Pioneers of Stanford GSB

To commemorate Stanford GSB’s Centennial, we dug into the school’s history to learn more about some of the students and faculty who went first, took risks, and led the way for future generations.

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Helen Carpenter (left) and Gertrude Benedict, both MBA ’30

When asked about her Stanford GSB experience 54 years after graduation, Gertrude Elisabeth “Benny” Benedict summed up her time succinctly: “I worked very hard.”

The Class of 1930 was notable for several reasons: The stock market crash of 1929 occurred at the beginning of their second year, and the graduating group of 41 students included Gertrude and Helen Elizabeth Carpenter as the first women to graduate from Stanford GSB.

Born in Brockport, New York, ­Gertrude was nine when her mother died. She attended Smith College, where she majored in history. Class officer, athlete (she played hockey, basketball, and baseball), and Phi Beta Kappa member, she was one of only six juniors who received an “S” pin, a noted symbol of achievement beyond academics.

After graduating in 1926, Gertrude moved to the Bay Area, where she completed her master’s degree in modern European history at Stanford. She also worked at the Emporium, a San Francisco department store chain. Gertrude enrolled at Stanford GSB in the fall of 1928.

Helen grew up in Richmond, California. She was a “Termite”: part of a group of 1,000 children who participated in Stanford professor Lewis Terman’s controversial, decades-long psychological study focusing on childhood intelligence. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Helen was a top shot on the women’s rifle team, a cheerleader for the women’s hockey team, a debater, and a violinist. She graduated in 1928 with a degree in Spanish before she enrolled at Stanford GSB.

Though the business school was coed from the start, women remained in the minority for decades. Until 1970, there were only two or three women per year; the double-digit ceiling was finally broken when 21 women graduated in the Class of ’73 — in part due to Dean Arjay Miller’s strong interest in increasing the number of women students, along with active recruitment programs.

The early alumnae remembered their experience at Stanford GSB as ­primarily ­positive. Though Phoebe Seagrave, MBA ’35, said, “The business school administration tolerated us, but they didn’t know what to do with us,” Gertrude was more upbeat. “[The women] were treated fairly by the faculty,” she recalled.

But a Stanford MBA couldn’t break through the stereotypes the women faced after graduation. “In those days, ‘Horrors! An MBA!… My, you must be a crackerjack secretary!’” Phoebe said of the kinds of things she heard from male employers.

After earning her MBA, Gertrude continued her retail career, working at Bullock’s, a high-end department store in Los Angeles. Starting there as a statistician, she later became an assistant personnel manager and eventually the store’s personnel director, at one point managing more than 300 “girls”— an impressive achievement at a time when women rarely reached upper levels of management in retail. She maintained her ties to Stanford GSB, meeting with Dean J. Hugh Jackson and other alumni in Southern California at the first alumni club get-together in 1931.

In 1942, Gertrude married Irving Clark Moller, an engineer and Army colonel 26 years her senior, whose first wife had been a well-known suffragette. After retirement, the couple bought an Arizona ranch, with five rental cottages that Gertrude helped manage. After Moller died, she married Charles E. Lasher, a former advertising executive. They sold the ranch and moved back to Southern California, where Gertrude lived out the rest of her life, continuing her athletic pursuits of swimming and lawn bowling. She passed away in 1987 at the age of 81.

Rather than entering the corporate world, Helen carved a path through education. After getting her MBA, she enrolled at UC Berkeley for her teaching credential, then taught office skills and was a registrar at a local community college.

While at Berkeley, Helen met Edwin Mills, a business student at the university. He enrolled at Stanford GSB, graduating with his MBA in 1933. Helen and Edwin eloped to Reno a month before their planned wedding date. They had one child, and opened a retail store, Federated Stores of America, in Oakdale, California, and later opened another store in Walnut Creek, California.

Helen worked at the stores, and the couple was active socially, with local newspapers describing their frequent dinners, out-of-town visitors, and restocking trips to San Francisco. A lifelong learner, Helen also became a licensed pilot and enrolled in law school at UC Berkeley in 1950 before spending a majority of her career as a social worker, retiring in 1974.

In 1978, Helen died of leukemia at the age of 71. Her granddaughter Jeni Johnstone, a clinical psychologist at Oregon Health & Science University, fondly remembers her grandmother giving her a Chevron stock certificate for her 10th birthday, though she’d hoped for a Barbie.

Stanford was designed from the start to be coeducational, and Stanford GSB was similarly welcoming of women from the outset. As pioneering women MBAs, Gertrude and Helen were the first to open that door to Stanford GSB for decades of women to come. — Susan Kistler, MBA ’78

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Ping Kei Leung, MBA ’31

On September 18, 1929, after a three-week voyage from Hong Kong, Ping Kei Leung disembarked from the SS President Madison at the Port of San Francisco. On his immigration forms, the 21-year-old listed his destination as Palo Alto.

Five days later, P.K., as he was known to his family and friends, submitted his application to Stanford GSB. He mentioned that he spoke Chinese and English, liked accounting, and intended to go into banking — his father’s career. A few days later, he was accepted as one of 42 first-year MBA students.

His timing was fortuitous. Stanford was among a handful of American universities that had opened their postgraduate programs to graduates of Lingnan University in Guangzhou, where P.K. had just received a degree in business economics. This was a rare opportunity during a period when immigration to the U.S. from China was all but prohibited under a series of laws that started with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and would remain in force until the middle of World War II. P.K. secured a non-quota student visa, allowing him to enter the country under strict conditions: He was expected to study and then return home. There would be no path to citizenship, no promise of the American Dream.

P.K. moved into the Chinese Students Clubhouse on the Stanford campus, where he lived with 18 other students from China. As he settled in, he learned that his family in Guangdong Province was experiencing financial difficulties due to economic instability and civil unrest. He would have to support himself, working several hours daily to cover his costs, which would amount to around $1,000 a year (approximately $18,500 today). P.K. would later recount to his family that during these days, he mainly subsisted on sui mein, or ramen. Between academic years, he roomed at the Chinese YMCA in San Francisco, which was affordable and likely one of the few places a Chinese national could stay.

Yet P.K. persisted, and less than two years after he’d set foot on campus, he earned his MBA, becoming the first Asian student to receive a degree from Stanford GSB.

He stayed in the U.S. for another five years, earning a PhD in economics from the University of Southern California. In his 344-page dissertation on Chinese monetary and banking policy, he wrote that “economic isolation is a serious impediment to world progress.” He returned to China to work as an editor and researcher, but following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, he came back to the U.S., entering on a business visa in 1939.

It is unclear how P.K. was able to stay in the United States during the final years of the exclusion laws, which Congress repealed in 1943. Stanford GSB Dean J. Hugh Jackson wrote a letter of recommendation to the president of the Federal Reserve Bank, and he found work in the Fed’s foreign research division in New York before moving to Washington, D.C. While recovering from tuberculosis, he met Mary Lee, a Chinese American woman whose sister was being treated alongside him. They married in 1948 and had two children, Keith and Valerie.

In the early 1950s, P.K. became the manager of the Orient Restaurant in Georgetown. He reopened the restaurant under his ownership in Potomac, Maryland, in 1971. The new establishment became a favorite among local families and politicians. A newspaper review noted its “moderate prices” and “spotless” decor.

The work, however, was relentless. Always in a suit and tie, P.K. would work the lunch shift, then walk home for a quick nap before returning for the dinner shift. His son Keith says he didn’t see much of his father except late at night and on some weekends. Yet he recalls his dad being there for him: When he was in 3rd grade, Keith experienced severe insomnia. P.K. would come home at 10 p.m., undoubtedly exhausted, and go into the kids’ bedroom and hold Keith’s hand until he fell asleep.

Keith spent a lot of time at the restaurant, working alongside his sister and dad. During these times, he would have long talks with his father. Yet P.K. rarely talked about his childhood in China. While he hinted that he didn’t completely fulfill his career ambitions, he didn’t discuss his advanced degrees or what it had been like to be the first Asian student at Stanford GSB. For years, his children were unaware of his accomplishments.

“I don’t think my father thought of himself as a pioneer or trailblazer,” Keith Leung told the Stanford GSB Asian Leadership Conference in November 2024. “If he were here today, he would be most proud not of being the first Asian MBA graduate. He’d be most proud of some of you who chose to follow in his footsteps to take that journey and chase your dreams.”

P.K. Leung died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 65. His life is a reminder that even if the American Dream was not initially meant for them, those who come here can build a life of meaning and leave a lasting legacy. — Deb Liu, MBA ’02, and Denise Peck, MBA ’85

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Andrew Jackson Howard III, Helen Martin (bottom), and Rose Martin, all MBA ’53

Born three years apart, Rose and Helen Martin were raised in Atlanta in the 1930s and 1940s, when white and Black residents lived in their own neighborhoods, attended separate churches and schools, and used separate public facilities. Schools still operated under the 1896 legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” leading to a substandard education for most Black children. The Ku Klux Klan was active. And Black women, despite the voting rights given to white women in 1920, were not allowed to vote until 1965.

Within this charged landscape, the sisters lived in a comfortable, middle-class home. Their father was a top executive at Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the oldest Black-owned financial institutions in the country. Their uncle, Walter White, was a renowned civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 25 years, lobbying against racial injustice and finding an ally in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his work to end segregation.

These strong role models inspired the Martin sisters. Rose attended Smith College, an elite, predominantly white women’s school in Massachusetts. Helen chose Spelman College, an all-Black women’s school in Atlanta, where she was active in the local NAACP. Though Rose initially enrolled at the University of Michigan for her MBA, she transferred to Stanford GSB after Helen was accepted in 1951 so her sister wouldn’t be alone there.

The third Black student to enter Stanford GSB that year was Andrew “Andy” Jackson Howard III. Like the Martins, Andrew came from a family of role models. His grandfather was the president of Alcorn College in Mississippi, the oldest public historically Black college and university (HBCU) in the U.S. Andrew’s father was appointed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and was then appointed by President Harry Truman to be a judge in the DC Municipal Court, both pioneering accomplishments of the time.

Growing up in Washington, DC, Andrew enrolled in Howard University, one of the most prestigious HBCUs. As student body president and a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, he graduated in 1942 with a full paragraph of accomplishments on his yearbook page. When World War II broke out, he joined the 92nd Infantry Division and became a sergeant in the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the only Black infantry division to participate in European combat. Andrew was also the managing editor of a publication distributed to the Black troops, speaking out against discrimination and the strict segregation in the Army. After fighting to liberate Italy, Andrew was given a rare copy of Dante’s Inferno. Years later, he donated this historic item to the Stanford library. During the Korean War, he joined the California National Guard and reached the rank of lieutenant.

In 1951, Andrew entered Stanford GSB as a married man. He rode the train back and forth between San Francisco and Palo Alto, and spent every evening with his wife and their two young children. While on campus, he developed key relationships with faculty and some fellow students that we know lasted for years after his graduation.

Although Stanford GSB administration and Dean J. Hugh Jackson knew from a letter of recommendation that the Martin sisters were “colored,” according to Rose, their classmates may have assumed the sisters were white. This intentional desegregation in GSB admissions was a bold move in 1951. In addition, Rose and Helen were also two of only three women in that graduating class of 158 students. Whether their race or gender was on people’s minds, Rose said, “They didn’t ask and we didn’t say.… We all just focused on the work.”

All three students graduated in 1953 with their MBAs. Helen married a fellow Stanford student a few months after graduating and seemed to have led a less public life than her sister. The couple moved to San Francisco and had one son. She spent some time at the U.S. Department of Labor working as an economic specialist. Helen eventually moved back to Atlanta where she joined her sister volunteering in the Black community, before dying of cancer in 1987 at the age of 57.

Rose moved to New York City after Stanford GSB to join Hanover Bank’s rotational program, ending up as an equity researcher — again, as one of only three women — before spending several years at a brokerage firm. In 1964, she moved home to join her father at the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. This pioneering insurance company filled a critical need for Black families in the era of segregation. Rose married a prominent physician who treated many civil rights leaders, including John Lewis, Julian Bond, and members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family.

The couple had a son, and the family was often featured in the local Black newspaper for their volunteerism and parties, placing them at the center of Atlanta’s Black social, business, and sociopolitical scene. Rose helped found the Atlanta chapter of the Links, a still-thriving national Black women’s volunteer organization, for which she focused on raising scholarship funds. In later years, Rose worked with her husband in his medical practice, advocating for the health needs of Black people and researching alternative medicine. As of today, Rose still lives at home in Atlanta at the age of 97.

Andrew had a different kind of journey after Stanford. Impressed with his achievements, a GSB professor recommended him to the Emporium, a nationally known San Francisco department store chain. From the outset, Andrew began identifying process improvement opportunities, such as the optimal incorporation of adding machines to speed up the sales workflow. He steadily moved up the ranks to be named manager of the Palo Alto store at the Stanford Shopping Center, along with a second Bay Area location — an extremely rare accomplishment for a Black man at the time.

At the same time, Andrew was also very active in the NAACP and other charitable community activities. His wife served as national president of Jack & Jill of America, an influential social organization that provides social, cultural, and educational opportunities to Black youth. Eventually retiring from the Emporium in the 1970s, Andrew moved to Ashland, Oregon, where he spent the rest of his years heavily involved with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and other community activities until he passed away in 1999.

Andrew Howard III, Rose Martin, and Helen Martin joined Stanford GSB as pioneers. Each of them forged a unique path for other students to follow after desegregating Stanford GSB. Together, they were trailblazers who truly changed lives and changed organizations. They helped to change the world. — Linda Parker Pennington, MBA ’83, and Kirk Holmes, MBA ’87

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Joanne Martin

Joanne Martin joined the Stanford GSB faculty in 1977. Her first day there, she opened the door of the bathroom marked “Faculty”; it was lined with urinals, many currently occupied. Told that the women’s room was around the corner, she found it labeled “Secretarial and Administrative Staff.” “This sounds like it’s trivial, but if it’s so ingrained that it’s even built into the bathrooms, you can imagine what working at Stanford GSB was like during those initial years,” she says.

But Martin was determined. After majoring in art at Smith College, she says, “I knew that I was never going to be a great artist, so… I had to find a way to support myself.” She joined McBer & Company, a consulting firm. “I kept getting promoted because I had this knack for writing proposals that got funded… and becoming the project manager.” She left after discovering her salary was a third of her male peers’. With a wry laugh, she remembers thinking, “I’ll get a PhD. That’ll take five years. At the end of five years, sex discrimination will be over.”

Initially planning to return to consulting, Martin changed course after getting her PhD at Harvard in social psychology. “I fell in love with research. I liked the teaching too,” she says. She also fell in love with an Australian classmate, Beau Sheil, and they married at the end of graduate school. He got a job at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto; Martin was hired as an assistant professor at Stanford GSB, drawn by the school’s emphasis on research and focus on practical implications of scholarly work.

Though she was preceded by two other women at Stanford GSB — ;Myra Strober and Francine Hall were hired five years prior — they left the school shortly after her arrival, never receiving tenure at Stanford GSB. The sole remaining woman on the school’s faculty for several years, Martin found it a lonely path forward, in an atmosphere where “some faculty assumed a woman could not be a first-class intellectual,” she says. Over time, this viewpoint became less popular, and a few more women joined the faculty. “Change was very slow but steady.”

In later years, Martin was asked to serve on many committees. “At first, they wanted the woman’s point of view… me, of course, being a representative of all women” — and Martin used that opportunity to speak up on an array of issues around Stanford. She and her husband developed friendships across campus and outside the university, and focused on their newborn child and their careers, balancing both between them equally.

When Martin went up for tenure in 1984 (university-wide policy gave pregnant women an extra year beyond the usual seven before coming up for tenure), “it worked out,” she says, “but it was nerve-wracking, because no one had ever gotten tenure [at Stanford GSB] before with my plumbing.”

Originally focused on justice and income inequality research as an experimental social psychologist, her interest evolved into studying organizations as cultures, using qualitative analysis alongside quantitative research. “I used rituals, company-specific jargon, and storytelling… to build a record of each company that captured the differences between group viewpoints as well as the commonalities that people shared,” Martin explains. Later in her career, she also examined social constructions of gender in organizational cultures, focusing on female executives in the tech industry.

Martin came to be seen as a pioneer in the field of organizational culture, with a long list of awards to her credit. In 2002, she received the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, its highest honor given to PhD alumni/ae who have made outstanding research-based contributions to society.

Over the years, Martin spent roughly 15 hours a week on women’s issues, above her more general administrative and teaching work at Stanford GSB. “I was a ­truth-teller and I used numbers to prove my case,” she says, of her work as coleader of the Faculty Women’s Caucus, and she joined the female professors who gravitated to the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Her reach also extended far beyond Stanford GSB. Elected to Stanford University’s Advisory Board, Martin reviewed tenure applications at the university-wide level. And she responded to then-Dean A. Michael Spence’s push for young faculty to develop an international research reputation by teaching overseas, which “took a lot of difficulty, especially with a child and fully employed husband,” Martin says. Recognition followed, with honorary doctorates awarded to her from Copenhagen Business School and the Frej University in Amsterdam.

Mentorship has also been important to Martin. “[The doctoral students] were always a great source of support and joy,” she says, of her role advising students, reading and citing their papers, sponsoring their research, and arranging special doctoral events at national conferences. Serving for five years as the director of the Stanford GSB doctoral program, she worked with students around the world.

“Joanne was tough and had very high standards. She was a role model and inspiration for me, and she made life so much easier for those that followed,” says Christine Beckman, PhD ’99, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In recognition of her mentorship, Martin received the Distinguished Educator Award of the Academy of Management in 2001.

The first woman to receive an endowed chair at Stanford GSB, as The Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Martin retired in 2007. In honor of her 30-year career, the Organizational Theory Division of the Academy of Management created the Joanne Martin Trailblazer Award. Given every two years, the award recognizes innovators in the field of organizational management theory as a nod to Martin as a pioneer herself. — Amara Holstein

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Persis Emmett Rockwood, PhD ’60

Persis Emmett Rockwood, PhD ’60, was a lifelong overachiever: She was a piano prodigy who skipped her senior year of high school in Boulder to enroll at the University of Colorado. There, Persis earned an undergraduate business degree in three and a half years before becoming the first woman to receive a doctorate in business administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

After her graduation, Persis was seeking a job and Florida State University was seeking tenure-track faculty for its new tenure-track program. It proved a great match. Persis settled in Tallahassee and kept pioneering: She was the first woman to be named a marketing professor at FSU and then the first woman in its business school to be granted tenure. For decades, she was the sole woman in Florida State’s 12-person marketing department. In 2018, she became the first woman inducted into the College of Business Hall of Fame.

Over the course of her 29-year academic career, Persis became an expert in retail location theory, analyzing traffic patterns and consumer preferences to determine the ideal locations for businesses. She also worked as a senior economist for the FDIC. After Persis led a Florida State committee on gender equity in faculty salaries, her calculations prompted the state legislature to adjust salary appropriations.

Former students and colleagues remember Persis as a calm and confident presence in lecture halls and faculty meetings. “She was soft-spoken,” says Charles Hofacker, the Dr. Persis Rockwood Professor of Marketing at FSU, “but when she spoke, everyone listened.”

While at Florida State, Persis met economics professor Charles Rockwood. Married for 54 years, Persis and Charles lived modestly and had no children. An avid reader of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, Persis took a hands-on approach to managing the couple’s money, says Winston Howell, their financial advisor and estate trustee. “When we met, Charlie would add humor and color, and Persis was the driver,” Howell explains of their interactions. “She asked the questions and focused on the details.”

Persis died in 2021 at age 97, leaving a legacy of philanthropic donations. The following year, FSU announced a $10 million gift from the Rockwoods that established the Dr. Persis E. Rockwood School of Marketing, believed to be the first school of marketing in the U.S. named for a woman. The school’s academic advising space for undergraduate and graduate students also carries her name, and the couple endowed several chairs and made a significant gift to fund students’ professional development. In 2019, they donated $2.2 million to Florida State’s College of Music for a custom pipe organ.

Meg Gilbert Crofton, who was an MBA student at FSU in the mid-1970s, gratefully recalls how Persis mentored her and secured a graduate research fellowship for her. “She was a trailblazer,” says Crofton, now a retired Disney executive. “I think great leaders are a combination of humility and confidence. She knew her stuff and was really good at what she did. She was a quiet powerhouse.” — June D. Bell