The best training ground for success in a male-dominated business world is a classroom full of women, says Cathy E. Minehan, dean of the all-female Simmons College School of Management.
In a coed environment, “male leadership roles remain unchallenged, and women are left with ‘play the game our way, or go home,'” she says.
Ms. Minehan, 65 years old, knows a thing or two about the old boys’ club. She is a former chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and spent nearly 40 years at central bank branches in Boston and New York. She stepped down in 2007, then took the deanship at the Boston-based school last summer, joking that she “flunked” retirement.