Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women - Hardcover

Valian, Virginia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262220547 ISBN 13: 9780262220545

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1998

Synopsis

A discourse on gender challenges the asumptions that masculine and feminine characteristics determine personality and ability

About this title

About the Author:

Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of  Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women (MIT Press).

From Kirkus Reviews:

A scholarly and convincing explanation of women's slow progress in the professions. Whether in business, law, medicine, or academia, women are not advancing at the same rate as men. They're not paid as well, they occupy less-powerful positions, and they are not as respected. In this copiously researched book, Valian (Psychology and Linguistics/Hunter Coll.) attempts to explain why. She argues that we all have unarticulated, often subconscious ideas about gender that affect both our behavior and, perhaps even more importantly, our evaluations of one another. For instance, we think men are logical, women are social; men are competent, women are flaky. As a result, men are consistently overrated and women underrated by coworkers, bosses--and themselves. The resulting advantages and disadvantages may be small, but they accrue over time to create large gaps in advancement. Valian reviews numerous studies, enlivens her material with personal anecdotes, and offers both personal and societal solutions. She looks not only at the workplace, but at its context--data on how girls and boys are raised and educated differently and the extremely inconclusive biological research on men and women's ``inherent'' differences (she has a refreshingly balanced take on the latter, noting that there may be a few differences, but they don't justify our discriminatory assumptions and practices). Throughout much of the book, Valian is in effect synthesizing the work of other researchers--but her take on the material, which draws richly on a linguist's sensitivity to nuances of verbal exhcanges, is fresh, and it's worth doing, since few readers will ever see the obscure studies she cites. Probably too academic in tone for most readers, but for anyone concerned about gender inequality--or perhaps even more importantly, readers who think they aren't--it's worth a look. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0262220547
• ISBN 13: 9780262220545
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 401