes a larger space make even more sense. “The students coming along just when they did seeking a lactation room, that was just providential,” she says.Data-Driven Arguments Hold Sway
The students came armed with data to back up their proposal when they approached the administration. It is Wharton, after all. In particular, they wanted to show evidence that supports the importance of gender-neutral restrooms, since that’s the issue they feared might meet with resistance.
They cited a 2013 study of transgender and gender non-conforming people who work, live and/or attend school in Washington, DC. According to the study, 70 percent of respondents had experienced problems using gendered facilities, including verbal harassment, assault and being denied access to public restrooms. Ten percent of those who attended school reported a negative impact on their education, including having excessive absences and dropping out of school due to issues related to restroom access. And 27 percent of those in workplaces experienced problems using restrooms at work that, in some cases, caused them to change jobs or leave their employer entirely.
“At Wharton, if students want something and we do our homework, backed up with data, the school is usually very responsive,” Matovu says. In fact, there was no pushback from the administration. “It was more about the timing and people not being able to say yes until they had all their ducks in a row,” she says. “I never felt like we were fighting an uphill battle from a conceptual perspective.”
Henderson, for her part, simply doesn’t understand the uproar in the public around gender-neutral bathrooms. “All of the bathrooms in my home are gender neutral,” says the 60-year-old. “I don’t check anyone out. I don’t have signs.” She also notes that such facilities offer alternatives for adults who might be accompanied by a young child of a different gender or by a wheelchair-bound student who happens to have a caretaker of a different gender. “It’s just good all around,” she says.
Huntsman, because it is a newer building and was constructed with large, multiple-use, single-sex restrooms, will require more significant facilities updates to incorporate gender-neutral restrooms. “The older buildings were easier to deal with,” Henderson notes, requiring simply that individual-use restrooms be re-labeled for use by people of any gender. The signage of half of the restrooms in the Colonial Penn Center has been updated to reflect this change, Dean Garrett noted in his email.
In Huntsman, new facilities will be constructed on the Forum Level, outside of the Ambani Auditorium on the Walnut Street side. The head of operations identified a space that had the necessary plumbing in place after scouring the building, Henderson says. “The positive part is that this area is a little bit separated from the other areas of Huntsman,” she adds, offering more privacy to those who use it. “Here again, it was all serendipity,” she adds. Because these facilities will require more extensive updates, their completion date will likely be later than the lactation suite.
Greater Inclusivity Presents a Win-Win for Wharton
“The administration was incredibly responsive to our proposal, and I think it speaks to the fact that inclusivity and diversity are key topics at business school because they are becoming more and more important in the business world,” Redmond says.
Earlier this year, students at Wharton came together to form the new organization, Return on Equality, whose stated mission is “to make Wharton a pioneering institution that deliberately equips students to be leaders and advocates of inclusive organizational practices, enabling individuals to be recognized and valued as their whole selves.”
“Seeing that group be so welcomed by the administration made it very clear that they are very much on board with creating an inclusive environment,” Redmond says. “Likewise, they understood right away why our proposal was so important because they are thinking about these issues themselves.”
Divinity Matovu, MBA ’17, co-president of Mothers @ Wharton
Matovu confesses that she had not given much thought to gender-neutral restrooms before working with other student groups at Wharton as part of this process. “I became educated about what an important issue it is through this experience, and I will be an ally moving forward,” she says. But even though she was no longer nursing her daughter when she applied to business school, the availability of lactation rooms was something she asked about during campus visits. “I wanted to know whether Wharton was a place that moms could come and feel supported,” she says. “When I found out Wharton didn’t have a lactation room in Huntsman Hall, I was not happy. I feel privileged to be part of the student team that advocated for this change, which will positively impact countless women and their babies in the years ahead.” Now, to those for whom either resource is a distinguishing factor between one school and the next, she thinks they could tip the scales in Wharton’s favor.
Henderson, too, hopes the facilities updates will help prospective applicants view Wharton as an increasingly inclusive community. “The decision about where to go to school is complex, and it’s hard to say that people will choose to come here because of the lactation space or the restrooms, but sometimes these things are symbolic,” she says. “It sends a signal that people at Wharton are thinking about these things.”
This article originally appeared in its entirety on clearadmit.com