BUSINESS EDUCATION Perched on a shelf in Deborah Ancona’s office at the MIT Sloan School of Management is a pair of purple high heels. The shoes – adorned with pink and pearly baubles at the toe – are a symbol of what Prof Ancona has taken to calling “career-limiting behaviours”, or CLBs, for short.
When she first started out as an academic at a different institution, a male faculty member took her aside and told her that the purple pumps she had on were “not tenure track shoes”. He was trying to be helpful, but the message was clear: if you want a future here, your footwear must change.
