Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women

by Virginia Valian

Overview

Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women.

Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige? Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. According to Valian, men and women alike have implicit hypotheses about gender differences—gender schemas—that create small sex differences in characteristics, behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations of men and women. Those small imbalances accumulate to advantage men and disadvantage women. The most important consequence of gender schemas for professional life is that men tend to be overrated and women underrated.

Valian's goal is to make the invisible factors that retard women's progress visible, so that fair treatment of men and women will be possible. The book makes its case with experimental and observational data from laboratory and field studies of children and adults, and with statistical documentation on men and women in the professions. The many anecdotal examples throughout provide a lively counterpoint.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262720311
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/07/1999
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	421
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.02(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women and coauthor of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (both published by the MIT Press).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

" Why So Slow? is a breakthrough in the discourse on gender and has great potential to move the women"s movement to a new, more productive phase." Publisher"s Weekly

The MIT Press

Editorial Reviews

Why So Slow? is a breakthrough in the discourse on gender and has great potential to move the women's movement to a new, more productive phase.—Publisher's Weekly—

From the Publisher

Why So Slow? is a breakthrough in the discourse on gender and has great potential to move the women's movement to a new, more productive phase.

—Publisher's Weekly

Reviews

Social psychologist Valian thinks that the Western world has gotten gender all wrong. "As social beings we tend to perceive the genders as alternatives to each other, as occupying opposite and contrasting ends of a continuum," she writes, "even though the sexes are not opposite but are much more alike than they are different." Indeed, despite nearly three decades of feminism, "gender schema"the assumption that masculine and feminine characteristics determine personality and abilitycontinue to influence the expectations and thinking of most Americans. Just about everyone, Valian writes, assumes that men are independent, task-oriented and assertive, while women are tagged as expressive and nurturing. As such, women lag behind in many professions and continue to do the lion's share of housework and child-rearing. Girls remain less attentive in math and science, while even women who attend medical school tend to steer themselves into "gender appropriate" slots such as family practice or pediatrics. Valian bases her findings on research conducted by social scientists in fields as disparate as psychology, education, sociology and economics, and the result is a work that is both scholarly and anecdotally rich. But it also posits concrete suggestions for changing the way we view the sexes, from stepped-up affirmative action programs, to timetables for rectifying gender-based valuations. Accessible and lively, Why So Slow? is a breakthrough in the discourse on gender and has great potential to move the women's movement to a new, more productive phase. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly