Virginia Valian, Expert on Gender and the Workplace, to Visit DePauw March 3

February 23, 2005

February 23, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - Virginia Valian, author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women and noted authority on gender and the workplace, will come to the DePauw University campus on Thursday, March 3. Valian will speak at 8 p.m. in the auditorium of the Percy Lavon Julian Science and Mathematics Center, which is free and open to all. She will also present two invitation-only workshops while at DePauw, one of which is open to deans, provosts, others in administration at colleges and universities across the region.

Valian is professor of psychology and linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on language acquisition in two-year-olds, second language acquisition, and sex differences in cognition. Her work is published in leading journals in cognitive and developmental psychology.

Dr. Valian's interest in sex differences led her to write Why So Slow?, which was published in 1998 by MIT Press. In the book, Valian asks why so few women are at the top of their profession, whether the profession be science, law, medicine, college teaching, industry, or business. To provide an answer, Dr Valian integrates research from psychology, sociology, economics, and neuropsychology.

Of the book, Publisher's Weekly wrote, "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." Dr. Valian's science-based approach has been featured in the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, and many other journals, magazines and broadcast media outlets, including NPR. The professor's current research investigates two-year-olds' knowledge and use of language, the role of input in syntax acquisition, gender differences in mathematics problem-solving, theoretical models of language development, and the relation between competence and performance in language.

Learn more about Virginia Valian by clicking here. Learn more about the two workshops by sending an e-mail here.

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