In 2015, the White House Council of Economic Advisors and more than 150 deans and leaders of business schools met to discuss a report prescribing “Best Practices” (AACSB, 2015) for business schools in preparing students to meet the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. The report focused on a workforce that was becoming increasingly more diverse in terms of both gender and ethnicity. Report recommendations dealt with four areas:

1. ensuring access to business schools and careers;
2. building a business school experience that prepared students for the workforce of the future;
3. ensuring career services that met the needs of non-traditional students; and
4. modeling best practices of effective organizations.

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has made the report the focus of its commitment to diversity and inclusion since that time, expanding the focus of programs beyond gender equity and parity to include other dimensions of diversity and inclusion such as ethnicity, culture and global region.

In a week where the firing of a Google software engineer for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes” (Wakabayashi, 2017) and the violent clash of white nationalists and counterprotestors in Charlottesville, Virginia (Astor et al., 2017) were widely covered in the news, an appreciation of diversity and inclusion issues seem ever more timely and critical. As educators, incidents such as these become teachable moments – where educators recognize the responsibility to prepare students to lead in a workplace with changing demographics. As creators of educational content, case writers have an opportunity to make a strong impact on student understanding of diversity and inclusion issues.

Diversity, inclusion and case writing

The “Best Practices” report addressed case studies specifically in its recommendations. Case writers were urged to make:

Case studies more representative and [ensure] that they reflect modern workplaces. For example, showing diversity in leaders solving a wide range of problems is important to illustrate the wide range of diversity in the business community. This includes showing women and minorities in more significant line management roles and/or as the main protagonist in the case (AACSB, 2015).

In case writing and research, selecting an appropriate protagonist is an important choice that ultimately determines whether students are inclined to engage in solving the case problem. As one experienced case writer explained it, “Readers of cases don’t care about situations, theories or problems. They care about people. The reader must feel empathy for […] the case character in order to participate in helping that character to solve case problems” (Vega, 2017).

Unfortunately, the majority of published cases feature white male protagonists, providing a view of the world that omits contributions of women or minorities. An article published in the Harvard Business Review (Symons, 2016) revealed that only one case of 21 award-winning cases from 2015 to 2016 featured a female protagonist. Only two of the approximately 300 cases read by first-year MBA students at the Harvard Business School featured a black protagonist (Fernandes, 2017). Although these two studies did not analyze all possible case studies, it seems clear that the case catalogue is not consistent with the “Best Practices” report. Women and minority protagonists are underrepresented in the case literature.