When you ask a graduate why they valued their time at IE Business School, the answer is almost never a rankings position. Most of the time, it comes down to a professor who made them feel like an adult in the room, or a class where raising their hand felt safe.
That kind of environment is built, deliberately, by the people at the front of the room. To see exactly what kind of methods go into this sense of inclusivity, we sat down with two members of IE Business School’s faculty: Laura Maguire, professor of Leading People and Change, and Christina Stathopoulos, professor of Data and AI.
Let’s find out the work that goes into making sure women thrive at IE Business School.
From MBA student to award-winning professor: Laura Maguire’s 22-year arc
Laura Maguire’s relationship with IE Business School began as a student. She graduated from the MBA here 22 years ago. Today she teaches courses in the International MBA, the Master in Management, specialized masters, the Global Executive MBA, and in executive education programs that take her across the world.
Her flagship course, Leading People and Change, sits at the intersection of leadership theory and the question of what kind of boss you want to be. She has won Best Professor for it twice.
But if you ask Laura what makes her classroom work, she’ll respond with two words: “The keyword here is psychological safety. An environment where people can feel safe to be themselves, to become creative.”
Why does psychological safety matter?
Psychological safety, in Laura’s definition, means rigor applied to the person rather than just the subject. Disagreement is welcome. Students are treated “like adults.” The professor is not the authority in the room, but the facilitator of a conversation that everyone is allowed to shape.
The result is a classroom where topics most programs wouldn’t touch arise naturally: hormonal health, family planning, the weight of leaving your family behind for a year. These discussions are shared seriously and owned equally by everyone in the room.
“A guy brought up the glass ceiling, women on boards,” says Laura. “He started the discussion. It was actually a male student. That was a very good sign.”
The conversation nobody is having with ambitious women
The International MBA cohort is, on average, 28 years old: driven, global, and in Laura’s experience, so focused on career momentum that they sometimes forget to check in with themselves. Laura raises the things nobody else in the program is raising. Family. Time. The biological clock that no recruiter or rankings guide mentions. “If you want to have a family, make sure you make the time for that,” she says. “Because they’re so career-driven that sometimes they forget. We ended up in our late thirties, and it was like – what biological clock? What?”
This is not, Laura is careful to say, a message only for women. The men in her classes, particularly those who have left families in Colombia, Peru or Saudi Arabia to spend a year in Madrid, face their own set of difficulties. But in a world that still sends ambitious young women the message that career comes first and everything else can wait, Laura feels a responsibility to name what nobody else is naming.
The deeper work of her class is self-awareness, for which Laura draws on the five components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. “Do you really know yourself? Do you really? And they say: no. We don’t have time. We don’t spend time on it. And I say: that’s a no. You need to make the time for you.” Students leave her class booking massages, joining book clubs, calling friends they’ve been neglecting. The wake-up call is not about the MBA. It’s about the life the MBA is supposed to serve.
What teaching actually means
Laura’s approach to teaching is not about going in, “vomiting content,” and leaving. She accompanies students through the year and beyond. Coffees. LinkedIn messages years later. Thirty-minute calls from former students who are a bit lost and need someone who will actually listen.
That kind of accompaniment requires vulnerability in both directions. “If they share a concern – a personal concern – I do the same,” says Laura. “Otherwise, this doesn’t work.” Her PhD is in linguistics. As such, Laura has trained herself to listen differently, observing how the way something is said reveals how someone feels about themselves. “When I listen, I can hear how you express yourself, and by that I can capture how you’re feeling. I think I owe it to the people I’m with.”
Asked whether the culture she creates in her classroom is a wider IE University culture, she is honest: it depends on the professor. But she is clear that when it happens, it is not subtle. “Magic happens,” she says.
Christina Stathopoulos: Making space for women
Christina Stathopoulos teaches Data and AI across IE Business School’s programs: data fluency and storytelling, data and AI strategy in the International MBA, and responsible AI, a course focused on ethics, bias, accountability, and sustainability.
Before IE University, she worked at Google and Waze, where she was almost always the only woman on the team. “I had an all-male team where I felt completely excluded; they made no effort, and it was mentally very, very tough,” says Christina. “Then I had another all-male team, and it was the complete opposite. They included me in everything. I have zero complaints. It’s like the luck of the draw.” That experience – of not knowing which version you’re going to get – is something she brings into the classroom, as a framework for understanding what inclusion actually requires, and what it feels like when it’s missing.
The small things that add up
When Christina talks about what discourages women from STEM fields, she goes back to being a student in high school.
In her drafting class, all her friends were going one way and she was going the other. “When you’re a young woman in high school, you want to be with your friends,” she says. “You’re continuously separated from them. It’s a little thing, but I think it does add up over time.”
And then there are the larger things. A female teacher who called her parents in and said Christina, who was not moving from her seat, was “a distraction” to the class.
She also remembers the college corridor where someone stopped her and said: “Are you lost? This is the civil engineering building.” She wasn’t lost. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.
How she runs her classroom differently because of it
Christina’s teaching approach is a practice she arrived at through lived experience.
In her classes, everyone raises their hand. She calls on people deliberately and keeps count. “I try to make sure I don’t just keep calling on male after male. I make sure the female voices get heard.” She uses small breakout groups to give quieter students a chance to validate their thinking before sharing it with the room. She doesn’t allow interruptions. If someone is cut off mid-sentence, she goes back to them.
She also teaches these dynamics explicitly, with her responsible AI course covering algorithmic and gender bias as core content. Repeatedly, across programs, students come to her after class to say the same thing: “I’m so happy to have a female professor.” Visibility, Christina says, is a structural benefit. “If you keep seeing the same leaders over and over… male, male, male…. It’s hard to picture yourself in their shoes. But if you start to see more females as well, then you see yourself in their shoes.”
What both women would tell a candidate considering IE University
“You join a school because of the people,” says Laura. “Everyone in the top ten of the Financial Times is going to offer you a good MBA. That’s a given. It’s the people. Always make it personal.”
Christina’s answer is about using what might feel like a disadvantage as information. “I use it to my advantage,” she says. “I can stand out. That can be good and bad, but if you use it to your advantage, you can stand out and be remembered.”
Between the two of them, they cover a lot of ground: leadership, emotional intelligence, data, AI ethics, self-awareness, team dynamics, responsible technology, and the question of how a classroom is run. What connects them is the conviction that what you learn in a program can change both your CV and how you understand yourself.
