A brown-bag session, “Still Too Slow: The Advancement of Women,” will be held Wednesday, Sept. 7 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana, Room 314A.
The event features Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology at Hunter College, who researches the reasons behind women’s slow advancement in the professions and proposes remedies for individuals and institutions. She will present experimental data that demonstrate how gender schemas – held by men and women alike – produce subtle overvaluations of men and undervaluations of women. She will also discuss the small imbalances in the treatment of men and women that add up to major imbalances in their success.
The event is sponsored by the Gender Equity Council with support from the offices of the Chancellor and Provost.
Valian is a member of the doctoral faculties of psychology, linguistics and speech-language-hearing sciences at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. She is the director of the Language Acquisition Research Center, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She is also the director of Hunter’s Gender Equity Project, which has been funded by NSF, NIH and the Sloan Foundation.
Valian’s science-based approach has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other journals and magazines. She has also appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC and “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
