Profile of Deborah Merrill-Sands as new dean of the Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business at Mills College

1. W O R K I N G O N T H E C E N T E R
Deborah Merrill-Sands 70F assumes a new role this fall: as dean of the Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business at Mills College in
California.
She helms the first MBA program in the West designed to prepare women for leadership roles in business. With her background in
gender studies and anthropology and her experience as director of the Center for Gender in Organizations and dean of the School of
Management at Simmons College, Merrill-Sands is an ideal woman to lead the school.
“My main goal is to build the reputation of the program and keep it distinguished with its focus on educating women of diverse
backgrounds for leadership. This is an MBA with a strong social agenda,” says Merrill-Sands.
As a member of the entering class at Hampshire, social change is in Merrill-Sands’s educational roots. She worked closely with
anthropology professor Barbara Yngvesson, and did fieldwork in Mexico over two summers with visiting professor Mary Elmendorf.
During her Ph.D. work at Cornell, she returned to the Mexican
village she had visited as an undergrad, deepening her relationships
with the people living there. That, along with her postdoctoral
fellowship, got her interested in the ways in which science is
gendered.
“I learned about women farmers when I was working in sub-Saharan
Africa, and how researchers weren’t recognizing the role that
women played in agriculture,” she says. “I got interested in bringing
women more effectively into the development process.
“Having spent the majority of my career in government and nonprofit
organizations, I became increasingly realistic about the power of
making change through business,” she says. Hampshire gave her
the confidence to make nontraditional career changes, moving from
agriculture and development to business education.
“We need to demonstrate that the goals of profitability and social
responsibility can go hand in hand,” she says. “There are new
opportunities for business growth that come from asking how these
goals align.”
Cultivating the next generation of business leaders is exciting
and fulfilling, she says, because the face of business is changing
to include more diversity at the top, something that correlates to
better organizational performance.
Fostering long-term social change starts with business, Merrill-
Sands says: “If you don’t focus on work organizations, which shape
so much of our society—if you don’t use them as the intervention
point—you’re working on the periphery.”
24 Fall/Winter 2010 Non Satis Scire (Reprinted)
Non Satis Scire
FALL/WINTER 2010
T H E H A M P S H I R E M A G A Z I N E F O R A L U M N I A N D F R I E N D S