Harvard Business School students during commencement ceremonies at Harvard University. Photograph: Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News  Autumn has finally descended with the usual mulching of the old and the new: cold rain and tired leaves mingling with the frantic queues at school uniform shops and the scent of fresh shoe leather on the bus.  On Sunday, I was sitting in an airport bar, contemplating the back-to-school feeling of these early September days. I had spent the weekend in Washington, where the city was fizzling with the new academic year – all around the Capitol building milled football fans in town for the next day's big college game; male students charging across the grass in a class-bonding fun run; pink-shirted sorority members canvassing for new recruits.  But as I sat there awaiting my plane home, two stories caused me to wonder about what may await the class of 2013. The first was the front page of the New York Times, which led with a feature about Harvard Business School's two-year mission to nurture female success.  At HBS more than a third of students are women, but historically few have made it to the upper echelons of their class – and the prestigious top 5% of students named "Baker scholars". There has also been a markedly small number of female faculty members, and female teaching staff have spoken of classroom hostility, of their intellect being questioned and of being assessed for their sartorial choices as much as their teaching ability.  But in 2010, Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first female president, appointed a new dean, who was intent on addressing the college's skewed gender relations, from the study room to social lives, with a programme specifically aimed at instilling confidence in female students and faculty members.  The changes were not universally welcomed by the 905 students who enrolled in 2011, but by the time they graduated there had been a marked shift in women's results – improved teaching scores for the female faculty members and the number of female students in the top 5% of the class rising from 14% in 2009 to 38% in 2013.  Any joy I felt at HBS's successful campaign was soon tempered by another story emailed to me by a friend – a dating advice article published on the website AskMen in 2009 that had somehow found itself resuscitated via Twitter and was now breathing its wisdom anew.  Titled Ten Ways to Flirt with a Woman Sexually, it offered a range of pointers so utterly, head-thunkingly dreadful that I had to sit stock still for a full 10 minutes before emailing back to my friend: "Please, please tell me this is a joke?"  Apparently it was not a joke. The advice bestowed varied from Imply That You're a Stud to Bring Sex Into Everyday Chat via a tip that women like to vacuum their houses when ovulating and will be really chuffed, not to mention aroused, if you tell her you know this. Perhaps the most dazzling morsel of advice was to Have Her Use You: "The next time you do something considerate for a woman, tell her, 'So you're using me already – next thing I know you'll be trying to use me for other things as well.'" It suggested. "She'll find this role-reversal hilarious and it's a great way to bring up the topic of sex in a safe, fun, non-threatening way."  I was reminded, as I read these tips, of a paragraph from the New York Times article that had questioned the wisdom of the school's gender mission, suggesting that graduating women would be shocked to meet the harsh, male-dominated and frequently misogynistic realities of the real working world, in which the salary gap widens starkly and women still find themselves shut out of the top positions: "'Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go?" asked a female professor.  I thought, too, of a problem some of the female students had raised – of the persistent feeling that they must choose between academic and social success, of the need to be pretty and well-dressed and not too intellectually challenging if they want to fit in. How crestfallen a newly confident batch of female graduates would feel to enter into a world of Neanderthal flirting tips and misogynist generalisations.  But by the time I had made it back to the UK, something had changed. AskMen had seen fit to remove the flirting tips feature from the archives. "An offensive article has been brought to our attention," it tweeted. "The article was published in 2009 & does not reflect the current AskMen UK editorial opinion & content. We have permanently deleted it from our site. We apologise for any offence this legacy content has caused."  And I wondered, then, if maybe, possibly, finally we really are seeing the world change for women. "Sunshine is the best disinfectant," Nitin Nohria, Harvard's new dean, had said of the college's successful campaign. And as we enter this season of grey skies and cold weather, how sweet to feel the warmth of a new light.
Laura Barton: What awaits the class of 2013? Harvard is nurturing female success and some Neanderthal web content is following suit