Francesca Gino

Francesca Gino (born 1978) is an Italian-American behavioral scientist who formerly served as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS), with her research focusing on "honesty and ethical behavior".[1] After an investigation by Harvard concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she faced disciplinary actions. In June 2023, she was put on unpaid administrative leave from her position as a tenured professor at Harvard Business School, stripped of her title, and removed as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets (NOM) unit.

In May 2025, Harvard revoked her tenure and fired her. Harvard declined to provide specific reasoning for their decision, but did state that this kind of revocation of tenure is rare and had not occurred for decades.

Allegations of Data Fabrication

In or before 2020, a graduate student named Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. In spring 2021, Ziani conducted a replication of Gino's study, failing to obtain any of the effects Gino had reported, and concluded "that there was almost no way the paper’s effect size could have been naturally generated" (as summarized by The New Yorker). Ziani, together with a collaborator, subsequently alerted Data Colada, a team of three behavioral scientists known for investigating faulty research, who had been independently developing concerns about Gino's work since 2014. Later that year, the Data Colada team contacted Harvard University about anomalies in four papers by Gino. Harvard subsequently conducted its own internal investigation with the help of an outside firm, which discovered additional data alterations besides the cases raised by Data Colada.

Allegations of Plagiarism

In April 2024, it was reported that Gino was suspected of numerous instances of plagiarism in several of her works, including her books Rebel Talent and Sidetracked, which were from a variety of sources, including several undergraduate theses (none of which were supervised by Gino), research papers and chapters by other researchers, and newspaper and magazine articles, including those by Forbes and Reactor (at the time Tor.com).

This article contains information imported from the English Wikipedia. In most cases the page history will have details. If you need information on the importation and have difficulty obtaining it please contact the site administrators.

Wikipedia shows a strong woke bias. Text copied over from Wikipedia can be corrected and improved.