MIT Sloan School of Management

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that Sloan "continues its efforts to recruit and retain a diverse, qualified cohort of underrepresented and underserved students from a variety of backgrounds."

MIT Sloan has "Open + Inclusive" workshops where faculty and staff can attend "interactive sessions designed to illustrate pervasive biases associated with team performance and provide tools for addressing them."

As part of the MIT Sloan Experts Series, Malia Lazu, a lecturer at Sloan, presented on "How Corporate America Can Advance Social Justice and Racial Equity."

The MIT Executive MBA program at Sloan "works to ensure an open and inclusive environment for every cohort, both in and out of the classroom" and includes student run sessions titled "Ask Me Anything Panels." The Panels "allow for open conversions on various topics, including but not limited to gender, gender identity, religion, biases, and life in and out of the military."

The school's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion states that in 2021, the school reconvened its "DEI Forum" for student and staff "engagement meetings."

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that "Orientation for all incoming students now features an overview of MIT Sloan’s DEI-related [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] tools and resources led by the Assistant Dean of DEI."

In Sloan's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report, it stated that it now mandates all incoming students to listen to an overview by the Assistant Dean of DEI about Sloan's DEI-related tools and resources.

As of 2020, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Sloan introduced "DEI-focused coursework" into the program curriculum.

The school's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion states that in 2021, the school "Redesigned courses to include DEI concepts and tools."

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that faculty members have "updated their courses to include content focused on developing leaders invested in creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces." Additionally, the Report states that the MBA and the Leaders for Global Operations program's coursework "includes classes on leadership, ethics, and diversity."

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that "all MIT Sloan staff" participate in a professional development program called "Open + Inclusive" which "offers participants opportunities for learning, increasing self-awareness, investigation of bias, and work towards broader cultural change."

In 2020, Sloan launched a campaign called the Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion, which provides increased funding for fellowships, curricula, programming, and other activities that promote DEI. Since it's founding, it has raised $25 million over 25 separate gifts for its cause.

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that Sloan has "helped to form the PREDOC [Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers] Consortium, a group of universities and research institutions dedicated to creating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces in the quantitative social sciences and related fields."

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states that its "Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion" provides "increased funding for fellowships, curricula, programming, and other activities to promote DEI" which "helps ensure that MIT Sloan continues to attract and enroll the best students from around the world."

On June 25, 2020, Sloan posted on Instagram about a student club called "Male Allies" that was hosting a workshop on gender equality. Male Allies operates under the umbrella of and in collaboration with Sloan Women in Management (SWIM).

In the Fall of 2020, MIT Sloan helped launch the PREDOC Consortium, a group of universities and research institutions dedicated to creating "more diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces in the quantitative social sciences and related fields."

Launched in the Spring of 2022, the ComMITment is the Office of DEI's "capstone event," which offers the Sloan community the opportunity to engage with global leaders and discover "how they address challenges related to systemic inequality." The 2023 event featured a conversation between Dean Schmittlein and two US State Department officials.

Sloan has a Diversity & Inclusion Task Force that gives recommendations to Dean Schmittlein and was formed in the fall of 2019.

MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative's mission is to "provide the best education, apply academic rigor to real world programs, and empower leaders everywhere to take action so humans and nature can thrive." Sustainability to Sloan doesn't mean just caring about the environment, but achieving "harmony between healthy environments, thriving communities, and ethical business + institutions," and working together to "create equitable economies."

The Sustainability Initiative has an Advisory Board that "provides guidance on matters of strategy, fundraising, and execution."

Sloan's Sustainability Initiative has a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Action Plan, in which the team released a statement saying the team "stands with community leaders, activists, organizations, and MIT leadership" with regards to collectively advancing DEIJ.

There are four stages to the Sustainability Initiative's DEIJ Action Plan and as of June 2023, Sloan is at Phase 2. Phase 0, "Looking Inward," includes engaging in conversations about DEIJ. Phase 1, "Pilot Actions," is about identifying initial actions the team could take or amplify in the short term, while planing ahead for future phases. Course-related actions completed in Phase 1 includes further integrating DEIJ topics in its S-Lab and Capstone courses, adding DEIJ topics into Sloan Executive Education courses (such as "disproportionate impacts of air pollution on communities" and "corporate initiatives aimed at securing a just energy transition"), and incorporating "diverse representation and topics" in co-curricular programming such as the Sustainability Lunch Series. Phase 1 also includes teaching about topics such as the "co-benefits of climate action on health, wealth, justice" and "corporate lobbying efforts that support/go against announced DEI goals" in various projects.

Other initiatives that are part of Phase 1 of the Sustainability Initiative include: 1) expanding access to and diversity of roundtable and networking events, 2) taking a DEIJ lens to "all initiative marketing and communications", 3) becoming a member of non-profit "Browning the Greenspace" to support its mission to diversify the clean energy workforce, 4) participating and joining MIT/MIT Sloan DEI working groups.

In Phase 2 of the Sustainability Initiative "Setting Goals + Tracking Efforts," the Sloan team is setting goals that tackle both near and long term goals, and is striving to align its efforts with MIT Sloan's broader DEI goals. In Phase 3, "Ongoing Learning + Improvement," the team will be focusing efforts on "closely [aligning] and co-evolving with efforts at MIT", getting the administration, students, staff, faculty, and alumni involved.

The Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab) is an engaged-learning course that allows students to "explore the intersection of business, the environment, and society, using new knowledge to solve real-world problems." With the support of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, teams of masters-level MIT students use a problem-formulation methodology developed by MIT Sloan to help organizations and companies determine what sustainability problem they want to solve and why it's important. S-Lab has worked on 240+ projects so far.

Since 2010, MIT Sloan has offered a Sustainability Certificate to graduate students. Each year, a cohort of 90-100 students participate in the program.

Sloan offers two sustainability internship programs for its students. The Sustainability Initiative Internship Program financially supports select first-year MBAs that pursue sustainability-oriented internships. Grants are made possible by alumni donations and a match by participating companies. The Sloan Social Impact Fund provides financial support to select students taking on "important societal challenges" during their summer internship. Funding is provided by the Dean's Office and contributions from classmates.

Sloan offers over 60 sustainability courses for those that want to pursue the Sustainability Certificate. Courses include "Environmental Justice: Law and Policy," "Navigating Politics & Power in Water & Sanitation Planning," "Leading the Way: Individual and Organizational Strategies for Advancing DE&I," and "Global Justice, Gender, and Development."

As part of the Sustainability Initiative, the Aggregate Confusion Project and MIT Climate Pathways Project produce ESG research for companies to use.

In the fall of 2021, the Aggregate Confusion Project (ACP) partnered with four investment firms to help "tackle the ESG measurement challenge and develop methodologies for more rigorous and reliable ESG integration."

On February 24, 2023, MIT Sloan Impact Investing Initiative (Mi3) and the Finance Group co-hosted its first ESG and Impact Finance conference titled "ESG & Beyond: The Evolution of Impact Finance." The day-long conference featured various panels on investing in public and private markets to regulations.

The school's Spring 2023 Annual Progress Report states Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has an event titled "ComMITment," which "offers the MIT Sloan community an opportunity to engage with global leaders and discover how they address challenges related to systemic inequality."

On November 10, 2022, the Sloan Office of Media Relations published an article titled, "New study suggests evolutionary forces are behind collective discrimination," which discusses how a "Research paper recommends fostering environments in which desired behavior emerges naturally through evolutionary dynamics rather than regulating against undesired outcomes." According to the article, "[s]trategies to encourage such environment include proactively providing social, educational and economic opportunities for underrepresented groups to counteract negative feedback loops, as well as providing lessons and activities for children to interact with each other with diverse backgrounds, to develop more accurate perceptions of people from other groups."

On May 10, 2021, as part of the "Sloan Expert Series," the school published an article titled, "How corporate America can advance social justice and racial equity," which states that "[o]ne year after a historic movement for racial justice, corporate leaders must go beyond intentions to make diversity, equity, and inclusion a practice."

On December 16, 2020, Sloan published an article titled, "How to have productive conversations about race at work," which states that "[c]onversations about race and racism can be uncomfortable, but they’re necessary for an equitable and inclusive workplace."

On August 18, 2020, MIT published an article titled "A 5-part framework for talking about racism at work." The BRAVE framework, as it was called, stands for Build (the intention, focus, and safety needed to have honest conversations about race), Respect (the sensitivity of the topic while challenging people to go beyond the superficial), Acknowledge (the uncomfortable realities of the past and the present), and Validate (the experiences of your racially marginalized employees).

On June 1, 2020, the school issued a statement titled "Black Lives Matter. Solidarity." which states the following: "We acknowledge our privilege as Black graduate students at MIT Sloan, and with this privilege comes the responsibility to lead and to align with true allies in this call. We understand that the power and voices we have as leaders in business can be utilized to drive positive change and to call on those within the broader MIT Sloan community to do the same. We will continue to work with MIT faculty, staff, and students on concrete actions that we believe the entire MIT Sloan community should take to address systemic racism in all its forms."