{shortcode-07daaa31763257504304ea7436e1ad59884f61b0}

The percentage of female protagonists in Harvard Business School case studies will double over the next five years, Business School Dean Nitin Nohria pledged at an event on Monday celebrating the 50th anniversary of women MBAs at the school.

Speaking at a “50 Years of Women at HBS” gala event hosted by the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Monday evening in San Francisco, Nohria apologized for the school’s historical disrespect and negligence towards women, according to an article on the blog  Poets & Quants chronicling the event. In addition to pledging to augment female representation in case studies, he affirmed the Business School’s intent both to assist women in serving on boards of directors and to encourage networking between female alumnae and students.

"The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better," Nohria.

Fifty years after women were first admitted to the two-year MBA program, the Business School continues to face difficulties in retaining and attracting female professors, and many of its female students have fallen behind their male peers, the New York Times reported in September.

Currently, nine to 10 percent of case studies developed and disseminated by the Business School—which produces more than 80 percent of cases sold globally—feature women as protagonists. By contrast, 41 percent of the MBA Class of 2015 are women.

Carin-Isabel Knoop, executive director of the Case Research & Writing Group, an organization housed within the Business School which has consulted in the development of more than 840 case studies, said that cases tend to involve situations in which a decision maker is in a position to meaningfully affect his or her organization.

As a result, she said, the protagonists of case studies produced at the Business School have tended to come from the highest levels of management—positions that men more frequently hold than women. As of Jan. 2014, for example, only 23 companies within the Fortune 500 had female CEOs.

Recently, however, the number of female protagonists in cases consulted upon by Knoop’s research team has grown, she said, primarily as a result of a diversification of the type of case study the school produces.

“We have been writing more entrepreneurship cases and cases that use protagonists at different levels in the organization,” she said. “We have seen more and more women protagonists recently.”