Management Education

This commentary to “Gender in the Management Education Classroom” (Bilimoria, O’Neil, Hopkins, & Murphy, 2010) employs social identity and self-categorization theory to analyze the incident described in the article. In any MBA classroom, students are dealing with multiple group memberships. Similar to workplace settings, when the focus is on diversity, categorization processes can lead to challenging situations in the classroom. Practical con-siderations and institutional influences in dealing with diversity-based conflict in the classroom are also discussed. Keywords Gender, diversity, social identity theory “Gender in the Management Education Classroom ” (Bilimoria, O’Neil, Hopkins, & Murphy, 2010) is a fascinating article that highlights the chal-lenges of teaching diversity courses and provides a vivid example of unex-pected events in the classroom. The article is valuable on two fronts. First, i