Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We have been reviewing our recruiting initiatives; emphasizing qualities of empathy, self-awareness, and resilience in our interview process; providing implicit-bias training to interviewers; and evaluating and implementing new ways to develop a strong pipeline of diverse candidates.

Key Efforts

Our ongoing recruiting initiatives include virtual and in-person diversity events; one-on-one office hours with diversity outreach staff; initiatives in diverse markets globally aimed at attracting more women to the Executive MBA Program; affinity group events expanding pipeline development with outreach to organizations and undergraduate schools, including historically Black colleges and universities; and frequent evaluations of our recruiting initiatives to measure diversity and inclusion efforts.

Booth piloted a new program with Questbridge to allow their graduates to apply to Booth through a matching process. Questbridge’s mission is to support access to graduate level education to talented low-income students.

Booth leadership was part of the university’s effort to establish a new department on Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) within the university’s Social Sciences Division (SSD), a novel approach to exploring these increasingly interconnected concepts. Dean Madhav Rajan, one of Booth’s deputy deans of faculty Pietro Veronesi, and professor Jane Risen worked with the university and offered to support the SSD in this effort, further expanding interdivisional collaboration with Booth’s undergraduate instruction at the university.

We are building on existing and new partnerships with groups that support diversity and inclusion, including 30% Club, Forte Foundation, JumpStart, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, Posse Foundation, Prospanica, Riordan, Reaching Out MBA, and Toigo.

Our recruitment initiatives include partnerships with several student organizations, including the African American MBA Association, Chicago Women in Business, Hispanic American Business Students Association, OUTreach, Coalition of Minorities in Business, Booth Pride Group, and Graduate Women in Business, as well as with alumni groups including the Chicago Booth Black Alumni Association and Hispanic/Latinx Booth Alumni Association.

Booth’s research centers and programs have participated in and launched recruitment-related initiatives to attract students from a broad range of backgrounds. These include partnering with the Leadership Alliance’s Summer Research Early Identification Program to provide outstanding emerging scholars the opportunity to work with faculty from the Center for Decision Research, the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, and other areas of the school. Booth also hosts IDDEAS for undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds who are interested in business research at the doctoral level, partners with The PhD Project, and participates in Discover UChicago to support graduate students and postdocs in career advancement opportunities. Additionally, the Becker Friedman Institute of Economics launched the University of Chicago’s Expanding Diversity in Economics (EDE) Summer Institute, to identify and support talented undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds who previously may not have been interested in the study of economics.

We are evolving and enhancing our curriculum and leadership programs by developing leaders who prioritize diversity and inclusion.

Key Efforts

Diversity and inclusion, ethics, and leadership remain focus areas for ongoing MBA curriculum review and LEAD curriculum review. LEAD—Booth’s experiential leadership development programming for students—includes new and updated modules on inclusive leadership and related topics. The Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership continues to feature guests and participants from diverse backgrounds in events such as ‘Leading with Inclusion and Creating Inclusive Workplaces: What Should Leaders Do?’

The Leadership Orientation Retreat includes discussion on diversity and inclusion, and implicit-bias workshops will continue to be part of Orientation+. We continue to explore university-wide opportunities for increased bystander-intervention training and implicit-bias training.

Booth’s Leadership Development Office offers programming on a variety of inclusion-related topics, including: addressing systemic racism; tackling social identity and bias at work; navigating power, privilege, and microaggressions; developing successful allyship and bystander intervention; fostering inclusive leadership; and more. We continue to seek insights on how best to integrate inclusion-related material throughout our leadership learning experiences.

We are working to strengthen the pipeline of diverse faculty candidates, and have redoubled our efforts through a more expansive search process that ensures we identify and recruit from the most diverse candidate pool available. We continue to examine our own hiring practices for Chicago Booth staff and work to eliminate biases.

Key Efforts

• We continue to expand our faculty network and conduct outreach to increase the pool of talented candidates. Our efforts in the last year have led to the hiring of exceptional new instructors from different backgrounds.
• In partnership with Kaleidoscope Group, we are working to increase diversity in hiring within our Chicago offices and cultivating an inclusive environment for current staff. We are piloting blind hiring practices within our human-resources efforts.
• We participated in the foundation of PREDOC (Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers), a consortium of universities and research institutions working to strengthen diversity and inclusion in the PhD student pipeline and in PhD programs.
• We launched D&I initiatives at Booth’s London campus focused on staff hiring and development, student recruitment and support, programming, and community engagement.
• We enhanced D&I training opportunities, which include new and ongoing senior leadership training, a two-day mandatory D&I training for the Booth Management Group, and all staff training.

We have expanded and enhanced efforts to improve communication and foster dialogue about diversity and inclusion among our staff, faculty, students, and alumni.

Key Efforts

Our expanded Chicago Booth Staff Diversity and Inclusion Committee helps to enhance awareness and understanding of diverse perspectives, identities, and experiences, increase engagement and learning across all backgrounds, and ensure an equitable culture.

The Deans’ Diversity Advisory Committee aims to improve communication between students and the Deans’ Office, and to expand collaboration with students around diversity and inclusion efforts. The committee addresses diversity and inclusion at Booth and the broader university, focusing on developing meaningful D&I programming, advocacy, and other topics.

We conducted a staff climate survey and continue to encourage feedback from staff, faculty, students, alumni, and other stakeholders to help guide our D&I efforts.

We launched the Diversity and Inclusion Alumni Task Force comprising more than 35 alumni members, split into three distinct committees: admissions, engagement, and fundraising and hired D&I consultants to help us develop a strategy to better engage our diverse alumni community.

We expanded efforts to proactively develop and maintain relationships with employers who articulate a commitment to diversity and inclusion as critical to business success. We support business leaders who take a strong and public stance against racism, and whose actions influence positive change. We are taking steps to address and eliminate biases in the recruiting and hiring processes of firms that source Booth talent.

Key Efforts

We partner with over 70 percent of DiversityInc’s Top 50 list, a leading ranking assessment of diversity management in corporate America. These companies collaborate with Chicago Booth when seeking talent, hosting educational events, supporting student-group programming, partnering with centers, and other efforts.

We partner with approximately 45 percent of the public corporations, universities, health-care systems, and private companies featured in Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Diversity list.

Career Services and Corporate Relations have expanded partnerships with student groups, Student Life, and Alumni Relations and Advancement to ensure a diverse suite of speakers are present at all Booth events.

Career Services and Corporate Relations are actively engaging in conversations with firms about diversity and inclusion and offering students a process to report any incidents of bias or discrimination they experience while working at a company.

We continue to expand our efforts to support and celebrate diversity and inclusion in all aspects of our community.

Key Efforts

• We developed and enhanced opportunities for engagement and volunteerism in the nine neighborhoods around the University of Chicago, in partnership with the university’s Office of Civic Engagement and led by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation.
  • Through the annual community-based Rustandy Challenge, full-time and part-time Booth students partner with local nonprofits to address a social or economic challenge. Working with the South Shore Chamber of Commerce in 2020, students developed and now support a marketing and event planning strategy for The Artisan Collective, an arts and retail incubator program that attracts predominantly students of color and now supports seven black-owned businesses within the collective.
  • Booth increased outreach to BIPOC-serving nonprofit organizations about Rustandy’s nonprofit board opportunities matching students (Net Impact Board Fellows) or alumni (Alumni Board Connect) with local nonprofit organizations seeking strategic project support or new nonprofit board members, respectively.
  • We increased the number of BIPOC-serving nonprofit organizations participating in Board Fellows to 19 in 2021-2022, from 13 the previous year.
  • Through Alumni Board Connect, we successfully matched new board members at nonprofits that serve BIPOC communities.
  • We launched two D&I-focused annual funds and members of Booth’s school leadership joined members of the alumni community to raise more than $1 million for broader D&I-related funds and initiatives.
• Booth expanded D&I event programming, including: D&I Dialogues, a quarterly series offering academic lectures, interactive workshops, and peer-led discussions; Innovating for Social Equity, a Rustandy Center series examining racial, economic, and religious equity in philanthropy, private corporations, and nonprofits; Marketing for Good, a quarterly series through the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing; and student-focused events celebrating diversity and inclusion during Women’s History Month and Black History Month.