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The dean of the Harvard Business School Nitin Nohria appeared before 600 alumni and guests in San Francisco on Monday, delivering a public apology for the school’s treatment of female students and professors. Dean Nohria vowed to make changes at the institution.

Many of the women present, including more than 100 Harvard alumnae, were being honored by HBS Association of Northern California for their impact on business and their communities. Nohria promised to more than double the percentage of women who are protagonists in Harvard case studies from about 9% to 20%.

Women make up a record 41% of this year’s MBA class.

Nohria’s comments come after an in-depth front-page article in The New York Times that described the school’s two-year experiment in dealing proactively with gender inequality. The story fueled dialogue and debate around gender inequality in male-dominated business schools. At Harvard, a third of the female junior faculty left from 2006 to 2007.

“The dean also told the group that last year’s class of female MBA graduates at Harvard received a higher percentage of academic honors than their actual representation in the class of 2013. A record 38% of last year’s Baker Scholars were women. Baker Scholars are graduates who make up the top 5% of Harvard’s graduating class.” via Fortune

Women 16% At Davos

As world leaders met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this past week, few women were visible. Writing for Huffington Post, Christine Horansky reminds readers that the Davos forum doesn’t picks its own attendees. Rather, it was the decision of its membership organizations to send only 15-16 percent women to one of the world’s most important gatherings of the global, decision-making elite.

The Financial Post reports that the number of women at Davos declined from 2013.

In contrast, when the Forum selected 50 invitees to represent the millennial generation of leaders under 30 at Davos — a group called Global Shapers - half were women.

Analisa Balares, Founder and CEO of Womensphere, has created a global campaign to help close this gap in representation, by inviting women (and men) to raise their voices online in support of #DavosWomen. As is indicative of the times we live in, it is driven by social media, that great democratizer of public discourse. Balares is herself one of the Forum’s Young Global Leaders, a community of leaders under the age of 40.

Symbolically, a session titled “Gender-Driven Growth” with Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, happened at the end of the event, starting after many had departed the Swiss resort town.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab dismissed the topic of gender parity at Davos, calling it “ridiculous” to suggest women weren’t well represented in Davos. “If you look at participation here, you have the most famous women in the world,” he said in an interview with CNN.

GM CEO Barra An Engineer

GM’s new CEO Mary Barra joins about 20 women, with one third having science backgrounds, who now run US companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Other women scientists include Ursula Burns at Xerox Corp., Virginia Rometty at International Business Machines Corp. and Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo Inc.

“It’s not too late to buy your daughter a truck for the holidays,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied CEOs. “It’s going to inspire and motivate women and girls. There are a lot of women who have been steered away from engineering and science.”

Financial Post writes that women made up 26 percent of of science, technology, engineering and math jobs in 2011. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, women represent 31 percent of graduate students and 45 percent of undergrads.

Previously: Women, Math & Science Do Get Along Well, Mr. (Larry) Summers Oct. 13, 2010

Another survey of 1,286,350 people young people and adults confirms identically of an earlier analysis of about 500,000 sets of test scores. Girls are as good in math as boys. Period.

More good news this week: the notoriously-gender biased Lawrence Summers has resigned as President Obama’s chief economic adviser.