While researching our 2021 book, Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, we took a careful look at how HBR has covered women and business over the years. This article, which is adapted from a Harvard Business School case study that we wrote on the topic, traces the ways in which the magazine’s approach has evolved. In the 1950s, articles mainly discussed whether female managers would ever be fully accepted and, on one occasion, how wives should help advance their husbands’ careers; in recent years, it has included in-depth explorations of such questions as why women still get promoted less than men and what forms of subtle discrimination they still face.

In 1953 HBR took up, for the first time, the topic of women in business. For their article “Opportunities for Women at the Administrative Level,” Frances M. Fuller and Mary B. Batchelder (the first two women to have bylines in the magazine) interviewed 47 women and 128 men at 95 organizations across the United States. What opportunities were there, the authors wondered, for women who were better educated than most of the women of their time? And how were they received by the men who would have to hire them?

The authors struck a hopeful tone in their introduction, citing the growing number of women in the labor force, but they reported that even those interviewees — both men and women — who were “enthusiastic about women’s capabilities” didn’t see their opportunities as extending to the top of the corporate hierarchy. In fact, the authors found that even when women were doing the same work as their supervisors, their jobs were classified as “clerical.” As one woman complained, “We do the same work but the men get the titles.”

The authors went on to document various beliefs about women’s lesser aptitude and appetite for professional work. Such views, they noted, were “contradictory and can be ‘proved’ or ‘disproved’ by numerous examples” but were also “a powerful force in determining a woman’s career.” The question of likability was also top of mind. “No matter how much technical skill a woman exhibited on the job,” the authors wrote, “the final evaluation of her tended to be in terms of her behavior. ‘Do people like her or don’t they?’”

This article anticipated decades of research on barriers to women’s career advancement, making HBR a pioneer in the discourse about women in the workplace. However, it would be more than 10 years before the magazine would again turn its attention to working women — and in the interim, in 1956, the magazine published “Successful Wives of Successful Executives,” by W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen, a primer for how wives could help advance their husbands’ careers. “It is the task of the wife,” the authors wrote, “to cooperate in working toward the goals set by her husband. This means accepting — or perhaps even encouraging — the business trips, the long hours at the office, and the household moves dictated by his business career.” As for the husband, they wrote, “He may meet someone who conforms more closely to the new social standards he has acquired while moving socially upward; he may discard his wife either by taking a new wife or by concentrating all his attention on his business.”

By the beginning of the 1960s, such ideas were rapidly becoming outdated. Women were making meaningful inroads into the professional workforce, and the national conversation about gender roles was changing. Harvard Business School began admitting women into its full MBA program in 1963, and in 1964 the Civil Rights Act prohibited sex discrimination in employment.

In the mid-1960s, in light of the enormous policy changes ushered in by the Civil Rights Act, HBR conducted a survey similar to Fuller and Batchelder’s in 1953, only larger. This time it involved 2,000 executives — 900 women and 1,100 men.

The resulting article, “Are Women Executives People?,” by Garda W. Bowman, N. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Greyser, probed the extent to which gender stereotypes determined the career paths of women in nonclerical roles. Many of the men interviewed categorically opposed the prospect of having more women in management positions: The article reported that 41% were “anti-woman executive in principle,” and 51% believed women to be “temperamentally unfit for management.” Amid these attitudes, the women interviewed were reasonably optimistic — only 47% were “of the opinion that the business community will never wholly accept women executives” — but they agreed with their male peers that only unusually capable women could prevail. Ultimately, the article concluded that women in senior positions should not focus on combating discriminatory practices in their companies. “When women act like people, ask no special privileges, and display no undue temperament,” the authors wrote, “they are more likely to be treated like people.”

In the years that followed, the magazine began to more forcefully critique discrimination and encourage business to evolve. Public discourse and federal policy also took a harder line. Feminist advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women were bringing attention to employment discrimination, and in 1972 the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act gave teeth to the enforcement provisions of the Civil Rights Act. In 1973, AT&T, then the nation’s largest private employer, paid millions in back wages and pay increases to white women and employees of color to rectify discriminatory recruiting, hiring, and promotion practices.

Throughout the 1970s, HBR explored the consequences of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. One article, titled “How GE Measures Managers in Fair Employment,” by Theodore V. Purcell, described a successful initiative at General Electric to increase the proportion of women and racial minorities in managerial and professional roles. Less sanguine was “EEO Compliance — Behind the Corporate Mask,” written by Frances Lear, the female founder of an executive search firm, which argued that many companies, while paying lip service to the act’s goals, had “developed an intricate corporate dance to keep [women and minorities] out.” (At the time, “EEO” was a common way to refer to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.) This more critical tone was consistent with other articles that HBR published in the latter half of the decade.

Sexual harassment, though it wasn’t referred to as such, made its first appearance in 1978, when the magazine asked 500 subscribers (250 women and 250 men, about 100 of whom responded) to comment by mail on a case study. How should a manager react, the case went, when a junior staff member reports that, on a recent trip, her male colleague told offensive jokes, failed to introduce her to clients, and insinuated to a buyer that they were engaged in a sexual relationship?

In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the body established in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to enforce laws barring discrimination in the workplace, issued new guidelines that defined two types of sexual harassment — quid pro quo and hostile work environment — and held employers liable for enabling them. The following year, HBR published “Sexual Harassment…Some See It…Some Won’t,” by Eliza G. C. Collins and Timothy B. Blodgett, which probed gender differences in views about what constituted harassment, and what harm, if any, it caused. “There is a male code of silence regarding harassment of females that has to be broken,” one executive said. But others were unconvinced. “This entire subject,” another executive said dismissively, “is a perfect example of a minor special interest group’s ability to blow up any ‘issue’ to a level of importance which in no way relates to the reality of the world in which we live and work.”

Meanwhile, pay disparities were spurring gender discrimination lawsuits throughout the United States. For example, in 1983 women employees of the state of Washington were awarded $838 million in raises and back pay when a federal court ruled that the state had paid workers less for jobs that were predominantly held by women, despite the jobs being equal in value to similar ones filled mostly by men.

That same year HBR took up the question of “comparable worth” by asking subscribers in a survey, “Can and should jobs of equal value be compensated equally regardless of other factors?” The resulting article, “Compensation, Jobs, and Gender,” by Benson Rosen, Sara Rynes, and Thomas A. Mahoney, sought to pinpoint the causes of the gender pay gap, spell out how to narrow it, offer advice on determining job worth, and predict the consequences of pegging salaries to a standard other than market value. Men and women, not surprisingly, expressed strikingly different views about the causes of pay differences by gender: Men tended to blame women for choosing low-paying jobs, and women tended to blame biased organizational practices and social norms.